The Road

SPOILER ALERT! The plot will be discussed.

The Road is based on a Cormac McCarthy novel. He paints bleak pictures of what’s left of benign humanity struggling to exist in a world in decline, as he did in No Country for Old Men. The first shot here is of beautiful flowers, trees and the sky, filled with brightness and colors. The Man (Viggo Mortensen) and the Woman (Charlize Theron) look happy, accompanied by a horse, which stresses what has been lost as there is then a jump forward in time. (Only one person has a name in this story to show how individuality has been stripped away, and people are reduced to their essential roles.) The brightness and color turns into the darkness of the nighttime with ominous fires glowing in the background. There are frantic voices in the distance. The Man starts to fill the bathtub, not to enjoy getting washed, but to store water, which shows how life’s priorities have altered. (Water is also used as a symbol for actual and symbolic cleansing in the movie)

The Man then wakes up as he had a dream of what happened in the past. He now looks scruffy and he is bundled up in tattered clothes next to a sleeping boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), his son, in a cave. They are next to a waterfall, but the skies are gray and gloomy, and the landscape looks barren and ravaged, with stripped, fallen trees and no vegetation. The man reassures his boy that the noise they hear is just another earthquake.

We get inside the father’s head periodically as he provides narration in a slow, elegiac voice. He says the clocks stopped at 1:17, and there was “a long sheer of bright light, then a series of low concussions.” So, we are in a post-apocalyptic world. His description can imply that there was a nuclear event, or something like a meteor hit the planet. It could also have been the culmination of some environmental event. The man thinks it’s October, but he’s not sure, because there are no changes in the seasons anymore, and he says he hasn’t “kept a calendar for years,” which lets us know that things have been awful for a long time. He says each day is grayer, and it is getting colder, “as the world slowly dies.” He goes on to say that “No animals have survived, and all the crops are long gone.” If there is no future source for food the only option left is to scavenge for the little there is left to eat. What we are left with is the absence of hope for the future, not only for individuals, but for civilization in general.

What we see is a world that is a graveyard of its former self, littered with the rotted corpses of buildings and cars. The man says, “the roads are peopled by refugees towing carts,” as if today’s homeless people were a foreshadowing of what we all would become in the future. He also says there are “gangs carrying weapons,” as life has degenerated into a survival of the meanest. There are signs of a hellish madness taking hold, as he reports having heard “deranged chanting.”  There are ominous religious messages written on road billboards, literal and metaphorical “signs” of what is happening. The man says there has been cannibalism, which he said is the great fear, suggesting that it poses the main reason for killing others. Everything is reduced to being focused on the basics, such as getting food, avoiding the cold, and finding shoes since they have to keep walking to search for what they need to survive.

He tries to tell his son stories of “courage and justice,” using them as myths that encourage the urge to continue. He says the boy is his “warrant,” which suggests that it is a command issued by God to carry out fatherly duty. He says of his son, “if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.” All of the man’s purpose is focused on taking care of his boy, or else there is nothing for him to live for, or to believe in. As he reads story books to his son there are shadows on their sleeping tent which appear like paintings on a prehistoric cave wall, as if the world has reversed its evolutionary progress.

They wake to forest fires, a hellish inferno that forces them to push on. They go to a barn, but they can’t find food there. They see family members that committed suicide by hanging. The boy asks why did they kill themselves, but the dad says his son knows why. The next scene is very dark, showing that suicide is the measure that must be considered if they want to prevent suffering in the end. The father shows that his gun contains a bullet for each of them. He demonstrates how to put the gun in the mouth and shoot upwards. He has spoken of this alternative before given the constant threat of either a gruesome or lingering death, but the boy is still shaken by the possibility.

There is a flashback to when the man’s wife was still alive, and pregnant. But she is despondent, crying out “what kind of life is this” in which to bring a child. So the boy has only known this dying, brutal world. The father and his son were sleeping in a car, but they hear a truck coming and hide in the woods as the truck overheats and the men riding in it stop. One of the gang members (Garret Dillahunt) goes off to urinate, but sees the two hiding. The father says he will kill the gang member if he says anything. The man thinks the father won’t pull the trigger and has never killed anyone. The gang member acts like they have food, but the father suspects not, and probably thinks they are cannibals. When the father is diverted by some noise from the truck, the gang member grabs the boy and puts a knife to his neck. The father shoots the man, but the boy is in shock and has blood on him. His fatherly dedication is evident as he picks up and carries his son away from the men. As they hide, he does hope that the boy will be able to pull that trigger if it comes to it. He later returns to the scene of where he shot the man and finds him decapitated, confirming his belief that the roving gang practiced cannibalism.

