By DOUG STANTON
I've just come back from the theater where I saw what was the best and most potent depiction of post 9/11, post Iraq, post economic free-fall America -- it wasn't a PBS special, or a report from National Public Radio, nor was it a non-fiction book or documentary. It was entirely made-up, and it was a movie. "The Road," starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, is one of the year's best movies that you might never see. But you should.
The subject is challenging. After some undefined disaster, natural or nuclear, life on earth has ceased to exist. No birds sing, fish do not swim in rivers. The movie is based on the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, and when I read it (I've read it 3 times), I was floored. The opening paragraph is stunning. It is the kind of paragraph that, if you are a writer, you think, "I would die happy having written those words." The paragraph is so well written, I was reminded of the prose poem by James Wright called "Honey," which turns out to be a metered poem that Wright slyly broke into paragraphs. The musical effect of the language and the visual effect of the pedestrian lines creates a deceptive magic.
"The Road" is about what a father will do for his son to keep him safe, when in fact there is nothing left to do but live moment by moment. Literally, nothing green or living seems to exist on earth. The father and son subside on what they scavenge, canned food, grain, barely filtered water from streams. Fans of McCarthy's 1985 novel "Blood Meridian," or 1992's "All The Pretty Horses," will recognize the quest of "The Road's" story-line: two figures move against a world that is indifferent to their existence. The relationship between the father and son is like the banter between the "old man" and the boy in Ernest Hemingway's novel "The Old Man And The Sea."
In "The Road," the young boy, (his character does not have a name), asks his father (Mortensen) if they are the good guys or the bad guys, this in a landscape where marauding bands of fellow post-apocalyptic survivors hunt for humans to eat.
"We're the good guys," says Mortensen. The father tells the boy they are "carrying the fire," which the boy comes to understand, when he points to his own heart, maintaining a sense of humanity in a malignant universe. The movie portrays the galvanizing influence the boy has upon the father, who trusts none of the fellow wanderers they meet on the road. The boy and son are heading south, to warmer weather, and to the sea. I won't spoil it for you by telling you what happens when they get there.
This image of "carrying of the fire" resembles the last image -- and scene -- in the 2007 movie "No Country For Old Men," based on another McCarthy novel by the same name. When the sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, tells his wife about his night's dream, about being on horseback in snowy mountains and watching his father ride ahead, carrying a small light in a horn resting on his saddle, Jones' tells his wife that he knew his father was lighting a way through the darkness.
McCarthy took the title for "No Country" from a line by the poet William Butler Yeats, from a poem called "Sailing To Byzantium." This poem, along with WH Auden's "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love," as well as many of McCarthy's ten novels, are intimations of mortality, the ache of finitude, the refusal to surrender to defeat. So why is "The Road" a mirror held up to this new decade in 2010? Aside from the fact that parts of the movie's landscape resemble economically decimated American cities whose manufacturing base has gone to Asia, "The Road" is about surviving, at its most elemental and spiritual.
The story is poignant because of the boy's -- and father's -- insistence that they must carry the fire. The movie, and the novel, celebrate humility, endurance, integrity, in a world turned to charred crap. I know I've met a lot of the supposed good guys, and many are really egomaniacs with savior complexes. The father and son on the road would not suffer these fools. They would keep on walking.
Doug Stanton, a life-long Traverse City resident, is the author of the New York Times best-sellers "In Harm's Way" and "Horse Soldiers."
