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By Maggie Scott

Whether by man, meteor or Martian, the cause of the destruction of Earth’s civilization isn’t explained in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s best-selling novel, The Road.   How and why is superfluous in the face of the brutal fact that the world has become a living nightmare for the unlucky few who have survived the apocalypse only to confront abysmal carnage and the equivalent of a nuclear winter.

With all support systems of humanity’s social structures seemingly expunged, a haggard man (Viggo Mortensen) and his dazed son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) have taken to the open road, seeking many, many miles away on the coast an imagined respite from the sky’s rigid pallor and frigid rain.  Left behind are a home stripped bare of life’s necessities, as well as the corpse of the man’s wife (Charlize Theron), the boy’s mother; lying somewhere free from the struggle to “just survive.”

While her will to live shrank inexorably with her growing belief that only unbearable pain lay before her and her family, his will not to quit grows, fed by a “fire within.”  In direct contradiction to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the man does not let the anguished void of material sustenance blot out the love and protectiveness he feels for his son.

He’s still a father charged with doing all he can to meet the needs of his son, while at the same time not neglecting his role of teacher—for the boy still asks questions that demand answers.  In the years since the cataclysm began, death has been their constant companion, yet the boy’s moral growth has not been stunted by fear or the gnawing emptiness of his stomach.

“Are we the good guys?” he asks his father, seeking reassurance that they won’t sink to human butchery to keep starvation at bay.  While the boy keeps a tight grip on his little stuffed elephant, it’s really the grip of his father’s sheltering arms that calm his nightmares and give him the strength to keep trudging onward across the foreboding landscape.

Since he’s worth saving, the boy believes others must be, too.  He challenges his father when the man turns on two men he perceives as threats to his and the boy’s survival. He questions his and his father’s right to take food they find in an underground shelter and their right to trespass in an abandoned house that was his father’s boyhood home.  And, most poignantly, he questions his father’s insistence on “always thinking bad things are going to happen.”

By what grace does the child retain such a hopeful vision?  There is less than nothing in his surroundings that would suggest that his and his kind’s inevitable end isn’t total annihilation.  And, yet, through nothing but the force of love are we persuaded that the human beings will find a way to come through.  Rationally, viewers will feel a low-level hum of skepticism at the proceedings: Exposure to the caustic elements, extraordinary demands on the body and lack of nourishing food should have swiftly felled the man and most certainly the boy.

But the embers of love are enough to fuel body and soul; and, so, they endure…for how long?  Nothing catches emotional fire in writer Joe Penhall’s screenplay.  Visuals (some footage done at still-devastated Mt. St. Helen’s) work up to a point in immersing the viewer in revulsion, dread and horror.

Neither by stark “showing” nor by stimulated imagination has director John Hillcoat managed to convey the immeasurable misery of this doomsday scenario.  Their pulled punches have spared our feelings with emotional detachment the result and a lost opportunity to take us on a sobering walk through what could be the future of mankind.  A Dimension Films release, rated R for violence, nudity.

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