The Road that goes nowhere

By Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter

We have an insatiable appetite for apocalypse, at least in the movies.  We love explosions, earthquakes, alien invasion, tsunamis, nuclear blasts—the more the better.  No sooner does the latest, greatest depiction of doomsday fade into memory than a new and grander vision comes along. And we rush to theaters to see it on a big screen.

If we gave a prize for the biggest, loudest and dumbest in breed, it would have to go to Roland Emmerich, who, every couple years, manages to raise the ante for grandeur in global destruction.  “Independence Day,” saw an assault on our world by aliens.  A tsunami, born of global warming waterlogged the northern hemisphere in “The Day After Tomorrow.”  And currently, the end of days, as predicted by Mayans, brings on global havoc in the hugely popular “2012.”

While the trailer was playing a number of columnists opined that the mass audience, buffeted by a distressed economy and so much international unrest, might shun his gleeful, epic  malevolence.  They said that people weren’t in the mood.  They were wrong.

Emmerich, a shrewd showman who knows the difference between disaster and dystopia, understands that the former is the type that fills theaters and the latter tends to clear them.  We like to see the world go to pieces, although we prefer not to confront the dire unpleasantness that would result if it really happened.

And so it comes as no surprise that one of the most anticipated, “adult” films of the year, “The Road,” based on a prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, has been met with such indifference at the box office. So far the film has only screened in big cities.   It will most surely arrive here, either during the holidays or shortly thereafter. I’m just not sure if there’s any reason you’ll want to see it.

An unnamed man, (Viggo Mortensen,) wakes up in the middle of the night, looks out the window, and immediately begins filling a bath tub with water.  It’s puzzling that he so quickly senses the gravity of events, especially since his wife, (Charlize Theron,) who finds him in the bathroom, has no inkling. But this is just the first in a series of murky events that point to the problems of making this book into a satisfying movie.

Cut to some time in the future.  All animal and most human life has perished.  The sky is permanently gray, the landscape a muddy hash of skeletal remains and disemboweled buildings. The man and his son, scraggly and near starvation, are on a tortured walk down an endless road.  To where, we’re not sure, although the coast is mentioned.

Agriculture is a thing of the past. Gangs of stragglers have taken to cannibalism.  The man, down to his last two bullets in an early sequence, instructs his boy how to kill himself, should they be captured.

Things go downhill from there.  They encounter a clutch of murderers, a pitiful old man near death, and a group of naked men and women, chained up in a basement like cattle waiting to be slaughtered.  None of these incidents bode well.

There are brief flashbacks to the family’s prior life, well shot and placed.  But other than reminding us that civilization once flourished, and that Charlize Theron has great and complex beauty, they have little emotional impact; there just isn’t enough to engage us.

All of this plays like an arty horror film, occurring as it does, in a pall of unrelieved gloom. The acting is strong; Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, a kid from Australia who has a natural screen presence, put their all into the roles.  The production design is meticulous, at moments, awe inspiring.  But try as I might, I couldn’t figure out why the movie was made, other than to make us feel awful.   I suppose the success of “No Country For Old Men,” also based on a McCarthy novel, had something to do with it, but this is very different.

The problem is one we’ve visited before, endemic to the issue of translating word to image.  Once liberated from the poetic aspects of McCarthy’s prose, “The Road” becomes a forced march that’s overly literal, and painfully redundant.  The material, which has pretensions to a vision that transcends its physical bounds, is simple minded, predictable, and numbing.  The airless environment never tells us anything we don’t get in the first few minutes.

I don’t mean to pick on this movie, because the filmmakers were obviously well intentioned, but the only thing that keeps you awake here, are the frequently gruesome moments.  And yet its talented creators did not set out to make an exploitation film, like, say, the team that remade “The Hills Have Eyes.”  Unfortunately it turned out that way, because the relentless depiction of a worst case dystopia is the movie’s most pronounced asset, by default.

Why did that happen?  Did this movie have to be such a chore to sit through?  Especially given that the same territory, so fertile, has been traveled so often, and so well, in so many other movies.

