Viggo Mortensen portrays The Man as dogged and stubborn, determined to protect his boy. I am not sure the characters could be played better, or differently. He encourages his son to keep walking, but holds out little hope for the end of their journey.

He and The Boy are transporting a few possessions in a grocery cart.

He is a wary traveler, suspecting everyone he sees. The Man has a gun with two remaining bullets. In a land where food is scarce, wanderers seek out canned goods and fear their own bodies will perform this work for the cannibals.Īlthough we read of those who stockpile guns and ammunition for an apocalypse, weapon stores on the Road have dwindled down. We've always done that, employing beef cattle, for example, to do the grazing on acres of pasture so we can consume the concentrated calories of their labor. The surviving population has been reduced to savage survivalists, making slaves of the weaker, possibly using them as food. The Boy and The Man make their way toward the sea, perhaps for no better reason than that sea has always been the direction of hope in this country. McCarthy evokes the general apprehension of post-9/11. No reason is given for this destruction, perhaps because no reason would be adequate. This has happened in such recent memory that even The Boy, so young, was born into a healthy world. Habitations have been destroyed or abandoned, vegetation is dying, crops have failed, the infrastructure of civilization has disappeared. The story is straightforward: America has been devastated. It is the same with all of McCarthy's work, but especially this one, because his dialogue is so restrained, less baroque than usual. Its effect comes above all through McCarthy's prose. The novel itself would not be successful if it were limited to its characters and images. I'm not sure this is any fault of the filmmakers. It is powerful, but for me lacks the same core of emotional feeling. 'The Road' evokes the images and the characters of Cormac McCarthy's novel.

The road mc