The Road

Seen at: Kress Lounge, Greeley, about five weeks ago.

Did I say Avatar and Antichrist were twins? Funny thing is that one could say the same thing about Antichrist and The Road.

Both are tight triangular stories involving the basic nuclear family: father, mother, and child. Both concern the human spirit faced with the hostility of nature. In Antichrist, this hostility arises from the primal force of nature everpresent inside ourselves. In The Road, nature has become outwardly lifeless and barren due to the influence of mankind. Both movies have problematic mother characters who cause harm to their husbands and their children. Both depict of the most barbaric forms of cruelty to other human beings. In both movies, the father character receives a critical hobbling wound in his leg that propels the story towards its climax. You get the drift.

The pairs form opposite poles in some ways. Antichrist is about the path (via the wrecked feminine) into the static frozen hell of the most primeval level of existence---and ultimately death. The Road, on the other hand, is about the path towards through a hostile world towards light and salvation. Without mentioning Jesus at all, it is the strongest crypto-Christian movie of the year. I haven't heard Cormac McCarthy's book (I wanted to judge the movie on its own), but I would nominate the movie alongside as the best recent movie in the tradition of Pilgrim's Progress as an allegorical road story.

The world of this movie is almost the bleakest imaginable that still allows the existence of human life to muster foreward. Death is inevitable for all it seems. Existence is stripped down to the most basic issues, on a day by day basis. And yet every scene in the movie has a sustaining basic nurturing warmth to it that allows one to go forward to the next one without despair---like a flame that keeps you going.

As any great work of art should do, the story crosses several emotional octaves of reality. It works as a futuristic science fiction fable and also a story of the existential trials of contemporary society---say, those of a depressed divorced father raising a single child, one who lives his life as if the apocalypse has happened inside himself.

The most powerful spiritual element of the story derives from the explicit words of the father, that his son is "God." It must follow (according to the logic of the story) that his son's words are literally Gospel, and the tension of the story and its subsequent resolution flow directly from this principle as a morality fable. Where the father follows the Word (of the child), he is led forward in light. When he turns his back on it, as he does at a critical moment when invoking judgment on another human being, he suffers a downfall.

But his downfall and inevitable death are also his triumph, for in doing so he guarantees life for his son. It is the ultimate act of sacrifice, and the assertion that humanity is born anew with each generation.

In my book, it is a mindblowingly good story on screen, a masterpiece as surely as its aforementioned Satanically-named twin.

And yes, one can think of Avatar, Antichrist, and The Road and a thematic triplet, forming a powerful trio of movies that touch artistically on so many of the dominant cultural themes of this past year.

In any case, indisputably the year 2009 belonged to the Apocalypse (it's still tricking into this year), and this movie has been by far the best of the pack.

I think I've got my five finalists for best movie of 2009. Probably going to squeeze in two more 2009 movies tomorrow before the Oscar deadline, so it could still change.