In another flashback, the man’s angry, dejected wife says they should not have waited until they only had two bullets. They should have killed themselves, because she believes, with all laws and decency no longer in force, that others will come to rape her and the boy, and then kill all three of them for food. He keeps saying he will do whatever it takes, but she doesn’t believe there is anything to be done. She is furious at him and says she should empty the bullets in herself and leave him with no option. She says there isn’t anything to talk about, and that her heart “was ripped from me the night he was born.” We have an upside-down world where hope for the future at the time of the birth of a child is replaced by despair due to the horror of the present. He says they will survive, but she counters with, “I don’t want to just survive.” The movie offers various ways to react to such a dire situation. In a possible dark reference to the Robert Frost poem, the ‘road” traveled on may be one of basic survival, another may be to try to hold onto the old ways as long as possible, and another might be to turn to suicide, to escape the inevitable, impending suffering and death that they all will face. The mother asks that she take their son with her. He says that she is crazy, but she points out that other families have chosen that option. She later bathes her son in an act that shows a yearning for a civilized world, but also symbolically represents a baptism to restore the innocence of a pre-fallen time. (The father’s washing of his son after he is bathed in the gang member’s blood also emphasizes the attempt to cleanse humankind’s sins).

In the present, the father says that it was necessary to shoot the gang member since there aren’t many good guys left. He says they have to keep carrying the “fire,” by which he means “the fire inside you.” The boy asks if they are the good guys, which the father says they are and always will be, implying that they will continue to carry that “light” which represents civilized humanity. The man brings the boy a treat, an unopened soda bottle, a great gift given the circumstances. But they are still hungry. They are heading south, for the coast. The boy still mentions his mother, but the father says they have to stop thinking about her, probably because he knows that the grief will just make them weak. But, conversely, it is also a part of the humanity he says they should hold onto. They are at a crossroads between retaining what makes them the “good guys” and letting those attributes go.

Despite what he preaches, the man can’t stop thinking about his wife. There is a flashback of her playing the piano, which stresses how music, and the arts in general, are elements that comprise a civilized society, and which point to what the wife meant by saying she didn’t want to “just survive.” The father stands on a bridge, representative of his being caught between letting the memory of his wife go and staying attached. He has a photograph of her and throws it off the bridge in a symbolic attempt to move on without her haunting him. There is a flashback of him pleading that she stay for one more night. She looks dead in her soul, and only says that they he and their son should go south since they won’t survive another winter. He says she went off to die “somewhere in the dark,” and there are no more tales to tell of her, suggesting stories cease when life ends. Back in the present, he leaves his wedding ring on the bridge, and says the “coldness” of her departure was her “last gift,” implying an emotional goodbye would have hurt more.

Father and son find another waterfall, and seeing the rainbow colors in the mist and taking their clothes off and experiencing the falling water provides an interlude of joy that they can share. (Again, we have water used as an image of washing away the evil of the earth, and the fact that they are heading south toward the ocean adds to the metaphor). They enter a house, but there are ominous signs there, including a collection of shoes and boots, a locked basement, large kettles outside, and a device with a meat hook on it. The man finds an axe and he breaks into a locked basement, hoping for some supplies, presumably thinking the house has been abandoned. They find emaciated people there, held hostage, and one says they will be taken to the “smokehouse.” So cannibalism is occurring here. It seems that lurking beneath the possibility of something positive is the reality of danger. The owners come back and the man and his boy hide upstairs where there are gruesome remnants of the peoples’ actions. The father, assuming they will be captured, realizes his son will not kill himself if the father is taken, so he is ready to shoot the boy first. But the homeowners are distracted by the people in the cellar trying to escape, and the boy and the father sneak out.

In the woods, they eat some roasted crickets and keep warm by a fire. The boy wants to be reassured that no matter how hungry they get, they won’t eat anybody. The father says they will never eat anyone, and they haven’t so far even though they are starving. The son says they are the good guys, and they are “carrying the fire,” which pleases the father, as the boy repeats what the father told him earlier, and the boy holds up a piece of wood with a flame, symbolizing the vow.

They return to the house where the man grew up. He shows his son where they used to place the Christmas tree and hang stockings. We feel sadness that the boy never had the joyful opportunity of celebrating holidays. The son says they shouldn’t be doing this, similar to how his father said they had to forget about the mother to move forward without sadness to defeat them. The child later believes he sees a young boy running around a building. The father chases his son and restrains him as the boy says he needs to find the other child. This scene shows the boy’s need for companionship and that he aches to be with someone his own age. He most likely was experiencing a hallucination created out of hope which still lives in the boy.

