Apocalypse Now?

Everything declines: There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. Oh no! The fourth seal has been opened! The Apocalypse is upon us! Cue music: Carl Orff’s ‘O Fortuna’ – aka the epic music overused on just about everything, including X Factor. It’s also the most famous piece of music composed in Nazi Germany, which is fitting. Carmina Burana, from which O Fortuna is taken, was inspired by medieval songs written by minstrels, scholars, monks and jesters in the years of bloody war and plague, joining hordes of homeless men and women traipsing across broken Europe.
Ingmar Bergman cited this piece as the inspiration for his dark classic, The Seventh Seal: essentially a road movie in which a medieval knight deals with death: the final judgement, famously playing chess with the grim reaper on a beach. What he loved was the idea of people travelling through the downfall of civilisation and giving birth to new music – and hope.
In The Road it is ‘The Man’ (Viggo Mortensen) who takes the role of the knight, along with his son, ‘The Boy’ (Kodi Smit-McPhee). These two unnamed characters are our heroes – unknown soldiers in a constant battle with hunger, cold, and the cannibalistic ‘bloodcults’ which prowl the stark, ashen lands of America. An America in which the sun no longer shines, so they must ‘carry the light’ – this is their charge and they preach it religiously.
First and foremost this is NOT a sci-fi-apocalypse-nuclear holocaust movie. The Road isn’t about a dystopian future; it’s just set in one. This is something the first trailers forgot with all their disaster movie iconography: footage of tidal waves, riots and hurricanes. All it was missing was shit hitting a fan. You’d have been forgiven for thinking The Road is another sanctimonious global warming, “we’re all going to die” film, preaching that if we don’t act now, this is what will happen.
It’s just not about that. Seeing it as some sort of social commentary misses the point entirely and sells the whole thing short. My god, if it was about that the film would be painfully depressing, and very boring indeed. Thankfully, the newer trailers get to the kernel of the film’s actual meaning, as intended by Cormac McCarthy when he wrote the book: the limits of our humanity – what would you do?
It’s about The Man’s devotion to his son and his eternal, constant fear. The fear of leaving his child alone without the knowledge he’ll need to face the world; a world more dangerous, violent, bleak and doomed than the one he was brought into. McCarthy has a young son and is in his 70s now; this was the inspiration for his book – indeed it is devoted to his son – and now the film, which has been respectfully and cleverly adapted for the screen.
The film portrays a lot of the emotions of the book, enhanced by the somewhat controversial voiceover, something director John Hillcoat and Viggo Mortensen were dead against, but that writer Joe Penhall and McCarthy were all for.
Another controversial aspect of the film is its music. My friend complained it was terribly soppy and sentimental, and some of it is, where it needs to be. The soppy stuff is counterpoint. It’s entirely at odds with the world created so convincingly by the film. The rest is about the filthiest, grungiest and darkest accompanying music I’ve ever heard. It gets under your skin and builds tension until it snaps, exploding into a properly dystopian tribal beat. For the most part the music works, although the sentimentality in some areas is unnecessary, or at least shouldn’t be so explicit.
By far the most impressive thing about The Road is its cinematography, which is as expressionistic as they come. It’s almost black and white. What’s more, no CGI was used. The awful world in which the story is set looks so realistic precisely because it is real.
My only real criticism of this film is its omission of some of the more gruesome aspects of the book. They nailed the single-minded sentimentality of the film, so they could afford to throw in some of the more disgusting elements of the story, which is not to say that the film avoided them altogether – parts of it still made me squirm. I mean, it’s not as if anyone’s actually going to watch the film; they’re all too busy fawning over the computer game graphics of Avatar. So, as usual, a film of such intelligence and feeling is going to be far outlived by a thinly veiled social commentary in which oil is renamed “unobtanium”. Sixteen years of development and that’s the best they could do? Welcome to 2010.