Cormac McCarthy's 10th novel, The Road, lauded by Oprah, awarded the Pulitzer prize, and optioned out for movie release within 2 years of his previous novel (No Country for Old Men), is like a icy cold jump into the void. It is not an action movie; there are no sexy bad guys (like No Country) and there are no gut wrenching chase scenes (like No Country). In The Road, Aragorn and his otherworldly son soldier through a desparate mission to find warmer climes. No living thing exists, save for a few human beings and one beetle, and the landscape exhausts your ability to name different shades of gray. Gun-metal Gray. Frozen-beard Gray. Dirty-sock Gray.
The film adaptation is as faithful to the novel as No Country was (thank you, John Hillcoat). Dialog is sparse, hunger and desolation abound, and you start warming your hands instinctively in the movie theater. If you are parent, you feel an even more intense pang, and it's a question most readers discussed after the book came out. Could you do this for your child? The man's commitment to delivering his son to a less hostile environment is juggernaut-epic, and Viggo Mortgenson solidly delivers the father's robotic commitment to species survival. He serves a gentle, mothering role sometimes too, but by the end of the movie his attempts to secure his son's protection in the face of absolute depletion are terrifyingly automated. He has become a computer function, or a biological one, that will serve its purpose until the plug is yanked. Ultimately, the film is disturbing, apocalyptically barren, and beautifully dark. It is not Hollywood.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have 2012, a film that tests the boundaries of computer graphics and believable narrative. John Cusack tries to save his two children, ex-wife, and her husband from being buried under one planet's-worth of ground. A host of things happen that one could never in her wildest dreams imagine (like the floods, earthquakes, and monument topplings), but you can witness them on the YouTube trailer. However, on that trailer, you don't see China shift 1000 miles to the south, you don't see the disgustingly sacchrine plea-for-humanity speech given by the President's surrogate, or the sneaking of a zen monk aboard a multi-billion dollar project designed to keep all of the rich people safe.
I went to see these films for two main reasons: loyalty and angst. You may already know that Cormac McCarthy, in my opinion, is the best living American novelist. Maybe the best ever. My dissertation covers his work, my shelves are full of his books and books about his books, and any film adaptation of his work is a must-see for me, whether it's good or bad. Thankfull this one was amazing. I won't heap the same kind of praise on John Cusack, but if I had a movie industry doppleganger, it might be him. Sometimes we think and talk alike, we have grown up in the same era, gone through some of the same changes, and he has been in some great movies. 2012 is not one of them; it is the worst movie he has ever been in, and maybe is one of the Top 5 Worst Movies of All Time.
How does angst relate? Truthfully, I just wanted to see all of these things break: the skyscrapers, the monuments, the culture, the language, even the earth itself. Perhaps these movies cap off a particularly angry period in my life or satisfiy a suppressed interest to watch things destroyed. Clearly, we have it in our culture, as 2012 made $65 million in its first weekend, just in the U.S. At the end of both movies, a good one and a bad one, the parental urge remains after everything else has been burned or starved or flooded away. That's comforting; kind of. One final thing . . .
Look at the dads in these two films:
Remember: sometimes the apocalypse requires a hood and sometimes it's friendlier to wearing a tie.
That is a great breakdown of both films. While I haven't see THE ROAD, I did have a chance to see 2012. I was as unimpressed by the movie as the next person. I came into the theater with the anticipation that I would be seeing an action epic, and that was exactly what I saw. The glamor of the destruction/ reconstruction of the earth portrayed in that movie was more than enough to get people in the theater seats. I would like to think that very fiew peeps came out for a life altering storyline and unmatched grammatical syntax. I would like to, however, see THE ROAD. I've been watching a slew of comedies to balance out my thirst for creation-destruction coctail.
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