Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee Carry the Fire in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

It was the spring of 2008 when I heard word that Viggo Mortensen, eccentric actor extraordinaire who breathed such regal life into Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, would be coming to Erie to film The Road, director John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel. As I’d just recently surprised myself by admiring the gritty No Country For Old Men, also based on a McCarthy book, this gave me three powerful reasons to put the movie on my Must List long before it hit theaters. When I learned that the cast would also include Robert Duvall, who’s been a favorite of mine since Phenomenon, that sweetened the deal even further. And yet it would be a film set in a devastated world, a landscape in which few could survive and fewer could maintain the last vestiges of their humanity. I wanted to see it. But could I handle it?

I wasn’t sure. So I read the book. And bleak as it was, I found the novel profoundly moving, uplifting even. So it was that I arrived at the movie theater with tickets in hand for the opening night of The Road, anticipating a much quieter story of ruination than the adrenaline-soaked 2012. In Hillcoat’s film, we see no exploding monuments, no panicked news reports, no citizens fleeing in terror. While faded remnants of advertisements turn up from time to time, no familiar landmarks appear. Mostly, it’s just utter desolation. Charred trees and long-abandoned cars languish under a permanently gray sky; a gloom to match Mordor hangs heavy in the air. But like Frodo Baggins, the unnamed man portrayed by Mortensen is glad to be with his son “here at the end of all things.”

The boy, equally anonymous, is portrayed by Kodi Smit-McPhee, a then-12-year-old Australian with a few films to his credit, though none I’ve ever heard of. This is a film dominated by silence; I would estimate that probably during half of the two-hour runtime, no words are exchanged. When they are, it’s Mortensen who does most of the talking, much of it only in voiceovers. Wisely, I think, screenwriter Joe Penhall occasionally takes McCarthy’s sparsely poetic narration and gives it to the man, turning it into his own thoughts. The writing is so painfully poignant, I feel the film would have suffered without at least some of those ruminations intact. It’s used sparingly enough that it never feels intrusive and helps us to discern the gradual passage of time in a setting in which clocks and calendars no longer have meaning.

Mostly, the movie has three characters: the man, the boy and the land. Because with Javier Aguirresarobe’s masterful cinematography, all of the barrenness of which McCarthy writes seeps off the page and onto the screen. This seemingly-endless stretch of long-dead vegetation is their constant companion, and much of their hope is wrapped up in the vague idea that somehow, somewhere it may change. That if they travel far enough, they may find life instead of death in every direction. An ever-present reminder of that faith can be found in Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s soft, evocative score.

Despite the desolation, though, they encounter others, both on the road they travel with a series of rickety carts and off in the fields and forests where they forage for food. Then, too, there is the man’s memory of his wife (Charlize Theron), revealed in terse flashbacks. Gradually, we learn how they drifted apart in the aftermath of the ambiguous disaster, he forever clinging to survival and she succumbing to despair. Meanwhile, in sun-dappled dreams, we catch the faintest glimpses of their idealized past amidst flowers in full bloom. She begs him to end their misery with a few well-placed bullets, but it is also she who tells the man to go south, giving him a sense of purpose, a quest to fulfill. She who has no hope nonetheless provides the anchor on which his efforts rest. The man endures because he must protect his son, a task made slightly easier when he is able to imagine that a better life could be possible.

Mortensen, so soft-spoken in real life, is in his element here, barely speaking above a mumble in most of his dialogue. His annunciation is more precise and his words a smidgen louder in the voiceovers, but I had to strain to make out some of his conversation. His delivery matches the quietude of the movie, but the man’s bare emotion is thus accentuated all the more clearly. A fleeting smile or a single tear carry great weight on the face of this grimy man ravaged by years of scavenging and months on the move. And oh, the tenderness apparent in his every gesture as he hugs the boy to him, kisses his forehead or, in one of the movie’s sweetest moments, reads him a story by campfire light! If Mortensen does not receive a Best Actor nomination for this role, I shall seriously question the competence of the Academy.

The man is a deeply decent person, a pioneering type who I imagine at home on a ranch in Wyoming somewhere. (Knowing Mortensen’s fondness for horsemanship, I love that the opening scene shows the man nuzzling a horse.) He’s practical and self-sufficient, a simple man who will do what he must in order to survive but will not relinquish his moral code in the process. It’s clear that he has instilled these values in his son, born into a world gone mad, for the boy is compassion personified, and when the man is tempted to let his survival instincts take him into savage territory, it is this largely silent observer who keeps him in check.

Throughout the first half of the movie, Smit-McPhee barely speaks at all, but when they face a series of critical ethical choices, the boy is not afraid to voice his opinion. In Smit-McPhee’s wide eyes are the sagacity of a little child who could lead the way into a new life, if one would dare dream of such a thing. This boy who regards his father as one “from another world,” full of delights of which he can only fantasize, is determined to “carry the fire,” as his father has instructed. A child so kind and contemplative might be in danger of coming across as cloying, but he never does. His desperate desire to extend generosity to a haggard fellow traveler (Duvall) and even a petty thief (Michael K. Williams) is believable, as a way of making sense of an incomprehensible world.

