The Beast In Me: A Movie Review of “The Road”

Psychologists would probably have a field day with Cormac McCarthy. The author’s two most recent novels, The Road and No Country for Old Men, share two things in common. First, now that The Road has been released starring Viggo Mortensen (who is making a dark-horse bid for inclusion in the “great actors of our time” discussion) and Charlize Theron, we can say both have been made into feature films. Second, both explore the one thing mankind doesn’t want to talk about: its animal nature. We are animals, but we have built Society to hide and restrain the natures and tendencies we’re born with. When those tendencies do come out, they become classified as “breaking the law.” Killing and theft are commonplace in Nature, but Society is better than that. So what happens when s*** hits Society’s fan and all the handshakes and yes-please-thank-yous and netiquette are gone and all we’re left with is the beast within? This is the question at the heart of The Road‘s premise, and though it becomes hard to watch at times, McCarthy and director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) flesh it out marvelously, if not perfectly.

In a way, The Road is the perfect opposite of No Country For Old Men. Where No Country watched Society implode from within in a world not fully aware of that implosion, The Road watches humans cling to the last remnants of their humanity–”the fire inside,” as Mortensen’s son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, calls it–in a world destroyed by some unmentioned catastrophe and visibly in its death throes. Every city and town is laid to waste, most people are dead, trees are leveled everywhere, earthquakes and fires happen periodically and the world is constantly rainy and cold. (Here, by the way, is where we run into the movie’s major annoying trait: The lack of expository details. Did humans cause the catastrophe? Was it a nuclear holocaust? Meteor strike? Did Sarah Palin answer the red phone? Answers are desired and not given. Won’t be the last time, either.)

In this post-apocalyptic world, people do whatever they must to survive, wandering the world foraging abandoned buildings, sleeping in burned-out cars and stealing whatever they must to make it to the next day. In this world, man no longer considers it wrong to kill man; indeed, Mortensen’s character tells us cannibalism is on the rise. Don’t worry, though; this father-and-son duo are the self-described “good guys” and would never do that. Anything else, though, just might be fair game, especially in Mortensen’s eyes. Hey, it’s a cruel world and he’s got a son to protect… and two bullets in what looks like a .38 revolver to do it with. This could get ugly.

There’s a lot of ugliness in the movie, actually, from the stark and vivid wasteland brought startlingly to life in the film to the hunting parties and aforementioned cannibalism that’s heard onscreen but not seen. The ugliness also resides within Mortensen’s character, a man so obsessed with doting after his young son that he drifts into cold, vengeful mania at times. Maybe he’s driven to madness by the dreams of his wife (Theron), who slowly went crazy herself and committed suicide sometime after the unknown catastrophe with no reason given. (Remember that expository detail thing we talked about? Yeah. There it is again.)

Mortensen’s character lives only for taking care of his young boy, who is a total wet noodle and needs a lot of taking care of. Not that watching so much death and destruction wouldn’t be cripplingly traumatic, but Mortensen ends up carrying the boy–literally–every time danger comes. Really? The boy can’t even run? Ever heard of survival instinct, kid? Apparently not, as he wanders off to try and make contact when he spots another boy his age and falls asleep rather than keep watch over camp. Then again, maybe his bumbling is necessary to advance the plot; pushing shopping carts through grey landscapes can only hold the viewer’s attention for so long, really.

In a movie that is almost exhaustingly bleak there are moments of redemption, when “the fire inside” wins, and they come out best during cameo appearances by Robert Duvall, Michael K. Williams and Guy Pearce. At the moments when Mortensen’s character most looks down at humanity, giving in to the beast within, his son looks up at humanity and sees these people for what they are: People whose hands have been forced by extraordinarily trying times. In the child’s eyes, Society can still come out on top, but it has a beast of a fight on its hands to do it.

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