A father and son at the end of time

Few movies are as relentlessly disturbing as John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road. Cannibalism, barbarism, suicide, mass extinction of the human race, rape, infanticide … this is not material you usually leave your Thanksgiving dinner to go see.

But amid all the grisly nihilism and stomach-turning hopelessness is one of the most heart-warming, tender and significant relationships of the movies of 2009. We have a father and a son, and the love they share brightens a screen that starts (and ends) in a pitch-black turmoil so thick it seems to drip from the screen like sludgy ink.

The Road, an exquisitely accurate adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel of the same name, stars Viggo Mortensen as a man with no name. He wanders the burning plains of a destroyed world with his young son, also nameless. The movie makes no attempt to explain the disaster, although nuclear war, famine and disease are likely culprits. Calamity is everywhere: Fires are sweeping through the countryside, all vegetation has stopped growing, electricity is long gone, cars are parked where they ran out of gas, most houses are tombs for their last owners, and roving bands of cannibals terrorize the few survivors.

In an early scene in the film the father and son look for food in a barn. Hanging from the rafters are the corpses of a family that could no longer bear the world. Notice the young boy: he doesn’t flinch at their decomposing bodies. The Boy, young and innocent, has grown up in this chaos and it does not shake him easily.

Man and Boy are instinctively traveling south to the ocean from what might be the Carolinas or Virginias. They scrounge for food where they can. A can of soda makes an unexpected treat. The road they’re traveling on is worn and overgrown, and occasionally they meet other travelers, who they regard with caution.

Because the only real plot point in The Road is getting to the ocean, the movie is very episodic in nature. It skips from event to event, like a highlight reel of Man and Boy’s travelogue. They wander the road from hamlet to hamlet, passing under collapsing overpasses and through burning forests dislodged from the topsoil by unnerving earthquakes. They meet Ely (Robert Duvall), an old man who blindly shuffles along the crumbling road. They are robbed by a harmless thief (Michael K. Williams). They find a bunker with stockpiled food. They bathe in a beautiful waterfall spitting grey water.

They cross paths with cannibals fairly often and the movie does not shy away from the reality of the horrific device — disemboweled torsos, amputated victims, discarded heads and bones — although it stops short of the book, which had a glimpse of a baby roasting on a spit. Was the film exaggerating the cannibalism? I’m not so sure. People will do most anything to stop the hunger pangs.

But not the Man and his son, who live by principle even if the world does not. And that is the point of The Road: In a world with no humanity, love and compassion can still exist. This movie teaches that goodness is inherited from good people. “Papa, we carry the fire, don’t we?” the Boy asks. “Yes, we carry the fire,” the Man responds warmly. The Boy was born into this madness and he was taught right and wrong by a father who was not obligated to teach such things. The Road is also about the goodness of children. The sparkle in their eyes. The innocence of their questions.

McCarthy, the reclusive author, has said in interviews recently that the dialogue in his book — dialogue that’s been brought over into the movie — was based on actual conversations he had with his own son, whom he dedicated the book to. Put into the context of his post-apocalyptic vision and it becomes heartbreaking. “Are we the good guys?” the Boy wonders. The film knows where our heartstrings are, but doesn’t strum them unnecessarily. It doesn’t pander to our sentimentality. It simply speaks, and we listen.

McCarthy should be proud of what Hillcoat (The Proposition) has accomplished with his version of The Road. The film understands the source material, even as it changes it (with the addition of a mother, Charlize Theron) and condenses it. And the producers must be applauded for keeping the film as dark and hopeless as the book, which is a brave declaration of the sanctity of McCarthy’s original work.

Really, though, what is this movie? It’s a movie for fathers and their sons. Very few movies speak so loudly and proudly about the powers of fathers. The day I saw The Road I had been helping my own father rewire electricity in his home, the home I grew up in. We had been working on it for more than a week, and we had bonded tremendously during those days of hard work. That time is priceless to me. I knew that before seeing The Road, but the film magnified it further.

Someone once said that parents raise children to replace them. It’s the truth. A good father only wants his child to grow up to be wiser and kinder than he is. And this father is no different with his son, be it the end of the world or no.