'The Road: A film that every one of us needs to see'

[Newsjock]

Source: The Independent

By Mark Lynas

As the credits roll and we fall stricken and tear-stained out onto the dark streets of Soho, it seems fitting that I am accompanied by the director of the second bleakest film ever made – Franny Armstrong, creator of the The Age of Stupid. The bleakest film ever made we have just endured together, over two relentless, harrowing hours, and are now so emotionally raw that we know not where we are going, nor do we much care. It doesn't seem to matter. "Oh my God," moans Franny, repeatedly, head in hands.

Remember, this is a woman who has just spent five years creating an on-screen warning about the impending apocalypse. But what we have just experienced takes place on a very different level. The Road is a brilliant, intensely moving piece of film-making, so powerful that it is almost a test of physical, as well as emotional, endurance. By comparison, the specific climate catastrophes that I portray in my book Six Degrees, of killer heatwaves, mega-droughts, spreading deserts and methane-driven runaway warming (the scenarios used in The Age of Stupid, for which I was co-writer), seem almost prosaic by comparison, with their leaden anchors of voluminous scientific referencing. Cormac McCarthy's apocalypse is unstated – he describes just "a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" – and is all the more realistic for it.

... With its relentlessly dystopian premise, McCarthy's world is truly Hobbesian – nasty, brutish and short, suggesting a view of man as in essence little more than base evil once freed from the shackles of sociallly organised moral restraint. Those who can survive are only those who deal death out to others; with all authority gone, only those whose violence is most abandoned and terrifying will triumph. Is this what people are really like deep down without the civilising influence of authority? This question – anxiety, perhaps – is a common theme in art and culture. In Lord of the Flies, after the murder of Piggy, Ralph weeps "for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart", whilst in Heart of Darkness itself, perhaps the archetypal examination of the theme, Kurtz sits at the centre of a madman's world of uncivilisation. In both books the severed head is the ultimate symbol of the essential capacity for evil that sits within us all.

... There is little to reassure us in a world where the future is going to be so unlike the past – indeed, we are now entering a new geological era, in which the major chemical cycles of carbon, water and nitrogen have all been altered immeasurably by human activity. How far will we have to push these planetary stresses for cracks to appear in our modern civilisation, and for the evil within us all to tear once more across the land?

The warning The Road is not of a specific outcome arising from a specific course of action which we need to change. Unlike The Age of Stupid, it is not about what might happen if we don't "seal the deal" in Copenhagen. The Road is about the human condition, and how humans might behave to each other if the worst does happen, in whatever way.

Mark Lynas is a British environmentalist whose books include High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis (2004, Picador) and Six Degrees: Our Future On A Hotter Planet (2007, Fourth Estate)

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/the-road-a-film-that-every-one-of-us-needs-to-see-1841829.html

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. I thought the novel sucked.

Well, maybe not sucked. But it was totally forgetable.

The movie looks worse then the book, and they actually used the Dark Forces scream in the previews, so I'll be skipping it.

[Ignis]

5. I didn't love the book, but it stuck with me.

It's not a stellar novel, but it makes an interesting story with its Everyman elements and the unrelentingly dark tone.

A move, though? Meh, I'm skeptical. The good parts of that book are creepy/good/disturbing because of the inflection-less voice, and I don't know if seeing the image will live up to the mind's picture.

Still, worth reading, even if you end up hating it. :)

[Marr]

15. I enjoyed the book well enough. Viggo Mortenson was great in the movie.

It's very bleak, though. Only watch it if you're annoyingly happy that day.

[G_j]

2. Sounds like an amazing movie, but now I'm afraid to watch it.

my outlook is already quite bleak.

[Luciferous]

3. I'm with you... I was kind of interested in watching it before

but I think I might pass now.

[mike_c]

4. unlike HFPS, I loved The Road, at least in the same sense I love most...

...Cormak McCarthy novels. I don't think I've ever had a rollicking good time reading one. They are mostly one punch in the gut after another, eloquently and sparingly described. I read McCarthy to listen to McCarthy just as much as for his stories.

The Road was one of the bleakest of them all. I thought it was excellent-- but not fun, certainly.

I don't know whether I'll see the movie yet. I'm happy to hear that the movie preserves McCarthy's sparse eloquence and his vision, but I'm also aware that some stories lend themselves to some media more than others, and what seems like literature on the page sometimes seems more like gratuituous brutishness on the big screen. So I haven't decided about whether to see the movie yet.

[Ignis]

7. "one punch in the gut after another, eloquently and sparingly described"

Great short review of McCarthy. :thumbsup:

For those looking for more, what would you recommend--Blood Meridian, perhaps?

[mike_c]

10. No Country For Old Men would probably be my first rec...

Then Blood Meridian probably. There's good argument for reading the border stories in order: All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. Suttree comes closest to The Road on the bleak-o-meter, IMO. I haven't read any of the ones he wrote before Suttree.

edit-- wonky markup

[Schema Thing]

8. It sucks as a movie, imo

[dysfunctional press]

16. HFPS...?

:shrug:

[mike_c]

29. HighFructosePronSyrup, who opined up thread....

eom

[dysfunctional press]

30. oh..duh! i thought that it was the initials to a nother CMcC novel i wasn't aware of...

:blush:

thanks.

[Marr]

18. I always get the feeling there's some big "point" to his novels that I'm missing.

And the impression is even stronger when his stories are turned into movies.

No Country for Old Men, for instance. It left me feeling like, "what? I must've missed the point". But you don't say it, because then everyone else will know you're slow. Unless... they're *also* missing the point and just too afraid to admit it... in which case... Oscar.

[patrice]

23. There was no point to No Country (and that's the point). There is to The Road.

[patrice]

22. The movie respects the characters and the dialogue.

It tries to add a little to the context to achieve the dread, but misses a little on achieving it. Maybe I just think that because I already read the book a couple of times.

I liked the movie, not as much as the book, but very much anyway for how it visualizes the relationship between the father and son.

[mwdem]

6. I thought "Happiness" was the bleakest fllm I ever saw.

I read "The Road", but I don't think the movie will do it justice.

[dysfunctional press]

17. i love 'happiness'...and yes- it is very bleak.

[patrice]

21. It gets pretty close, but you're right, except for the dialogue, it CAN'T capture

McCarthy's language.

[mwdem]

24. Off topic, Patrice,

How's Kansas? I moved from there (overland park) over 4 years ago.

[patrice]

26. We had one of the most beautiful Summers I can remember in 60 years.

It's cold as hell right now. 5-10 degrees!

F-ing Brownback is going to run for governor :puke: ! Pure f-in' shocker after Kathleen Sebelius . . .

I have a pretty progressive job in a health related field though, so I stay as sane as possible under the circumstances.

Dennis Moore is quitting I hope like H - E - L - L that the party does itself a favor, even if it has to take this one on the chin, and runs at least a center-Left or a real Progressive Populist candidate for Dennis' seat.

How's it where you are?

:hi:

[mwdem]

28. I hate that Dennis Moore is quitting.

He got a lot of my money, good man. I now live in Tarrant County, Texas, one of the most conservative counties in Texas, of course. My work is cut out for me, just like in Johnson County! I still have friends in Westwood Hills, and they are very active, progressively, as is that whole town.
Good luck, and wish me the same.:hi: Even though I'm from the south (N.C.) and have lived for awhile in the northeast (N.J.), I do miss Kansas....

[AlienGirl]

9. Probably not going to see it; I'm too bleak and negative as it is...

[CampDem]

12. It is bleak in many ways, but a great novel

To me, the book was a genius love story. It obliterated me.

It explores the love between a parent and child, self love, and the survival instinct.

These characters have been dealt unfathomable loss and violence. Can they stay human/themselves?

I found this book beautiful. I can't wait to see the movie.

:hi:

[girl gone mad]

11. I loved the novel.

The film couldn't possibly be as depressing as those torture porn pics like the "Saw" sesries. The heart of the novel was a relationship built on unconditional love, which I found inspirational. I thought it was less horrific than Blood Meridian.

[LostInAnomie]

13. Now, Blood Meridian would make a crazy movie.

That would really be an exploration of how depraved man can get when social restraint is removed.

[malakai2]

14. That one I don't think could be properly done

Not unless it was really, really long, and at that it would be a four or five hour examination of human violence. I don't know how you'd get several scenes from that one into theaters. I'd still like to see it attempted though, because even if it were a massively long movie a good director with a decent budget could make it very visually pleasing. Who would play Holden? And how awesome would the gunpowder incident would look on a big screen?

[LostInAnomie]

19. Yeah, there is almost no way you could condense it to less than 4 hours.

The gunpowder episode would be hilarious though. Some hairless, seven foot tall, monolith compelling a bunch of ruffians to piss for their life.

You're right though, you'd never get half of the more interesting scenes past the censors.