We need look back no further than last year, when Will Smith’s “I Am Legend” which enjoyed one of the biggest December openings of all time.  “Legend” was big and flashy, but carried the same message as “The Road.” It just delivered it in a livelier, more engaging manner.

But, “Legend,” it could be argued, was less thematically ambitious.  Its emphasis is on adventure, and, without dismissing it completely out of hand, the relationship between the last man on earth and his dog. I’m willing to concede that the Will Smith vehicle put the needs of audience above “art,” and that it had less on its mind than “The Road.”  But not that much less.

So, let’s move on to other examples, like “Planet of The Apes,” or “On the Beach,” or “The World, The Flesh, and the Devil,” from way back in 1959.  The latter, starring Harry Belafonte, dealt with last three survivors of an unnamed holocaust wandering through New York City, (ironically, the same setting as “I Am Legend.”)

I’ve picked on this title in particular because it asks the same questions as the movie version of “The Road;” how do we conduct ourselves in the face of the worst of circumstances?  “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil” is talky and tamer, but way more interesting because it’s simply more ambitious.  The story, as a narrative, covers more territory.

The problem with “The Road,” and exercises in similarly conceived “serious” films, supposedly aimed at discriminating movie goers, is that there’s more emphasis on the seriousness than there is on the realities of narrative filmmaking.  Beyond that, while it’s methods seem tailored for the most sophisticated segment of the movie going public, the appeal is actually to those who’ve seen much less and are willing to indulge it’s over used motifs.

Frank Capra once said the worst thing a filmmaker can do is to bore the audience.  Sadly, adult movies seem the category most inclined to embrace the ruinous means to boredom.   The most common,  which we see all too often since the demise of the studio system, is the insistence of filmmakers on placing what they perceive as artistic integrity over the unyielding requirements of linear storytelling.  (And by that I mean the type of movies we pay to see in theaters.)

Movies, above all, must move, and, in the best cases, on several levels.  They have to keep us engaged with new information, in a way that stimulates rather than depresses our senses. They need to engage us in either a conscious or unconscious dialogue.  We ask questions, they answer, or at least better articulate the questions as the story moves forward.

A singular vision, for which “The Road” cannot be faulted, is much less important than complexity and contrast, whether that comes through the dialogue, movement or character.  In addition, these elements need to make some kind of sense to us, because moving images are so stubbornly literal.

One example (although there are many) where “The Road” fails will serve to illustrate.  Midway through the film’s running time, (for lack of a better marker) the man and boy find an underground bunker stocked with enough food and shelter to support them indefinitely.  This comes as a massive relief because up to that point, they’re starving, freezing, and too much of the time, soaked.  After a couple nights of blessed calm they hear what might or might not be movement, somewhere in the distance.  The man immediately elects to leave. They return to the unbending misery of the road.

Why didn’t they investigate the origin of the noise?  They’re armed with knives, and strong.  Could they have mounted a defense of the place?  The movie doesn’t tell us.  It suggests that Viggo Mortensen’s character is more motivated to suffer than to live, but even that isn’t really discussed. Whatever mystery stimulates his ill advised decision, which only increases their jeopardy, serves more as an irritant, and a reflection of the movie’s  fealty to tone above all else.

This may be a function of director John Hilcoat and writer Joe Penhall’s slavish adherence to the book, but it doesn’t work in the movie.  On the most basic level it inspires our distrust in the filmmakers and their commitment to the vision. Instead it suggests a reluctance to rethink the material for a medium that has its own strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve gone on at length here, because when a movie like “The Road” fails, and by that I mean, fails to earn back its production costs, the industry blames the audience, and in particular the adult audience.  In reality the filmmakers are to blame. There are very few of us, regardless of how much we love films, willing to spend two hours on a road to nowhere.

Next time, something more entertaining. I promise.  But until then look around for Richard Linklater’s charming “Me and Orson Welles,” a smart comedy, now playing in very limited release, but worth seeking out.