Valley Futures

It is probably safe to say that Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Road” is one of the bleakest stories ever written by an American author. Crafted in McCarthy’s immediately recognizable prose – lean, taut, spare, and devoid of anything but the barest description – “The Road” recounts the tale of a Father and Son’s harrowing journey across a post-apocalyptic U.S. landscape rendered dead by a mysterious nuclear blast. Menaced by cannibalistic bands of nuked-out nomads, plagued by desperate attempts to find edible food and drinkable water, the duo’s deepest challenge is, oddly enough, a spiritual one – how to find meaning in a world in which meaning itself has completely been obliterated?

“The Road’s” readers seem to fall into two camps, either rejecting the novel as “too dark” (“black” it undeniably is), or embracing McCarthy’s desire to “go there,” exploring the deepest and darkest places in human civilization’s collective soul. (I fall into the latter category, finding the book absolutely mesmerizing.) At one point in the novel, the two post-armageddon travelers stumble into a clearing where they find, horrifically, a human baby impaled on a spit post-grilling, and the reader realizes that, indeed, Dorothy, we are not in Kansas any more.

And yet, in some oddly compelling way, “The Road” finds its power and promise in the redemptive relationship between father and son. The love they nurture for one another – they are “carrying the fire” – propels them onward toward the safety of the coast, with each new challenge strengthening the emotional bond between them. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll kill anyone who tries to hurt you,” says the Man to the Boy at one point. “’Cause that’s my job.”

Turning McCarthy’s horrific yet strangely hopeful novel into a compelling film is director John Hillcoat’s challenge, and fortunately, he has some potent tools with which to work. His two protagonists are near-perfectly cast: the reliably understated Viggo Mortensen as the Man, and young acting sensation Kodi Smit-McPhee as the Boy. Despite its bleak theme, too, the story possesses a natural made-for-Hollywood mojo – Jack Kerouac meets Mad Max. The toughest part of Hillcoat’s job is capturing the nuanced development of the father/son relationship while, at the same time, painting the post-apocalyptic backdrop in a manner that is realistic but doesn’t either distract or overwhelm the viewer.

No easy task, and many of the film’s critics have already charged Hillcoat with “exercising too much caution” with McCarthy’s no-holds-barred story “Why didn’t he show the ‘baby on a spit’ scene?” groused one critic in one national newspaper of record.

Maybe because the terrifying nature of the story speaks for itself without resorting to visual shock. Hillcoat’s film is full of scenes of desolation and long stretches of relative silence, and while the mournful musical score is a bit schmaltzy at moments, Hillcoat wisely uses sound to his advantage. The duo’s journey is punctuated by horrifying adventures and small ironies: they travel with a shopping cart, the uber-symbol of 20th century consumer civilization, and discover remnants of the way things were – a dusty Coke can here, an abandoned cellar full of canned goods (Vitamin Water and Cheetos – product placement has never tasted so good) there.

We’re the good guys, right?” The Boy asks at one point. “Always will be,” the Man replies.

And always, looming over them, the possibility of suicide by the one bullet left in their pistol – a much better option than being captured, cooked, and eaten.

I was almost as mesmerized by the movie as the book. “The Road” provides me with a strange sort of hope, as human civilization confronts a series of converging crises – financial, energetic, environmental. The world can’t possibly get as bad as McCarthy’s novel suggests, as long as 21st century communities can organize and re-localize, and we manage to stave off nuclear armageddon. Perhaps McCarthy has done us a favor by painting a ‘worst-case scenario” by which we may measure the success of our own re-localization efforts.

Here’s hoping.

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