The Road

We watched The Road tonight. I read the novel three years ago. I read it fast. As some have said, it's more of a prose poem than a novel, and it reads fast. Reading the novel I don't recall wondering about plot. The premise offered by the title is well-fulfilled, and the interplay between the characters provides plenty of tension and motivation. The boy wants to live, to be the good guy, and to be with his Dad. The man wants to preserve, to save, his son. These primal instincts couple with the bleak setting to take me, paradoxically, into that safe place where we guard ourselves from the troubles of the outside world. The time in the survivalist shelter evokes this most clearly.

The movie bombards me with visual information that, essentially, distracts me from the primal nature of the relationship at the core of the story. In a visual medium, this setting takes over. The flashback scenes with the woman which, about half of the time recall the better days, also carry the effect of calling attention to the way things look. But this is a story about the way things are, or aren't, at the heart of human beings. It's about whether or not you carry the fire. It's about whether you want to be the good guys. The novel never strays from this path. The movie however, forces you to watch forest fires, falling trees, and the concrete and steel hulks of buildings and cars. The novel offers you the words of the man and the boy as they sort things out. The movie offers you pictures of the boy and the man watching what you are watching. The Road is no 2012. But the apocalyptic scenery, though unsensationalized, can't help but have a sensational effect. The dialogue is necessarily reduced, and thus we follow the decline of Western infrastructure more than we plumb the depths of the relationships that sustain us. (The brightest spot of dialogue in the movie is when the Robert Duvall character (a 90 year old man) exemplifies the moral complexity the novel presents.)

I love the tableau of the jack-knifed semi on the overpass. It expresses to perfection the precarious, and surreal, state of our systems, even when they work. Who hasn't imagined scenes like this one. To see it set up as real as this, affirms my schadenfreude-esque sense that these things will fail, and they will fail on a grand scale. But again, this is not what the novel is about. The novel is more Odyssey than Inconvenient Truth, more about clinging to something meaningful, against the odds, than a dark harbinger of civilization's decline. The movie can't help but beat us over the head with this warning. Whereas the novel asks me to consider the complexity of what it means to be a father and to be a son, the movie tells me that if we aren't the good guys together, we're the bad guys. Not that that's bad, it's just different - different enough to change the story.

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