I saw "The Road" on Thanksgiving Day, which was either the worst day to see it, or the best, depending on what one is thankful for, precisely. It's a grueling, grim, bleak-as-fuck movie that offers two slivers of hope in it, sort of like being a starving man finding a peanut in your pocket, and carefully halving the peanut, eating one half earlier in the day, and saving the other half for later.
I won't throw any spoilers into this, but it's a terribly dark movie, and you know what's going to happen to one of the characters almost from the outset, as Viggo does some "acting" (he's a good enough actor, with a penchant for extreme roles like these, but he telegraphs something early on that is like a pulmonary Morse Code for "DOOM(tm)" in movie terms -- from the first exhalation, you know where that's going to lead).
Both Viggo as The Man and the boy who plays The Boy (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Charlize Theron, who plays his mother) do a good job conveying the dismal nature of their existence -- it's like a concentration camp without walls, a world-gone-foul in some unnamed, unspecified apocalypse that has claimed the world-as-we know it. Everything is dead and/or dying, with trees falling and not an animal to be found in the wild, or so we're led to believe.
The world seems divided between varying shades of survivors -- good, bad, and ugly -- with the ugly being the cannibals and slavers, in no uncertain terms, and the bad being the merely ruthless and/or opportunistic predators and/or scavengers. I put a lot of and/or in the mix because in a world devoid of hope and trust, it's hard to know friend from foe, since everybody's brandishing a knife or a gun, without assurances of who's predator and who is prey.
Viggo's quest for hope in the South, and his pathological concern for his son's security point to how strongly human safety is bound up in solidarity -- that is a curious thing. Only the cannibals and slavers appear to work together -- Viggo is very much a go-it-alone type, and there's some kind of editorial point to be made in this. Maybe The Man is too much of a control freak to be willing to trust anyone else, but three groups of predators are all doing pretty well for themselves (in relative terms) by banding together. I feel that maybe McCarthy and/or the director/screenwriter might be chalking that up to the predatory lifestyle of those groups, but that they are in groups is exactly how and why they succeed. That, and guns. Work together, and Man can prosper in almost any setting -- work alone, and you become something of a hermit and a vagabond. Viggo the Vagabond wending his way through a shattered world.
The Boy offers a strong moral counterpoint to some very questionable decisions and actions by The Man, which is valid and vital, makes the Boy's presence in the world all the more vital and necessary. Despite the bleakness of their life, he maintains the hopeful promise of a better world in his heart. That is one half of the sliver of hope in this movie.
The other half, as I saw it, was the presence of a beetle, flying free. They discover it in an empty chewing tobacco container, and the bug flies off for parts unknown. I liked seeing that, since we're to believe the world is dead, and no animals live within it (which feels like a cop-out of sorts, or a narrative convenience -- since wild animals would likely be better able to survive the post-apocalyptic holocaust than man). That beetle, not unlike the sprig of green in "Wall-E" showed to me that all was not lost -- that man may have destroyed his civilization, but the world would, in time, heal and move on, long after we were gone. In the (Cormac) McCarthyite world, even that sliver of hope is better than none at all.
