Cormac McCarthy's portrayal of love presses us to care about this society's treatment of fathers and children, writes JOHN WATERS
ON TUESDAY I went to see The Road– with some trepidation, having been repeatedly told it was "not as good as the book". It was, they said, "depressing", the voiceover all wrong, the ending unhinged from the author's intention. Several said they had walked out. The movie is bombing, they said, and rightly so.
The eponymous Cormac McCarthy book has been declared Novel of the Noughties. Although I haven't read every other contender, it strikes me as a plausible conclusion. The Roadreveals why it is still worthwhile to write stories about things that might have happened but didn't – yet. McCarthy maintains an unflinching gaze into the unthinkable: a world all but ended, where human civilization is in rewind and love must meet its final, terrifying test.
But if the book is better than other books by a margin of x, then the movie is better than other movies by a margin of x squared. One reason movies based on books rarely satisfy is that they impose a single, definitive key, making the story seem out of tune to almost everyone who has "heard" it in his own interior voice. Perhaps I am lucky, but John Hillcoat replicated the voice from my head. The mood of the movie is exactly as I imagined it. The acting achieves perfect pitch. The Roadis so great it will not surprise me if it does, indeed, "bomb", receives no awards and is forgotten for a decade before being hailed, if history has not vindicated McCarthy's "prophecy", as one of the greatest movies of all time.
But this is not a salutary, finger-wagging movie, any more than the book was intended to become the Bible of green fanatics who understand nothing. True, it depicts a future now more than a possibility in the most dangerous century since man first stood upright. But this is not its point. It is about, yes, the fragility of civilisation and the pathos of man’s conceits. Its stunningly realised cinematography offers occasional images that allow us to share McCarthy’s relentless gaze: a gigantic flyover, obsolete and incongruous, seen from below; a TV set framed with an irony that brings a shiver to the bones.
The book struck me as a version of The Swiss Family Robinsonplayed backwards from wherever it is we think we're going. The hunt for the means of survival forms part of a narrative implying not a voyage towards salvation, but a clinging to the faintest traces of the life-force. As everything is stripped away – order, law, civility, romance – and the world descends into cannibalism and terror, a question rises up: what, finally, is there for the human being to hope for?
The use of flashback delivers an almost unbearable pathos, as moments of affection, lust or culture force their way into dreams or resisted memories saturated with the realisation that, in the light of what has emerged, none of it could have been real. Nothing, no human limb, can look the same after this.
But this is, above all, a love story: of the love between a father and son who embark on a journey with the vaguest of destinations driven by nothing but the idea that their existence must mean something. There is not an ounce of sentimentality. The father, in the end, loves nobody but his son. The boy loves everybody because he has not come to sense. Love, where it exists, is all there is, and the love of a father for his child is the purest, most functional thing in the world.
The ending is slightly different from the book, but only in delivery, not meaning. It’s a less “godly” ending than McCarthy’s, but the visual shock of a particular instant is so powerful as to render it an improvement.
The day before I saw it, having foolishly forgotten that the Irish media is interested only in stories of State abuses more than a half-century old, I had again made the mistake of raising the question of our society's treatment of fathers and children on a radio programme. The inevitable happened: the apparatchiks moved to restore the State's version. On Tuesday I was contemplating never again uttering a word about the corruption that is family law. Why should I go crazy worrying about other people's sons? But I went directly to the cinema from meeting a young man, a brilliant though undiscovered poet, who travelled from Cork to tell me his heartbreaking story about losing his children to another country because of the corruption and degradation of the Irish State. I am cautioned by State-sponsored ideological hucksters that such stories must be "balanced" by the other side, but I looked in his eyes and saw a man who has known pure evil. The following day he sent me a long poem, containing these lines, which might have been the last of The Road:
We came through fields of tall grass
until we reached the seashore –
You walked on water and motioned
for us to follow; You sailed away on song;
You swam out to sea like a dolphin,
while You took to the wind like a gull.