![](\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_dmDaLWNETzg\/SxcyPbpSpxI\/AAAAAAAAAmQ\/oMsYIbb-jto\/s200\/Road\")
<\/a>The story is grim and uniformly gray. A father (Viggo Mortensen) and preteen son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) wander through a desolate landscape that has been stripped of life by an unknown global catastrophe. Nuclear war? An environmental disaster? A meteor shower? Neither McCarthy nor screenwriter Joe Penhall offers conclusive clues. What\u2019s clear is that the world is ending, first in calamity, then in cannibalism. Because animal and plant life have been wiped out, the only fresh food is human flesh. Most of the shocks in \u201cThe Road\u201d are delivered with all the subtlety of a slasher film whenever a would-be cannibal gang appears. <\/p>\nSteering clear of these gangs when they can, father and son walk south, away from the cold and toward the sea, seemingly a symbol of hope. But when they get to the coast, the water is not blue, as the father promised, but another shade of gray. \u201cWhat\u2019s on the other side?\u201d the son asks. \u201cNothing,\u201d the father says, \u201cor maybe it\u2019s another father and son.\u201d When I typed that line, I thought for a second, maybe Father and Son were meant to be capitalized. But then I thought, naaah; what the line is describing is a solipsistic world in which humans look back at humans, with no higher power anywhere in sight.<\/p>\n
Father\u2019s moral code is to save his son. The son speaks repeatedly of the \u201cgood guys\u201d and says the two of them are \u201ccarrying the fire.\u201d But the only values in this world, and they aren\u2019t enduring or dependable, are creature comforts and human companionship\u2014as long as your companions are \u201cgood guys.\u201d<\/p>\n
The remarkable thing, the sad thing about McCarthy\u2019s novel and director John Hillcoat\u2019s film version is that God isn\u2019t even part of the discussion. There\u2019s a mumbled reference or two to God by Robert Duvall, wonderfully cast as a grizzled loner whom father and son run into, then leave, but the references are more imprecation than imploring. When Mortensen and son find a huge cache of food in an underground shelter, they fold their hands and say a little \u201cprayer,\u201d thanking not God but\u2014\u201cfriends\u201d? And when our antiheroes take refuge in the bombed-out shell of a church building, where the frcscoes look more Roman than Christian, a brief shot of sunlight coming through a cross-shaped window looks more like an effect than a symbol. If symbol, it\u2019s in stark contrast to every other detail in the film. The storytellers might at least have placed faith in the discussion by making one of the wandering characters a priest or someone who had lost <\/i>their faith. But there\u2019s nothing here to suggest that human beings once believed.<\/i><\/p>\n
Why did I bother going to see \u201cThe Road\u201d? Because I had read several of McCarthy\u2019s novels, including this one, before my conversion to Catholicism, and I had been duped by the hype about this novelist of violence in a godless world. That hype culminated with Oprah recommending \u201cThe Road.\u201d Now I can only wonder, What was she thinking?! <\/i>The cynic in me says Oprah chose this book not because she thought it was any good but because in choosing it, she went so dramatically counter to her viewers\u2019 expectations that she created tremendous publicity for . . . Oprah.<\/p>\n
My thoughts about movies and other art forms have changed radically since I became a Catholic. Ten years ago, I might have seen \u201cThe Road\u201d and left talking about the artistic filmmaking, the acting, the script, the Oscar potential. Now, I only see emptiness. There is nothing to be gained from seeing this film; Catholics may not be moved by it at all, they may be annoyed, they may yawn. A world without even a hint of belief in God is a false world\u2014like looking at a modern painting in which the sky is not blue but fuchsia, a baseball game played without bat, ball, or even players. <\/p>\n
Conceivably, an atheist might cry at the ending of the movie, which offers scant consolation, but consolation all the same\u2014if you don\u2019t believe in God, that is. Children will cry because the film is scary in a primal way. With the boy of the film, children will whimper, \u201cI\u2019m scared, Daddy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Catholics, meanwhile, should take a detour and avoid this \u201cRoad.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Posted by Webster I\u2019ll wager that only an atheist or a child will shed a tear over \u201cThe Road,\u201d the new film based on the Cormac McCarthy novel. Like the book, the movie describes a post-apocalyptic world so godforsaken that not only is there no Second Coming, there was never even a First. In \u201cThe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n