19 February 2010
	CINEMA Beyond the Blood Meridian By Peter Wilhelm There is no flinching from the truth of the blight, of the wintry landscape

I have been struck by the extraordinary number of visions of the Apocalypse which have stained the cinematic fabric. An American friend concurs that this might be because the US is self-preoccupied with its own "end of Empire". Yet since most apocalyptic (and post-apocalyptic) films emanate from Hollywood or thereabouts, they must be delving deep into unconscious material to flourish. The Road - based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy - was even more eagerly awaited than most, though it has had scant critical approval and none at the box office. Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee And many have and will find it insufferably bleak, an unremitting chronicle of the tortuous advance over a devastated landscape of a father and his son (Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) until they end on a beach, at death's edge, staring at a dead, dark sea. The film presents us with an inkling of resurrection and fresh beginnings (I have not read the book, harbouring several doubts about McCarthy's current acclaim). This can be seen as an affirmation of the man's loyalty and love for his vulnerable son (they are given no names, and might just as well be called Viggo and Kodi); but equally as a mystic representation of the renewal of life. Watch for the beetle. The film should not be confused with commercial works that trade on the brand of the Apocalypse: there is little action and no fun. That said, two elements go some way toward redeeming the material from outright anti-humanism. One is "the road" itself, the American road that leads to freedom and has been trodden by Huck Finn and Jack Kerouac. It becomes central as the protagonists range ever on, until there is no further. The illimitable horizon - barely visible beneath ashen, storm-filled skies, upon a dying planet - perhaps embodies a hope of hope. The origins of this deathworld may lie in an atomic cataclysm - McCarthy apparently never says, though his roots are in many science fiction novels from which he departs into myth. The woman who is with Viggo and Kodi at the chronological beginning - a young yet despairing Charlize Theron - kills herself because she cannot endure living. They walk on from her end, with their meagre belongings, their hunger, their gaunt skeletal frames. They encounter maddened bands of cannibals; every step is resonant with threat; and the almost sole dweller in their lost world of minimalist charity is an old man (Robert Duvall) who has lost his son. Duvall is unrecognisable, as, for the most part, is Mortensen (though A History of Violence showed him extending his skills). Smit-McPhee is blessed with an uncanny name and angelic personality. The Road Directed by John Hillcoat Lead roles: Viggo Mortensen Kodi Smit-McPhee Charlize Theron Robert Duvall The second element I find original is that there is no flinching from the truth of the blight, of the wintry landscape. This has an eerie beauty finely captured in virtually static - and colourless - moments. The "desaturated" print is leavened by emotionally charged flashbacks and the terrible red fires that engulf the dead forests and cities of an unknowable future. The box office collapse of The Road may be due to this remorseless depiction of a place where it is better to be dead than alive - not a message that the living may wish to contemplate. On another level, though, the film etches out an ecological disaster which many feel to be close; indeed, the green movement championed McCarthy's novel for exactly this reason. Mortensen provides a voiceover - using the novelist's words - which brings these several meanings together. Having frequently wished I was nearing the end of The Road, I found the final cinematic synthesis affecting and true. That makes it worth seeing.