In every moment - even the last one - you'll want to know what happens next, even if you can hardly stand to look. Go see it because it's two small people set against the ugly backdrop of the world undone. Don't see it just because you loved the book. Not because it contains warnings against our own demise. Not because it is littered with small lines of dialogue you will remember later. Not because the score is creepily spiritual. Not because it is unforgettable, unyielding. You should see it for the simplest of reasons: Because it is a good story. You want them to get there, you want them to get there, you want them to get there - and yet you do not want it, any of it, to end. It is a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all. You know that going in, because generally those movies just flirt with the apocalypse, just offer a little look-see at a tidal wave or a nuclear blast. But in those movies, the end never really comes. Anytime the man turns his back on the boy or separates from him, it feels - in a way that scary, apocalyptic movies often do - as if everything will end. When the father grips the boy's mouth to quiet him, it is too rough. When they run from danger, they clank and rustle and seem wetly destined to never get away. When they do move, the father and the son progress through a quietly seething dream, a world at its end. Sounds awful, because it goddamned well is. Ruined, wrecked, used up - it is our world, consumed at its edges by fire, at its center by rot. There is no color left in anything - not the people, not the plants, not the faces of mountains. People-zombies, some of them hungry for human flesh, stare out from abandoned office buildings and sometimes hunt other people. This is what happens: A father and a son walk from point A to point B through a desolate landscape. And yet now they stand there watching the fire, dazed, like two drunks gazing out the window of a Laundromat at a mushroom cloud.Įverything about the film seems disconnected in this way - shocky and post-traumatic. From the get-go, the father and son have moved. It feels like the two of them should get out of there. Dense and hot, certainly loud, it's the sort of fire from which there is no safe distance. The fire leers profanely from one edge of the screen to the other. Originally published in the June 2009 issueĪt one point in The Road, a moment that is never otherwise explained or referenced, the father and the son stare at a dead forest as it burns.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |