The Road - Film Fundraiser - Wednesday 10 February

The Climate Action Centre is holding a film fundraiser.

What:     The film to be shown is "The Road".
When:    6.30 pm Wednesday 10 February 2010
Where:   Cinema Nova in Lygon Street, Carlton.
Cost:      $20 donation at the door, but reserve your tickets here. 
Trailer:   See the official trailer by clicking on the image above.
Review:  Below is Tom Ryan's review from the Sunday Age of 31/1/2010

★★★★
THE ROAD | Review by Tom Ryan | 31 January 2010 | Sunday Age
© 2010 Copyright John Fairfax Holdings Limited. www.theage.com.au

Like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day, The Road is about the end of the world as we know it. And while its deployment of CGI is much more restrained than theirs, it pays close attention to getting the visual effects right. There are no "wow" scenes: of the world cracking apart, giant waves sweeping towards Manhattan or national icons being destroyed. Just a ravaged landscape. The colour has been incinerated out of it, except for pallid greys and browns, and a once-vibrant countryside (glimpsed in a dream sequence at the start) has been reduced to a wasteland.

Based on Cormac McCarthy's novel, for which he was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the film follows the book's lead by offering no information about the cause of the devastation or the form it took. Unlike the aforementioned multimillion-dollar blockbusters, The Road begins when the action's over. Or almost over: during an early flashback, we glimpse what appears to be an enormous fire through a window.

It deals solely with what happens to two survivors of what took place, an unnamed father and son (played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, from Romulus, My Father). There are no cutaways to what might be happening elsewhere in the world, just scenes of the pair as they make their way southwards across the country, towards the coast, in the forlorn hope that things might be better there.

Like most disaster movies, The Road is about the collapse of social order. But whereas they generally focus their attention on the physical destruction of a way of life, it concerns itself with the social fabric, with the values upon which a civilisation is founded rather than its surface trappings. It reflects on how people might act when the old way is destroyed, when the shackles are removed. And on what values might be worth preserving.

On their journey, the father and son scavenge for food and clothing, shelter from the cold, hide from marauding bands of cannibals and watch helplessly as others become their victims. They also encounter a few travellers less hostile to them: an old man (Robert Duvall) who's dying, a would-be thief (Michael K. Williams) whose circumstances echo their own.

While the father serves as the film's narrator, outlining what matters to him — "All I know is that the child is my warrant . . . I'm trying to prepare him for the day that I'm gone" — his son provides its moral compass. The adult's survival instinct might guide the direction they take, but the boy is the one who wants to understand what they're doing, his questions drawing out its implications.

Looking for reassurance when they do what his father says they have to do to survive, he asks, on more than one occasion, "Are we still the good guys?" The response is what he wants to hear: "We still are and we always will be." But the further the journey goes, the more the doubts increase.

Directed by Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat (The Proposition), and adapted for the screen by British playwright Joe Penhall (Some Voices), The Road is part adventure story, part existential fable and part Pilgrim's Progress for the new millennium. But at its heart, it's a poignant contemplation of the bond between a parent and a child. In this case, it's a father and son, the mother having killed herself rather than deal any longer with her despair. (Played by Charlize Theron, she appears only in flashbacks.)

The evocation of the yearnings of a father who wants to protect his child and a son who doesn't want his father to die is powerful, moving and almost primal. The urgency of these needs underscores the drama's fraught momentum, and despite the bleakness of the characters' circumstances, lends it a beauty that lies beyond the grasp of any image.

The Road depicts the depths to which the human race has descended over time, one sequence carrying overtures of death camps, another suggesting a far too eager embrace of the law of the jungle. But it also celebrates mankind's impulse towards nobility and its capacity to achieve grace when all seems lost.