[patrice]

20. It's an extremely Good book, maybe/maybe-not Great. The movie added the physical language

for the relationship between the man and his son that was missing from the book.

I am fascinated by how McCarthy makes the absolutely bleak world of his tale so deeply and darkly beautiful. It is Beauty as Bleakness.

I am fascinated by his exquisitely spare and subtle shifts from profoundly sad yet mundane perceptions into surreal dimensions and then back again without so much as a "lookie! lookie! see what I can do!"

I was fascinated by the book's hook: let's take humans and strip them of absolutely everything that is artificial and take a serious look at what we have left. No Mad Max silliness here.

I was fascinated by how the book's meditations on "God" relied on no mumbo jumbo, no deus machina, no symbolism, no theology, no pretty fairy tales, nothing extraneous to the question, thoughts couched entirely in the phenomenology of existence stripped to bare nerves.

The movie manages most of this very well, only being short on the precisely articulated intimately sad beauty of McCarthy's world. They left out the details of the father's exploration of the shipwreck. I was a little disappointed by the loss of that particular piece of extravagantly spare beauty.

The movie respects McCarthy's simple dialogue. The characters match the dialogue and their circumstances.

The most horrific details in the book are few and less mediated, so the movie adds a little something to those to convey an atmosphere of profound dread that McCarthy achieves much more economically.

The best thing about the movie and THE reason to see it is what it adds that McCarthy could/would not: the rich articulate physicality of the relationship between the father and his son . . . his little boy.

[AlienGirl]

25. If you liked The Road, you might like this (includes punctuation!):

Past Peak: A Story of the Near Future

The first sign we had in those early days was the lines. It started with the lines for gasoline: that was customary enough and had been done before. No one panicked when we went into gas rationing, two days a week for even numbered license plates, two days a week for odd, two for vanity plates and one day a week when no one was to get gasoline unless they had missed their regular day and their gas card had gone unswiped. It was a little inconvenient, but this echoed the seventies, as the local news helpfully pointed out with pictures comparing the lines of the current era and that one. In the first weeks, people in the gas lines would joke with each other; later, the mood tensed and tempers shortened. One day there was a shootout when someone line-jumped, and a mother from a nearby suburb died in the crossfire. After that incident I started filling up at odd hours, when fewer people might be out; I had always loved the deep early morning anyway, and three-thirty a.m. gas runs fit well into my sleep schedule.

The gas shortage was followed closely by a shortage of jobs, as businesses could not afford to pay for electricity and gas to ship products and still afford to pay workers. Of the three, only the workers were expendable. Job lines began appearing anywhere that looked like it might have work. It seemed odd at first to see middle-aged men and women in costly business suits standing in line for jobs cooking fast food or washing dishes, but we got used to it; and as the weeks wore on, the suits began to look bedraggled, a little frayed and wrinkled, a little more like they belonged.. Some of the prospective applicants had the more important pieces of their resumes written in big letters on signs that they could wave to get the attention of the management in the building. I noted these signs on my daily walk: one line twenty prospective workers deep at a Burger King contained three signs proclaiming “MA,” “MFA,” and “MSW.” Further down the line was an older, white-ponytailed man whose sign said “Ph.D Astronomy.”

I was in my third year as a court clerk, and this was a very good job to have, because the courts had become very busy. We didn't have enough money in our budget to hire on new staff, so those of us who were already employed found our workload escalating steadily. I didn't really mind, I liked my job and the longer hours were no hardship. The courthouse was only a half-mile walk from my one-bedroom walk-up apartment, so I stopped driving except on the rare occasions when I needed to go out of town.

It wasn't long after the appearance of the job lines that certain goods began to be scarce. Shoppers who still had a little money for luxuries lined up around the block at the rumor that the local grocery store had received a shipment of coffee; when the end of the line finally got into the store and saw empty shelves, the scene began to grow violent. The police arrived with one of the new microwave-based crowd dispersal units; the boy who was trampled as shoppers ran frenzied and in pain was brought to the regional hospital and eventually recovered.

Still we persevered, confident that our grandparents and great-grandparents had suffered far worse in the Depression. TV networks ran uplifting feel-good movies and game shows where anyone might become a millionaire, and we were placated. That was spring.

More: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=216x6000

Tucker

[Swede]

27. I read the book in one evening.

I hope the movie is as good,I will definately be going to it.

[Blue_Tires]

31. i'll probably skip...

i get enough bleakness from reality...

EDIT: isn't the world described in this movie the one libertarian teabaggers keep dreaming about??