The Road takes place under the blasted grandeur of a world once blue.
The movie, portrayed by critics as relentlessly bleak, is actually beautiful to look at. Spare and gray, the landscape is a looming, awesome portent, one that suggests, rather than contains eternity. It was mesmerizing to look at, reminding me of the visual experience of watching the Jim Jarmusch masterpiece Dead Man—alien and omnipresent.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis provide a soundtrack that’s lyrical and melancholy. Listening to it as the movie unfolded, I was infused with a kind of romanticism, be it for the want of a love lost or for one that may yet be achieved. It was actually hard to feel pessimism and gloom in the face of such visual and aural beauty. From Armageddon, art was born, and art is nothing if not hope.
The movie, though, felt incomplete. For reasons that make sense to Hollywood rather than an audience, Charlize Theron was cast as the man’s wife. We see her in flashbacks throughout the movie, providing a star-accented subtext for the narrative that actually propels the film. We all have pasts of imagined beauty, and one hardly needs to put the face of Charlize Theron on that past, in order to make it vivid.
This diversion is pointless, serving to dilute the tension and weight of the work—how do we respond in the face of our inescapable and merciless extinction—rather than amplify it.
The movie was a weird, aesthetic experience, one that was formal rather than felt, and rather than staying with me for a long time, as did No Country For Old Men, this movie just sort of fell away as soon as I left the theater.