The Road

Saw The Road. It was very sad. The protagonist and his son struggle to survive amidst an unspecified global catastrophe. Bands of marauding cannibals are an ever-present threat. Often other survivors are reduced entirely to the weapons they wield, their faces obscure but their knives flashing. This is meant to signify the open hostility of this post-apocalyptic hell. A dismal soundtrack keeps things sorrowful and their desperation as they search houses and gas stations for food is palpable. The film is technically excellent, spare, and powerful. But why must it be so sad?

The obvious answer is to help convey the shittiness of the situation, but then why flash back to when the father's wife was alive? Why intercut footage of his idyllic youth and focus on the bird-like crying of his son? Sad movies try to work on your sense of empathy to put you in a receptive mood for their (often extremely humane) moral. In general, really sad movies are desperate attempts to make us better people. So, with this in mind, I tried to uncover the film's moral leanings.

There's some grist to argue for a religious allegory: they talk a lot of 'carrying the fire,' there is a prominent son, talk of God abounds (the father even narrates a line about if he were god,) and they spend a night in a church, gazing at the murals of saints. Unfortunately, I don't know what to make of all of that, except to buttress my argument that this film has ethics on its mind. The son is clearly the moral compass of the film however, often nagging his father into merciful acts, referred to as an angel, and, in the opening narration, as "the word of God." Indeed. A more interesting take on all of this, I thought, was revealed by the ending which I'll discuss in white font (highlight to read the next paragraph.)

The film ends with the simultaneous death of the father and rescue of the son. It is revealed that the shadowy figures pursuing the duo are benevolent but wary, keeping their distance out of fear of the father, rather than for any sinister purpose. The father is always reprimanded by the son for being too suspicious and every time the son is correct. The black dude was harmless, the old man friendly, even the dog snuffling around their bunker was, it is implied, attached to the friendly family. The father usually responds to this reprimand by calling the son naive, but it is the father himself who is naive. His experience has made him so paranoid that he perpetuates the hell which he believes he is escaping. In the narrated line I mentioned above, the father says "If I were God, I would have made the world just so and no different." I thought that was interesting (though to be honest, I've come across this meme of the self-perpetuated hell before in The Sandman, among other places. There's a connection to prison life here as well.) Alright, enough of this.

The story bleak but the message uplifting, this is a hard movie. It is indirect in its points which may annoy the more literal-minded, but it's a lot more intelligent than some other post-apocalyptic films, with their mindless glorification of rugged individualism and pseudo-sophisticated dismal outlook. This film is, underneath it all, suffused with hope.