The Road - (11/26/09)
If an actual, physical, American road is the most apt symbol for the trajectory of United States culture and civilization, from Lewis and Clark’s pragmatic and disciplined forging across the North American continent, to Jack Kerouac’s open road of modern bohemianism, then the film The Road symbolically plots that trajectory across a not only dead, but entirely decomposed landscape where humans are reduced to such a primordial need for survival, concepts like tragedy and cruelty are as numbingly distant as morality and kindness. And if the final destination of that metaphorical road is an equally dead and empty ocean, the paradoxical origin of this planet’s life in totality, then this film was a faithfully executed exploration of the most untrammelled nihilism, completely devoid of both the covertly narcissistic phenomenon of ennui, and any conventional cinematic representations of good and evil.
