MESSAGE IN THE MOVIES

The Road Rated R

On Blue-ray and DVD

Directed by John Hillcoat.  Starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smith-McPhee

Photo ©The Weinstein Co./Dimension
Movie Review by Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

I“Are we still the good guys?”  This question is asked several times by a son (Smith-McPhee) who is traveling with his father (Mortensen) through the vast wasteland of a devastated earth.  He has good reason to be concerned. They are on their own since the world was destroyed; the mother has left a long time ago to quietly give up on life.  It’s not clear what has made the world a desolate place – it could have been a nuclear war or an environmental disaster – but there is little food or fuel and much of humanity has gathered together to prey on others. 

The Road is based on a Pulitzer Prize (and Oprah’s Book Club) novel by Cormac McCarthy, the same author who wrote No Country for Old Men, another story filled with dread and nihilism.  And this is a dark story indeed.  The father has a gun with two bullets; if they use the weapon in self-defense they will lack the ammunition necessary to kill themselves. 

The two are pretty much on their own and life seems quite hopeless; another character they meet is bold enough to question the goodness of God.  And still I found the film to be quite moving, for its depiction of the love between father and son.  Love is a part of every great recovery from disaster, and God is present in our capacity to care for others above ourselves.

As regular readers know, I am getting quite tired of post-apocalyptic stories and feel that moral fiction needs to begin offering us more hope.  But, if you see only one post-apocalypse film this year, make it The Road.  Beautifully acted and stunningly filmed, it first takes away all hope and then returns a remnant back to us. 

Pitchfork/Halo Ratings:

Three halos. A meditation about what you have left when everything seems to be taken away.
Five picthforks. Three pitchforks for scenes of grisly violence and two more for humanity’s destruction of civilization!.

Reviewer’s Note:  Since the films that are making it into our neighborhood theaters are less interesting each week, I will be supplementing my reviews of theatrical films with reviews of overlooked Blu-rays and DVDS, as well as films that are available on demand from Netflix and your cable boxes.  You are welcome to suggest titles to me that you feel deserve reviewing.  

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