Cineforum Bolzano - The road

On the road, a man and a child move forward behind a cart, into “a night darker than darkness and a day grayer than the one before.” A radioactive rain has drained the world of its colors; a war, or perhaps a nuclear apocalypse, has brought an end to nature and its creatures: trees collapse, birds have lost the will to fly, the sea has exhausted its blue, people no longer dream and feed on other people and cruelty.

From the past toward an unseen future, a father and son move on, resisting harsh weather and the attacks of the desperate with two bullets in the chamber and the fire of love. Heading south, the father tells the boy about his life in color, filled with music and the blond gentleness of his mother, swallowed by the night and the fear of survival. Along the way, the boy will explore his own humanity, learning the difference between good and evil.

Just a few minutes and a handful of shots are enough to convey to the viewer the meaning of a work that sets out along a path enclosed within the obsession of a father, focused and relentless in his parental care. By translating the desperate visions of Cormac McCarthy, director John Hillcoat places the father-son relationship within an extreme world, a post-apocalyptic environment about which nothing is ever known except what is contained in the protagonists’ gaze, thoughts, and dreams.

If the Coen brothers, with No Country for Old Men, demonstrated that cinema can engage with McCarthy’s literary universe, the Australian filmmaker embraces this challenge and appropriately confronts the artistry, the compact plot, and the solemn language of the writer. United by their literary roots, No Country for Old Men and The Road are intimately connected, with the moral desolation of the former serving as the logical cause (and premise) of the latter.

The storm of violence, money, hedonism, and drugs that swept across the vast Texan plains, the inevitable decay of a country for which Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) no longer wished to fight, builds up and explodes, leaving emptiness, ash, and a feral silence. Yet while the Coens’ road movie was stripped of feeling and pathos, and in their Texas without clear rules fathers could only be evoked in dreams, in Hillcoat’s dismantled and stripped-down America an unconditional love advances, sustaining the two protagonists as they resist loneliness and hunger.

At the heart of their bond lies the ability to share and the courage to face adversity by activating their human resources. Viggo Mortensen, once again emotionally aligned with the dramatic situation, portrays a father who is “always present,” marked by urgency and tenderness; a parent who tells his story, evoking in “color” flashbacks intense moments of a lived life, and who remains a source of (in)formation and knowledge for his son.

A son who, in the end, transforms from a passive object of care into an emancipated, developed, and civilized subject. A son who grows in presence, captured in the final close-up that leaves America out of frame—a world where the ruthless survive, but where one can (still) choose whether to give up on life or to keep living.

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