In his narration, the man says the boy hopes that he’ll find other children as they journey south toward the shore. The father probably just sees the journey as just something to do, a direction to go in a world without purpose. The boy asks about the father’s friends, and he tells them that they are all dead now, emphasizing that the father really has nothing to live for except to keep his son alive. He narrates that he just tries to “dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings.” He probably feels this way because future possibilities are the fuel which drives a youth forward in life. But the earth no longer offers no goals to head toward. The father is coughing often and the son asks if they are going to die now. The man tries to shed light on how things end for individuals that die of starvation, that it takes some time. In the narration he says he is trying to get the boy used to when he is gone since he admits to slowly dying, just like he earlier described what was happening to the earth.

The father says every day is a “lie,” since the body wants to survive, and it keeps looking for a chance to live another day, even though there is no point in the attempt. Alone, the father breaks down as the futility of his actions catches up with him. The boy calls to him and says he looked in a window of the abandoned house they are in and realized how “skinny” they look. Many times, the mind does not want to accept the cruel reality of what is happening. The father uncovers a piano in the house, and tries to play, again trying to resuscitate his past life with his wife, and a world that now no longer has music to inspire it.

Outside the house, the dad steps on a metal hatch door, which leads to an underground room. The boy remembers the cellar where those practicing cannibalism lived, and doesn’t want his father to go down the ladder. But, this time, the results are beneficial, reversing pessimism to optimism, and suggesting that one never knows what lies down “the road.” The father finds an underground shelter that has cans of food. The boy asks if it’s okay to take this food, since they are supposed to be the good guys, and are not thieves. The father says it’s okay, and paints it as an altruistic act of the former owners, so they should say a prayer of thanks. He covers the metal opening with an old mattress so nobody else will find the place. They eat and the boy sleeps. The father empties out his son’s belongings. Despite all of his attempts to forget his wife, he discovers one of her hair clips, reminding him of an evening out with his wife at a concert, another reference to a lost world of culture and refinement. 

In the house, just getting washed (more water baptismal imagery) with soap and shampoo, using toothpaste, and cutting their hair and his beard makes them feel human again. He smokes a cigarette which seems odd to the boy since it just makes the father cough more. He comments that his son probably thinks his father comes from another world, which the boy agrees. And in a way the father does, since it was a time “before,” when everything was different, and to which the boy cannot relate.

They hear a dog, which is surprising, since he noted earlier that no animals survived. The father anticipates that someone is with the dog, so the place is no longer safe. He says they must leave and take what they can. The boy, weary of being in fear and running all the time, says his dad is always negative, yet they found this place full of food. The father insists they leave and they find a large cart and fill it with supplies. Always in the background are rumblings, like the shifting of the earth in its deathbed.

They come across an old man (Robert Duvall), who can barely stand upright, and who uses a cane. He says he has nothing, and the father assures him they are not robbers. The boy wants to give the old man some food, but the father’s first response is negative. But the benevolence of the boy influences the father, and he eventually agrees to offering one can of food. The father anticipates his son asking that they take the old man with them, and again he initially says no. But, he relents again, and invites the old man to have dinner with them. 

The father is inquisitive about the age of the old man. He says he’s ninety, but the father believes that is what he says so people won’t hurt him. The old man says yes, and also acknowledges that others hurt him anyway, which shows that compassion is almost nonexistent now. After eating at a campfire, the old man says his name is Ely. It is significant that a very old man is the only person in the story with a name, suggesting that soon even individual identity will become extinct. Ely says when he saw the boy, he thought he saw an angel. He never thought he would see a child again. The father says his son is an angel, or more like a god to him. The old man finds that it’s sad that a god would be traveling on this road (the road to one’s death?), a sort of comment that even the gods have fallen prey to how horrible life has become. To stress the bleakness of their situation, Ely says that “if there is a God up there, he would have turned his back on us by now. And whoever made humanity will find no humanity here.” So he tells the father, “beware,” meaning there is no goodness left, and no God to rescue them. Ely says he saw this apocalypse coming, though many called it fake, which points to those being in denial, even in the face of scientific facts, who reject the truth for psychological, or possibly selfish reasons. The father asks if Ely ever wished he would die? The old man says no, and in a bit of dark humor, adds, “It’s foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these.” Death would be a gift and there is only a purgatory that one must endure now.

Ely leaves them, and the boy points out that the old man is going off to die (reminiscent of what happened to his mother) and says the father doesn’t care. The father reminds the boy that when the two of them run out of food he’ll think about things differently as to why they must tend to themselves first. But the son says the old man was not a bad person and now the father can’t even tell the difference between the good guys and the bad ones. The father only feels an obligation toward his son in the long run, while the son thinks in the short term that they can be generous. The peril that the father speaks of is emphasized in the next scene as they see footprints in the snow and hide as men hunt a mother and daughter. As they flee this danger they encounter another as there are more earth tremors and trees begin to uproot and fall, almost crushing them.

