Though Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007 and has been recommended by Oprah (yes, I’m jaded about too many honors), it still has the power to be instructive.
It’s worth discussing now because it’s being brought out as a movie which will be released Nov. 25. If you’re a McCarthy fan, you know he also wrote “No Country for Old Men,” which as a movie won four Oscars in 2007, including best picture. Another of his novels, “All the Pretty Horses,” won the National Book Award in 1992.
I said all this to say that McCarthy is a “literary” writer, and if you’re like most, you left left the theater after “No Country” scratching you head and wondering what happened.
The translation of “The Road” into a movie might just leave us with the same problems. While “2012″ is designed to be an action/adventure movie, this is more human, exploring survival and morals and a host of other issues that people are likely to face in a post-apocalyptic world.
A father (whose name isn’t to be known) and his young, sickly son must face life together in a grey world after nuclear war, one devoid of wildlife but inhabited by cannibals (at least, thank goodness, it isn’t zombies!) who have found a substitute for the lack of meat on the hoof.
The pair (mom killed herself) are leaving the frozen north with all the food and supplies they can carry and heading for the coast in warmer climes, not knowing, of course, what they will find. On this journey they encounter not only the roving bands, but also themselves (I said it was literary.) Dad tells his son that they’re the good guys, but the boy wonders about how his father treats the strangers they encounter.
The story, of course, is supposed to leave you thinking, and that you should. Because in a post-apocalyptic world, you’ll be facing the same basic philosophical issues. To what length will you go to care for your family? Can you actually kill someone? How will you treat strangers? Dealing with these issues beforehand could be the difference between survival and not.
You can watch the movie trailer or you can read the book.