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I recommend this film. The film is not the novel which is a beautiful prose poem. But the cinematography, in dvd or blue-ray, dazzles the viewer. The acting deserves awards. Near the beginning of the film I think the director shows footage he took at the site of Mount Saint Helens. But for me, the story pulled me in. I saw the movie first and then read the book.
Rent or buy this film. If you think the premise impossible, check a Scientific American article called, "Nuclear Weapons in a New World", about limited or small nuclear exchanges such as between India and Pakistan. Such a confrontation could kick up enough dust to block the sun around much of the world, decreasing the oceanic plankton growth, for ten years.
The film version of The Road is a modern post Armageddon folktale with unlikely but necessary plot limitations, such as a scarcity rather than a total lack of food. Like many of you, I thought about how even canned food would go bad within a few years and most other food, processed or not, would rot before the story gets to where it starts. The implausibility of the story in no way detracts from the story. People have suspended their disbelief while reading or hearing stories for thousands of years. The search for food propels the plot from one scene to the next, allowing the story teller to do what he wants to do and tell his story.
As in science fiction, a cousin genre to this story, this is a story about the present. As the fish, plant life, animals other than humans, die at a very fast pace around this planet Earth, more every day, we all might be characters in this story. Today, humans judge one another very strongly, and quickly, to be bad people, if not dark and evil. We see a predator around every corner. Our families are separated from other families and individuals are separated by ideas and beliefs. There may be seven billion people in the world but friend is lining up against friend, ideas are lining up against ideas. One billion people, more than there were people in the world one hundred and fifty years ago, live close to starvation around the world today, including in the United States of America. Rich or poor, although we need to protect our children, many of us believe we need to protect our children from other people and other ideas.
Without going too deeply into the story for those who want to read or watch it, Cormac McCarthy spell bounds the reader or listener with his character development of a father and his son trying to survive in a world where they need to feel some purpose and meaning by inventing goals, such as traveling south or to the ocean, without knowing whether going south will help their circumstances in any way. In a world where most of the human race and most animals have died because of some vague catastrophe, this father wants, rather than needs, to raise his son. (The book gives more clues about the cause of the planetary wide mass extinction of life on Earth.) Even his mother could not dig deep enough inside herself to want to go on living in a world without enough other people and without a society holding people together. No social system exists any longer to tell anyone what is right or wrong, good or bad, or good and evil. The boy's father finds books to teach his son to read in a world that does not include humans in its future. The father passes his message of civilization onto his son the only way he can. While telling his son about a world with a community of people, the two of them live separate from the few other people alive in the world who are broken down into either the good people or the cannibals. As the plot progresses, this dichotomy of good and cannibal blurs. The boy rarely sees any other people. When he does, they are starving and trying to survive the only way they know how. Sometimes they don't behave so well. If they eat other people, they are called cannibals. The final scene in the story, after the father dies, shows the boy reaching out to others.
There are other scenes earlier where the boy reaches out to an old man and another where he reaches out to the first other boy close to his own age he has ever seen. His father grabs him and stops him from communicating with the old man and tells the boy not to hold his hand. For one evening, the father shares some food and conversation with the old man. But the father believes getting attached to another human being is too great a risk. The next morning he tells the old man to go his own way. The father believes he cannot afford to trust anyone. When the boy, by chance, sees another fearful boy walk by, he chases him only to have his father stop him. The boy wants to bring trust back into the world and associate with other people. Before a child is ten years old, he will play with any other child, until his parent tells him he does not want him playing with a child who has cancer, cerebral palsy, autism, a different color skin, a different religion, a different nationality, a parent with liberal ideas, and the list can go on for pages.
But, the boy does learn a story about people being good to one another, from his father, that he can pass on to others in spite of the fact that every waking traumatic moment is a horror to the father and this is the only world the boy knows. Cannibalistic groups of men and women hunt other humans for food and a violent death is an ever present fact throughout the story. The reader or viewer needs to suspend disbelief once again. Young children growing up with Europe as their playground during World War Two learned a different lesson while they scrapped for food in and out of the towns. But such children still had a world of people out there, not participating directly in the war, holding the infrastructure of society together. McCarthy gives this boy no such world. Yet, with one insect finally flying by our protagonist, the viewer feels hope, if not for humans, then for life on the earth.
And this is where we the reader might notice something. If you saw or read McCarthy's story No Country for Old Men, you might remember something about someone mentioning carrying the fire in the horn. Once again, in this story the characters pass on the fire from one generation to the next. This is what the father does, the son learns to do, and Cormac McCarthy continues to do.
This is a story about the present. This is not a story about the future.
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