After Billy Bob Thornton's moronic adaptation of All the Pretty Horses, we had to wait seven years for a director to brave one of McCarthy's moody, demotic bloodbaths.
With No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers slyly improved the author's fatalist Regan-era gun-porno. Next on the list, I prayed, Terrence Malick would announce his involvement in a cinemascope framing of Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.
Instead we have The Road directed by John Hillcoat: a film so astoundingly bad that it actually presents a fair critique of all of McCarthy's work. Stripped of McCarthy's Faulknerian prose, the story of The Road, and the author's Boots an' More hick philosophy, is finally exposed to the light of day in all its nostalgic, incipient, rambling pseudo-grandeur.
The story is about a father and son living in the aftermath of a faceless apocalypse. In McCarthy's post-apocalypse, all animal (besides human) and vegetable life has vanished from the earth.
Roving hoards of cannibals stalk the highways in search of food. The Father and the Son arrogantly assume the moral high-ground and refuse to eat each other. Too bad for the viewers who now must watch an oft naked Viggo Mortensen drag his sniveling rat bastard around an ashen monotone Pennsylvania for a ride about as shocking as a thousand miles of Kansas highway.
Nick Cave composed a piano-plunking score which I'm sure I've heard on Lifetime and is probably the real reason the Man's wife, Woman, played by Charlize Theron, decides to kill herself.
Father and Son hit the road, trundling a cart through Transylvanian Appalachia, headed towards the coast with a vague hope of salvation. The Father and the Son. The Father of the Child. See the Child. See the Father and the Son. Man and Boy. See them Carrying the Fire. What's the Fire, you ask? In a word of advice: Don't eat people, eat Cheetos.
Somewhere in the film, Man and Boy discover a Coca-Cola machine and the Man wrestles out a can and gives it to the child. The inept, whiny ten-year-old musters up a smile. "It's good," he says. I'm watching this in Paris and the theater around me jeers. I love a French audience. They know how to vocalize irreverence. Some minutes later, Man and Boy discover a bomb shelter filled with canned food.
They share a similar moment with a bag of Cheetos. This time, the audience satirically applauds. In a film capitalizing on twenty-first century eco-anxiety, the Americans are still product pitching.
Dear reader, it just occurred to me that the "Boots an' More hick philosophy" line might offend some people. It was a lousy jab and I'm not proud of it, but Cormac McCarthy's social commentary doesn't add up to much more when he blames the downfall of American values on kids with "bones in their noses" who don't say sir and ma'am.
The Coen Brothers improved No Country by poking fun at McCarthy's feeble old dinosaurs who resign in the face of modernity and find nothing better to do than mouth off at the aesthetic choices of a nation's youth.
The Road is a continuation of this backwoodsman's parable. McCarthy eliminates mankind to be alone with his son in a world that lives up to his prejudices. Watching The Road, I've become demystified to all of the author's work—a denouement I'm ashamed has come so late. Harold Bloom's admission of McCarthy to the pantheon of great 20th-century writers should have tipped me off.
What to watch instead? Michael Haneke's The Time of the Wolf is a more terrifying post apocalypse film. A polar opposite of McCarthy's melodrama, in Haneke's film the father figure is murdered in the first five minutes, leaving the family to seek an alternative to authoritarian cowboy strength in a multilingual enclave of ragged survivors.