Sin #56: No Country for Young Men

Cormac McCarthy is the kind of author that takes the brutal, the heinous, the vile and painful as a poetic anchor for describing human misery. His stories are dark glimpses into the life of characters that are stuck in an endless purgatory of suffering. I’ve tried to finish reading his “Blood Meridian” but simply cannot; it’s an odyssey so harrowing that at times I’ve had to put the book down to catch a breather. McCarthy describes the violence in such startling detail that even the stench of a corpse is palpable through the pages.

This kind of despair is difficult to capture on film, where audiences expect to at least empathize with its hero (as a film “Blood Meridian” might feel like an endless slog through hell without a ray of sunshine to be found). When I heard “The Road” was being adapted I was afraid that Hollywood might glamorize the story and make it accessible for Cineplex-attending audiences (its trailers sold it as a post-apocalyptic action movie, almost a “Mad Max” clone). But then I remembered its director John Hillcoat, who made a stunning Australian movie called “The Proposition” a few years ago that felt positively McCarthian in the way its blood-soaked violence defined its characters and I knew that he was the right person to adapt this story to the screen.

After watching “The Road” I felt I’d gone on an unforgettable and painful journey to the heart of darkness, which is the right feeling for this story. Beyond the barren landscapes and the cannibalism, the story is really about a father and son struggling to survive in a world where hope has been completely forgotten. For it to work the movie needed brave actors and Viggo Mortensen and young Kodi Smit-McPhee deliver extraordinary performances. Their connection feels authentic and its closing scenes are heartbreaking.

On interviews McCarthy has said that “The Road” is really about him and his relationship with his son and in factual truth is more of a love story than merely a horror thriller; one could say there’s something of a happy ending in its final sequence (even though happy is a very poor word to describe it).

It’s curious how some filmmakers use a canvas of despair to entertain and excite while others use it to provoke thoughts about the human condition. Take two movies for example, “I am Legend” and “Children of Men”; the first is an ordinary action movie starring Will Smith as the last person on the planet (or so he thinks) and the second one is an equally action packed cerebral exercise in doomed fascination. “I am Legend’s” scenario happens after a mysterious vaccine turns people into crazed zombies (although they look nothing like the zombies from the George Romero pictures or “28 Days Later”, more like ugly avatars from a lousy X-Box game); on the other hand, in “Children of Men” there isn’t really a scientific explanation, we have to accept that there’s simply no more children being born. I hated “I am Legend” as much as I loved “Children of Men”, and that’s saying a lot (one thing that bothered me with “Legend” was how dim the violence seemed thanks to the filmmakers intent in making the movie family-friendly).

Still, “The Road” casts a spell unlike any post-apocalyptic film, mainly because it focuses intently on a relationship between father and son. McCarthy may see it as a love story and a hopeful one at that but it is unrelenting in its starkness. Still, the love comes through.