http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbLgszfXTAY
I watched The Road about a month ago, mainly because I forgot to scrub it from my Love Film list when it was chosen for this year’s programme.
It’s a post-apocalyptic tale and we therefore is not all sweetness and light. The group choosing went for it in the end because it seems like the type of challenging tale that a film society should be showing.
If you saw some of those post-nuclear TV movies from the 1970s or read things like The Lord Of The Flies, you’ll know that people in highly-pressurised situations behave in unusual and often unpleasant ways.
We all know that we’re born and then we die. Much of the time in between is spent surviving in one way or another, no matter how we dress it up. What we have here is a heavy dose of the surviving and a little less of the dressing that is normally comfortable. The purpose of life is questioned. Folk have to balance pain with living and not everyone makes the same decisions.
Our main protagonists have ultimately chosen hope, picked life over death. They’re a father and son heading south to see if the world warms up or if there’s any way to escape their troubles via the sea.
It’s gritty. The first half an hour will have you wincing from time to time, inside and out. Nevertheless I think you should come along.
The filming is terrific, the idea is true to what I imagine a post-apocalyptic world really might be like, there’s Omar from the Wire and there’s Robert Duvall.
There’s also something rather uplifting to the whole thing (or maybe I’m twisted) in a way I can’t explain. Maybe it’s encapsulated in the final lines of the Count Of Monte Cristo –
`All human knowledge can be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope.’
Great stuff.
Friday 25th March, 8pm Hallhill.