On The Road

This is not a movie for sissies!
Based on Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road is a road movie on a landscape, barren after some unnamed cataclysmic event. Typical of the genre, this is also a buddy movie, father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) make for a duo set on survival, foraging for food, fending off bands of marauders so debased they prey upon humans. By chance I happened to be seated next to Gabe Pressman at Monday night's premiere. We had met at the First Gathering of Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem in 1981; he was reporting for NBC, I was accompanying my mother, the late Pola Siedlecka Weinreich, a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, and concentration camps at Auschwitz and Stutthof. Gripped by this moving story, which has all the tension of a well-wrought horror flick, we waited the long list of credits to speak, and say, how sad to think that men would behave such, if a disaster did occur, and knowing too, that we have every evidence that we would turn on ourselves, and who would be left to blame us. Fortunately, The Road looks toward the best of the human spirit. Its message is that the future belongs to those who possess the light within. Sounds hokey, right? Like believing that your life could be saved by a can of Dole fruit cocktail. Parents everywhere will be provoked into grappling with the dynamics of preparing children for such a world. How does one go on? The fine supporting cast of vagabonds and rogues includes a scene stealing Robert Duvall. Charlize Theron plays the mother who has abandoned hope early on. Guy Pearce arrives late in the film, bringing the boy into his fold. You could say that the unspoken star is the stark terrain itself. If it looks real to you, it is. London based Australia born director John Hillcoat explained his documentary approach: some of the footage came from New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, some from Mt. St. Helena. Much was shot in the cold climes of Pittsburgh; in color, a stony gray pervades and everyone has bad teeth.
When asked why he chose this potentially difficult subject, Bob Weinstein of the Dimension arm of The Weinstein Company said, "Either the material grabs you or it doesn't. I knew this film had to be made and I wanted to be part of that," and added, "I have a son." Writers, among them Calvin Trillin, Walter Mosely, Stanley Crouch, and A. M. Holmes were on hand at the SL afterparty to greet novelist Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men, the book on which last year's Best Picture winner was based. Similarly, expect to see this masterpiece, The Road, on many a top ten list for Oscars.
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