“The Road.” John Hillcoat, director. Dimension Films, 2009, 110 minutes.
Reviewed by Jo Ann Skousen
“The Road,” based on Cormac McCarthy’s book of the same name (see my review in Liberty, January-February 2009), opens with a sunlit close-up of a beautiful garden. A radiant, smiling woman (Charlize Theron), sunlight and domesticity personified, clips a flower as the camera pans out to reveal a lovely, sun drenched home. But the scene ends in the blink of an eye. A haggard, grizzled Man (Viggo Mortensen) awakes with a start from this delightful dream to the nightmare of his bleak, post-apocalyptic existence. A permanent cloud of smog and ash now hides the sun. Trees are bare. Vegetation is gone. Nothing remains but bleak, gray, hardened men and women struggling to survive.
The Man and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) sleep fitfully in caves and underbrush, always listening for marauding strangers who would rape the boy, then eat them both if given half a chance. Their gun is always at the ready, not just to kill the enemy but to turn it on themselves if they should be caught. Anarchy is not the road to prosperity and harmony, at least not according to this film.
The Man and the Boy are traveling along what is left of a highway, heading for the Atlantic coast. We don’t know why they are heading for the ocean or what they expect to find there, only that they are indefatigable in their determination to reach the shore.
This film strips away all the non-essentials and explores what really matters in life: a place to sleep, food to eat, and most of all, a relationship to nurture. In many ways, “The Road” is a metaphor for the need to have a goal, a purpose in life, a reason to get up and keep moving. For the Man, that purpose is to protect his son from the evil around him and teach him what he needs to know in order to survive on his own someday. As he tells the Boy, “I will kill anyone who touches you. Because that’s my job.”
For the Boy, the goal is different. He doesn’t merely want to survive; he wants to be “one of the good guys.” For the man, being “one of the good guys” is simple: “We don’t eat people. No matter what.” For the boy, it requires more. Somehow, instinctively, despite being born into a world where no one is kind, he wants to share food, find a friend, be kind to strangers. His job is “to carry the fire” and bring hope to a hopeless condition.
If Anton Chigurh in McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” is the personification of evil (see my review, Liberty, May 2008), the Boy in “The Road” is the personification of goodness. No one has taught him to “play nice” or say “please” and “thank you.” He has grown up in a system of kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, steal or be stolen from. Yet he is angry when his father refuses to give an old man (Robert Duvall) a can of food, and horrified when his father forces a man who has stolen their goods (Michael K. Williams) not only to return their property but to strip and give them his own clothes as well. In both cases, the Boy wins out.
Despite its bleak setting and sometimes horrifying scenes, “The Road” offers a powerful message of hope, love, goodness, and individual self-determination. It remains true to the novel (one of my all-time favorites) and translates surprisingly well to the screen. Mortensen and Smit-McPhee demonstrate a deeply believable bond as the father and son, showing emotion that never turns treacly. Small roles– played by Duvall, Williams, and Guy Pearce as the Veteran–are made large by their deeply resonant performances. This film is a gem.

“Bright Star.” Jane Campion, director. BBC Films, 119 minutes.
Reviewed by Jo Ann Skousen
Like a comet that flashes across the sky and is gone, John Keats lived only 25 years. Panned by critics during his lifetime, his poems survived to become iconic of the romantic period. With its emphasis on mythology, the beauty of nature, and the primacy of pure emotion, Keats’s poetry evokes great truth and intense feelings. Yet often it accomplishes these large purposes by attending to the minute details of the life around us.
The essence of this poetic style is brought gorgeously to the screen by Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” a film about the passionate relationship of John Keats (Ben Whishaw) with his neighbor, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Today’s movies ordinarily try to portray the wild abandon of love through the impatient ripping of clothes and the lusty merging of bodies. But Campion presents this love story by means of its small details–the urgent longing of locked eyes, the gentle entwining of fingers, the wafting of a breeze beneath a skirt, and in one surprisingly erotic scene, the pressing of a furtive finger against a wrist beneath an organza cuff. The characters’ romantic obsession transcends physicality; in fact, when Fanny says she will “do anything” for him, Keats turns her down, responding, “I have a conscience.”
Unable to earn a living through his poetry, Keats relies on the financial largesse of his patron and friend, Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider). Charles is “Engels” to Keats’s “Marx,” praising him, pushing him, protecting him, and supporting him. Conflict arises between Fanny and Charles as they compete for Keats’s attention. Charles wants Keats to spend all his time writing; Fanny wants him to spend time teaching her about literature. Her love for Keats is intellectual as well as emotional, and she is happy just to be in the room with him while he works.
Fanny, too, is an artist, although her craft is the homely kind that often goes unnoticed and unappreciated. She is an accomplished fashion designer, her page a bolt of cloth and her pen a needle making neat little stitches across a seam. Campion reminds us that women’s arts were just as beautiful and creative as the more manly pursuits of letters, paint, and marble, though they were never given the same honor and recognition.
In this film, both the costumes and the cinematography are splendid works of art. Each scene is composed with careful attention to lighting, background, and color. Windows open wide to invite nature inside, blossoms float in the spring air, the camera lingers on the two lovers as they share quiet moments together. Yet one of the most stunning scenes is a somber view of the Spanish Steps in Rome, where Keats went to convalesce after contracting tuberculosis, and where he at last succumbed to that disease.
At one point a light from the sky beams down on Fanny’s bosom, a subtle reminder of Keats’s poem “Bright Star.” The speaker of that poem longs to be like the star shining “stedfast” upon his “fair love’s ripening breast.” The poem ends with his desire “to hear her tender-taken breath,/ And so live ever—or else swoon to death.” Keats did swoon in death, but his poetry lives on, “a thing of beauty [that] is a joy forever.” The film is a fitting tribute to the poetry and the life that made it.