TORONTO: More on ‘The Road’

There were some complaints in yesterday’s Toronto thread that I wasn’t specific enough as to why I enjoyed John Hillcoat’s “The Road,” so let me make it clear.

The film captures, miraculously, in its performances and its images, a profound sense of loss, both for what was and for what will never be. Trees fall around the actors, nothing left to replace them.  There are no flowers, no bushes, no sense of life.  The land — the earth — is slowly dying and with that humanity will die as well.

Yet The Man is dedicated to surviving and sees his son as the future, as any parent would.  “To me he’s a god.”  One day we will die but our children will live on, and that is a motivating factor carried across precisely in the film.  The Man hopes he is teaching his boy how to survive because he knows he is dying.  The constant pain is etched onto Viggo Mortenson’s face throughout the film, all joy is gone, and memory has become his foe, taking him back to happier times that simply torture him.

In one stunning sequence, The Man breaks down and weeps from the depth of his soul, and you can feel the anguish pouring out of him.  We understand how long this has been bottled up. Watching the breakdown of the human race is quietly terrifying.

The cinematography is stunning because it so perfectly captures a dead world.  Even the sea is dead, gray, cold.  “I’m sorry it’s not blue.”  The film hit hard because I wonder how far are we from something like this? And I do not mourn for myself, but for my children and theirs. What kind of world will they be left with?  Yes, it is a film, but there is a great deal of possibility therein that stunned me with its grim realism.

Mortenson’s performance is superb, both emotional and physical. We feel his weakness, yet we also feel that near obsessive need to keep moving, and the exhaustion that comes with it.  He is one of the few actors who can tell a story with his eyes, and these are eyes so full of pain.  It is the best kind of acting, pure and honest.

In a nutshell, the film is the apex of Eliot’s “The Hollow Man” come to cinematic life: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”