NOTE:  While I allude to certain things that occur in the film, I think I've avoided explicit plot spoilers.  But if you prefer not to know anything about a film before seeing it, you may not want to read this.

Let me make this clear:  I’m someone who watches movies that other people shrink from, the ones that most people say are “depressing” and avoid because they expose the dark corners of the human soul.  I avoid most mainstream “feel good” and blockbuster movies because those are the ones that depress me, so far are they from real life and real feeling.  I love art that makes me feel something deeply, whether it’s joy, hope and inspiration or sadness, pain and moral horror.  And yet even I found The Road almost too much to bear.

About halfway through, I walked out to tell the staff that the sound was too low, and that it was hard to hear the often-whispered dialogue.  But, I added with a grim chuckle, I’m not even sure I want to hear it.  And I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back into the theater.  But I made myself go.

I can’t say I’m sorry to have seen the film, because what it does, simply, is make us realize how much we have and how easily we could lose it.  Taking place several years after an unspecified apocalypse that has destroyed all animal, insect, and most human life as well as all vegetation, it portrays an utterly gray landscape in which nothing can grow, everything is dead or dying, and the few remaining humans have already scavenged virtually all the stored food.  Most have now turned to cannibalism, which they pursue with bloodcurdling efficiency and not the slightest trace of human feeling or regret.

The exceptions include the two heroes of the film, an unnamed man and his young son, played with heartbreaking honesty by Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee.  Adhering to a moral code that the father calls “carrying the fire,” they attempt to retain their humanity as they push on through the wasted landscape towards “the coast,” where they hope to find…well, we’re never really told what.  We don’t know if this apocalypse has devastated the entire world or only the U.S., and it seems they’re not sure either. They live on the hope that somehow there might be something better "down south” on the coast, and so that’s where they head.  Along the way, they scavenge for any food that might have been overlooked, fight off a series of cannibal attacks and occasionally find some small solace and relief, such as when they make contact with a harmless elderly man (Robert Duvall, reliable as always) or an intact survival shelter with a cornucopia of stored food.  

After they have gorged themselves in that shelter, I heard a woman behind me whisper to her companion, “My stomach hurts,” which seems to me the perfect description of the film’s effect.  One way or the other, The Road will make your stomach hurt, because whether you are watching the characters eat themselves sick, or escape yet another cannibal attack, it feels utterly real.  

Humans have always feared some sort of apocalypse, but in a post-nuclear age, with the threat of bioterrorism and the knowledge that a mere meteor could send us the way of the dinosaurs, we know for certain what earlier generations could only speculate about:  Our existence could end in a flash.  Even worse:  We could be one of the survivors in an utterly changed world.  And the way humans behave in this film is the way we all secretly know it would unfold. If you have any complaints about your life, see this film and you will come out silenced.  It will make you realize how much we have, and how easy it would be to lose it all, including our humanity.

It’s a good thing to be reminded of, but in the end, the film left me with an unanswerable question:  Why go on in a dying world, with no hope of rescue or long-term survival?  The Road gives the central character the motivation of living for his son, but why raise a child in such a world?  What does the son have to live for?   If anything, isn’t this an act of selfish cruelty?  The father teaches his son how to kill himself, in case he is facing torture and death from the cannibals, but we are never shown any evidence that there’s an alternative to death, which seems inevitable in some painful form. The old saying that “where there’s life, there’s hope” seems utterly pointless in a world as gray and dead as our moon.

Not having read the Cormac McCarthy book it’s based on, as The Road edged towards its close, I wondered how this vexed question would be answered, as it seemed to me that the author had painted himself into a corner.  And sure enough, after immersing us in this futile, terrifying world for two hours -- a place in which most humans have turned into animals, and even our hero father and his son have started to wonder if they are still “the good guys" -- we are wrenched from it by a quick resolution and a happy ending.  Having taken us to the brink of a pointless void, and having questioned the very nature of our humanity, the writer loses his nerve, supplying the audience with an easy “out” that strains credulity, in an apparent attempt to reassure us that human beings are really good at heart.  Call me a cynic, but I think the cannibals would win in the end.

A warning or a promise:  Unlike most movies that leave your head the minute you leave the theater, The Road stays with you.  As we left, ordinary sights became grimly and even terrifyingly evocative:  The shopping cart of a homeless man (like the one the father and son push through the dead landscape), an inexplicable pile of shoes in front of a house (which conjures one of the scariest scenes in the movie), the sinister implications of the “house-cured bacon” on the menu of the pub we went to afterward to have a beer and discuss the movie.

For discuss it you will.  That’s the other warning. This is not a film to see alone, because it will generate questions you need to ponder, such as whether you would fight to survive in such a situation or not.

On that, I confess that I’m on the side of the main character’s wife, who we see only in flashbacks (added by the screenwriter, said my partner K., who read the book).  Pregnant when the event occurs, she survives long enough to see her son grow for a few years, but ultimately despairs and chooses to die, and she wants to take her son with her, rather than leaving him to whatever horrible fate awaits him.  That would be my choice, too.  A quick and painless death on my own terms.  The fact that the father cannot make this choice for his son is morally questionable.

And then there’s the ultimate question:  If you did choose to try and survive, on what terms would you do so?  It’s easy to say you’d never resort to cannibalism, but human beings have done so throughout history in situations far less dire than years of progressive starvation.  You may never have stolen anything in your life, but what if stealing food or a blanket or water would save you or your family?  Would you really value the life of a stranger over your own?  Would you love your family more by keeping them alive, or helping them die?

If these are the kinds of questions you like to consider, The Road is the film for you.