I read The Road on Father’s Day, and rarely have I encountered a more compelling father-son relationship. I saw the movie on the eve of Thanksgiving. It might seem like an odd choice. But in truth, few movies have ever left me feeling so profoundly grateful for my blessings, big and small. In the film, the man and the boy take nothing for granted, carefully guarding their meager possessions. And at one point, they offer thanks while sharing a repast that may come from a can but is truly as appreciated as the most magnificent turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

On the way out of the theater, we bumped into a couple of my brother’s friends, who laughingly noted that little video editing was needed to make Presque Isle in April look post-apocalyptic. That may be so. But come the summer, the flowers will bloom and the birds will chirp in the branches overlooking the gently lapping waves, just as they do in the unseen background as the credits roll. Some may watch The Road and see only despair. But I see triumph of the human spirit, faith against all odds and love of the deepest kind. I see a true contender for Best Picture. And this Thanksgiving, I’m grateful that my little town could be a part of it.

Cormac McCarthy Infuses Bleak Dystopia With Faint Hope in The Road

During my recent long (yet all-too-short) weekend in Massachusetts with my friends Erica and Art, the subject of movies came up often. As all three of us consider ourselves enthusiasts of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, any film involving a former cast member tends to be of interest, so I expressed my desire for The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen, to hit theaters, which was supposed to happen last year. "I feel like I really need to see it, though I'm not sure if I'll be able to stomach it," I confessed. My first assertion came from Mortensen's involvement; the fact that part of the movie had been filmed in my hometown (during which time I rather regrettably resisted the urge to attempt to crash the set); and Cormac McCarthy. After No Country For Old Men left me stunned with its cinematic splendor, I figured McCarthy must be a golden novelist and that another film adaptation of one of his books, however bleak, would be similarly rewarding. However, apocalyptic dystopias have never been my cup of tea, so concerns bubbled at the back of my brain. In response, Art issued a dire warning.

"You need to be prepared," he told me, explaining that reading The Road was one of the most emotionally wrenching literary experiences of his life. That he'd read it all in one sitting, so intensely mesmerizing was this tale of a father and son clinging to one another in a world where hope itself seems to have become an anachronism. And that it had been devastating. I was still trying to determine whether the endorsement overpowered the disclaimer when I spotted a mass market copy of the book at a gift shop in Albany, the halfway point on my homeward train trip. I'd been flipping through David Sedaris's latest collection and seriously considering purchasing it, but The Road stopped me in my tracks. Upon examination, I suspected that I could finish it in the time it would take for me to get to Erie, which certainly wouldn't have been the case with my favorite contemporary humorist's tome. I was rather taken with the notion of digesting an entire book during my train trip, as well as spending the waning hours of Fathers' Day immersed in what sounded like one of the most powerful father-son relationships ever explored in a novel. Plus, I'd just spent the last five days embracing my inner Took; I figured I'd better go for the gusto before I went back to being a mild-mannered Baggins.

So I bought the book, and I opened it, and I read it with only a few brief interruptions. Half an hour before we pulled into Erie, I turned the final page. It was mesmerizing. It was devastating. It was well worth the eight dollars. And now that I've emerged from the book unscathed, I've no doubt I can handle the movie. I sometimes think I don't give my nerves enough credit.

After I saw No Country with my dad and brother, I was so affected by it that I decided I needed to read the book. So I got it out of the library, but before I had gotten very far, Dad nabbed it, and by the time he finished it I was preoccupied with other things. I do intend to read it one day, but at least the first few chapters were able to provide me with a cursory familiarity with McCarthy's writing style. I was hoping that the lack of quotation marks might have been limited to one book, but I soon found that punctuation was just as rare in The Road. That seems to be a McCarthy trademark, and I confess to sometimes finding it confusing, though more so in No Country, I think, in which there are more characters to deal with.

Also perplexing to me, especially at first, is his use of apostrophes. Some contractions have them, many don't, and it all seemed very random until I started really paying attention and discovered that every word in which the apostrophe is included hinges on a noun, while the words with the missing apostrophes consist only of other parts of speech. I didn't read far enough into No Country to pick up on a pattern there, so I don't know if that's an across-the-board system he's worked out or if it's intended to say something about the world he's created. Maybe both. I like the idea that apostrophes are a link to culture and civilization, and that verb-centered contractions aren't strong enough anchors. That it doesn't suffice to go on simply for the sake of surviving, but that the right noun - the right person - can provide motivation not only to live, but to retain elements of society that otherwise appear outdated. Maybe I'm trying to read too much into a simple grammar choice, but I may never look at an apostrophe the same way again.

