On the evening before the news broke of the Haitian earthquake I saw the film The Road, faithfully adapted from Cormac McCarty’s novel. Wholesale disaster has struck. We do not know what it was, but after a catastrophe its effects seem more important than its causes. This is a story set in a devastated landscape, where the trees are bare and dying, there are no animals or crops. The few human survivors are cold and starving. A father and his young son are on the road, heading south. The father knows they will not survive another winter in the north. The journey is fraught with danger. Bands of men scour the country looking for people, to eat. Occasionally the Father and son encounter other lone human beings, but these encounters do not usually go well.
This is a truly terrible book and film. It has no alien monsters, only human beings in extremis. One critic said that the book explores the depths of despair and savagery beside the heights of love, tenderness and self-sacrifice. Alan Warner wrote in The Guardian that the book is emotionally shattering, it affirms belief in the tender pricelessness of the here and now. It does not add to the cruelty of our times, it warns us now how much we have to lose. Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think abbot them While we can.
At one point the boy asks his father are we still the good guys? He is told Yes. We are. We still carry the fire. Inside.
Disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti strip people to their core. Some run away from it to save themselves. Some run towards it to save others. Some think only about themselves, some only about others. Most of us are caught in between. But the boy’s question does not go away. Are we still the good guys? Do we still carry the fire? Inside.
The Road profoundly addresses the questions of what it means to be human – and to be good – in such circumstances. The book won the Pulitzer Prize. The film may not will win many awards, despite the remarkable adaptation, photography and performances, but I am sure that its harrowing images and compassionate message will linger longer in our minds than the memory of many Oscar winners.
I am sure it would help to be Jewish to fully appreciate A Serious Man. What a joy that must be, because even as a goy I thought it was a real return to form by the Coen brothers, after the severe disappointment of Burn After Reading. This is a mature, unflashy, mordant tragi-comedy. It may not have the Shakespearean depth of their No Country for Old Men, but then again, it has not got the same quality of source material.
Todd McCarthy wrote in Variety that "This is the kind of picture you get to make after you've won an Oscar,” and here the brothers have the quiet confidence to let the story do most of the work. They are operating on home territory, the inner world of the suburban soulless Minneapolis of their youth in the late 60’s. Grace Slick’s chromium plated voice sings us in. At times Roger Deakins’ photography brings a mouth or on a pair of eyes into sharp focus somewhere in the middle of the depth of field. Other parts of the face are not quite in focus and the effect is strange and subtle, and somehow exemplifies the film’s strangeness.
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a Jewish physics teacher. He has done nothing wrong; in fact he seems to have done nothing at all, nothing to keep his marriage alive, or to engage with his two children. He is a professor seeking tenure, but he has published nothing. And now all that nothing is coming to bite his bum. Or maybe it’s God. Or a curse. We are told the story of a curse in a Yiddish prologue, but does it have any more relevance than the advice and parables offer to Larry by his rabbis? We do not know, the uncertainty principle Larry tries to explain to his students seems to be operating here, in spades. Is this the judgment of Job? I don’t think so. That would make too much sense. Larry’s misfortunes seem to be too random. He does not even have the consolation of a meaning. This is too tragic to be explained away. Yet it is deeply, dreadfully, funny. I must mention that Fred Melamed is wonderful as Sy Ableman, the ‘friend’ who is taking away Larry’s wife, moving him out of his own house – and offering him bear-hugs and Bordeaux wines in consolation.