By now the father’s coughing is increasing. He says in the narrative that when one has bad dreams, one still has fear, which means a person continues to want to live. When one has good dreams, one is giving up, which means that in this inverted place, good dreams are bad omens. When they finally get to a southern beach, the father says he’s sorry the water is no longer blue, the drainage of color mirroring the absence of the old world’s beauty. The boy asks if there is anything on the other side of the sea. The father at first says there’s nothing, but then pulls back from his nihilism by saying there may be a father and son sitting on a beach on the other side of the ocean. The boy has a fever and throws up. It then storms, adding to the gloominess. The boy asks the father what would he do if the boy died? The man says he wouldn’t want to live, and confirms the boy’s statement that he would die so he could be with his son in death. The father here confirms that, for him, there is no point in existing without his son, the only connection he has to being human.

The father discovers a shipwrecked boat not far off the beach and tries to swim to get some supplies. While the boy slept, a thief (Michael Kenneth Williams) came by and took all their supplies. The father grabs the boy and goes after the robber, who looks in poor health himself. The man has a knife, and is at first defiant. But the father threatens him with the gun. He then throws down his knife. The father tells the thief to take off all his clothes and put them in the cart. Although the boy pleads for the man’s life and wants to be generous, the father, in a sort of Old Testament “eye for an eye” justice, says the thief would have left them with nothing. He warns his son how he won’t be around forever to protect him, and he has to learn how to survive. The boy’s response is that he doesn’t “want to learn,” what the father is teaching him if it amounts to being cruel toward others. He is echoing, even though he didn’t actually hear it, what his mother said about how just surviving is not enough.

The boy says the man was so afraid, but the father says he is afraid, too. He tells his son he is the one who has to worry about everything. But the boy yells that he is the one who must worry. In a way the boy, carrying “the fire,” is the conscience of humanity, so that is why he must worry about everything. He convinces the father to go back and leave some clothes and food for the man if he shows up where they left him.

Near some houses, hope seems to appear as they find a beetle and see a bird flying in the sky. But, as if to undermine that feeling of optimism, the father is wounded by an arrow coming out of a house window. The father shoots into the window and we hear groans. He gets inside the house and sees that he killed the man who shot at him, and the man’s female companion curses the father. People shoot first, and don’t even ask questions later. It is interesting that the father, Ely, the thief, and now this woman all ask why were they following each other. But nobody is hunting anyone; they are all just suspicious of everyone as fear of others has replaced all feelings of community.

The father pulls the arrow from his leg as he yells in agony. Because of his failing health, he can’t drag the wagon anymore. He looks at the water and remembers being in a car with his wife as she rested by the sea. (The flashbacks of happier times are full of brightness and color). In his narrative, he says if he were God he wouldn’t have made it any different so he could have “you,” as he thinks of his wife and then he looks at his son. Despite the hell that has been visited upon the earth, the father would not change anything since he is still grateful for the love for his family. The boy gives him water and keeps him warm. The father says he doesn’t know what will be “down the road.” In the end, “the road” is all there is left. He gives his son the gun, tells him to continue to head south, look for the good guys, but be on guard. The boy doesn't want him to leave and asks that he take him, too. The father thought he could end their lives together because he promised not to leave his son alone. But he can’t do it. Declaring his love for his son, even in such adverse times, he tells his boy that he always had his father’s “whole heart.”

After the father dies, the boy takes the gun. A man, carrying what looks like a military rifle, and is called the Veteran in the script (Guy Pearce), walks toward the boy along the shore. He has lost some fingers (in a battle, which shows he is a warrior who has the ability to protect?). After he finds out that the father is dead, he says the boy can come with him. The man has a wife and a boy and a girl. He says he doesn’t eat people, and says, yes, he is one of the good guys. Even though he must guess at what the boy is saying, he says that he tries to carry the “fire.” The family has a dog, the one they heard near the shelter filled with food. The Motherly Woman (Molly Parker), the Veteran’s female companion, appears with the couple’s son and daughter, children his own age who he longed to connect with. The Motherly Woman, contrary to what the others declared, says they were following the boy and his father. But, they were doing so only to look after him in case the father could no longer care for the boy. They are like guardian angels. The boy asks how does he know if the Veteran is a good guy. The Veteran says the boy will just have “to take a shot.” The phrase contains feelings of trust and suspicion. But, the boy, carrying that “fire,” opts for optimism. Here is where humanity still exists, in the hope and faith in each other.

After a Labor Day break, the next film is Milk.