All in Features

Next Article

Features

2009: The year in movies

8. The Road
For those who found the Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men too lighthearted, John Hillcoat's version of the author's post-apocalyptic novel might hit the spot. It's a sci-fi Waiting for Godot with cannibalism and family values. A father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) push a shopping cart through a landscape of ash, dodging gangs of cannibals. The cause of the cataclysm is never revealed, and it doesn't matter — this isn't a cautionary tale, but it does teach a moral in its most wrenching sequence, a kind of reverse Good Samaritan parable. "We are carrying the fire," the Man tells his Son, and it is in such scenes that the fire burns brightest.