The rejection of traditional structure manifests itself throughout the novel in more ways than one. The book is nearly 300 pages long, yet it is not broken up into chapters - though there are large spaces between paragraphs. Additionally, the two main characters - the only two characters for most of the passages in the book - are never given names. They are "the man," also referred to by his son as "Papa," and "the boy". Refusing to name these characters seems a powerful step toward dehumanization, a removal of identity to go along with the dissipation of all that is familiar, so that each truly is "the other's world entire."

The boy's age is not specified so far as I can tell; I imagine him to be about eight or nine, though the boy who plays him in the movie was about 12 during filming. He is frail and fearful and has about him the inquisitive nature of a young child, along with near-absolute trust in his father, though the man reflects at one point that in an ordinary world, the boy probably would have begun to pull away from him by this point. The mother is the subject of several painful flashbacks, but much about her remains shrouded in mystery, as does the event itself that has led the world to ruin. It seems to have been some sort of nuclear holocaust, judging by the fine covering of ash that has rendered the entire landscape grimly pallid; I imagine an idyllic final day of normalcy, to the backdrop of Ian Campbell's The Sun Is Burning. Its culminating verse seems custom-written for this book: "Now the sun has disappeared. / All is darkness, anger, pain and fear. / Twisted, sightless wrecks of men / Go groping on their knees and cry in pain / And the sun has disappeared."

One of the reasons I loved No Country so much was the terse humor of small-town eccentrics reminding me of the stories of Flannery O'Connor. It felt very life-affirming to laugh at minor oddities and witticisms in the midst of Anton Chigurh's wanton destruction. The Road, whose minimalist dialogue consists largely of exchanges of the word "okay," offers no such reprieve. I don't think I laughed once during the entire novel, though a wistful smile passed across my lips during occasional oases of piercing beauty. Like any good story about castaways shipwrecked on a forbidding island, The Road makes one ashamed of the material excesses of modern society. The barren wind of Ecclesiastes howls across the ruined land, making a mockery of once-flashy billboards advertising products no longer in existence. Even moments that acknowledge the sweetness of such items are streaked with bitterness because both realize that any good thing they encounter is likely to be the last of its kind. The question arises as to whether it might be better for the boy never to sample such treasures of a bygone era, as it could merely lead to fruitless yearning for a world irrevocably lost. But existing as a vagabond in constant fear of starvation and attack has caused the man to live for the moment as much as possible, and to allow his son every exquisite experience he can.

The Road is a story of a father and son with the strongest bond imaginable. The two sustain each other completely, which makes it all the more excruciating when it becomes clear that the man struggles at every moment with a promise he made to the boy's mother, a vow inversely reminiscent of Abraham agreeing to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis. While that was a wrenching demonstration of faith, the single bullet remaining for the man's son is the ultimate indication of despair. The boy knows why it is there; indeed, whenever his father leaves him standing guard, the child reluctantly retains the gun, having been instructed to pull the trigger himself should marauders overtake him. The man has every expectation that the protection, in the form of a quick death, from the ravages of those who have managed to survive through brutality and cannibalism will be the last gift he imparts, a final violent expression of love to be followed by his own tormented demise.

And yet...The Road is the story of a journey. So while his may be, as Gandalf would say, "a fool's hope," the man presses his son onward with vague promises of a coastal haven unspoiled by the desecration that has surrounded the lad for the whole of his young life. I was startled when I realized that this epic trek through a ruined world toward some fabled destination reminded me of The Land Before Time, the haunting 1988 Don Bluth film whose magnificence remains undiminished despite excessive merchandising and an increasingly embarrassing line of direct-to-video sequels. Littlefoot and the man face many of the same challenges; both bereaved and made to soldier on in a life suddenly so unfamiliar, they find solace in caring for others, and this is what keeps them going when it seems that all of their efforts could be for naught. While Littlefoot attracts a small band of fellow apparent orphans, the man's entire focus is on his son's well-being, to the exclusion of all others. His practical insistence that they stick to self-preservation is often at odds with the boy's surprising altruism. Here is a child who has been raised in a world where survival of the fittest seems the only order of the day, and yet he consistently demonstrates empathy for other stragglers they encounter. While he is terrified of "the bad guys," what frightens him most of all is the thought of his father and him resorting to "bad guy" behavior in their desperation to endure. His keen sense that, to quote the film version of Sam Gamgee, "there's some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for" anchors the book in a hope that feels far more substantial than the man's ephemeral utopian visions. In a future in which the body is in constant peril, this child's chief concern is his soul.

Therefore, The Road left me feeling far less depressed than I expected. In fact, despite the utter desolation of the landscape McCarthy paints with his stark prose, I daresay I was uplifted. I look forward to comparing notes with Art and Erica after the film finally makes it to the big screen, supposedly in October, and retracing Mortensen's footsteps at Presque Isle once I see exactly where it is that he and his young co-star walked. In the meantime, I offer the same recommendation that was given to me. Prepare yourself for a searing experience, but don't let that stop you from exploring The Road in all its elegiac majesty.