THE ROAD
ZOMBIELAND
London Film Festival, and various cinemas

The Road, both as book and movie, begins in dreams. The reality is bad enough, a world denatured and denurtured by an unspecified catastrophe, in which survivors subsist on the only available food source – other survivors. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel, the hero (strip just a tad from the title and that’s what you get) dreams himself into an even worse reality, the lair of an unrecorded creature hideous to behold. But in the screenplay adaptation by Joe Penhall, the same man dreams of family life as it once was, or should have been.

The images that blossom forth are saturated with colour. Near-lascivious close-ups of pink rhododendrons linger. The man’s wife and child are lucent with happiness. Meanwhile, he hugs the family mare. What’s going on? Has the projectionist put in the wrong film? Are we watching The Horse Whisperer, or The Road? Then the sleeper awakens into the terrible place he only dreams of in McCarthy’s novel, “the inward parts of some granitic beast”, and gathers his young son for another dangerous day of travelling south, in hopes of clemency from climate and cannibals alike.

Dreams play an important role in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, and nowhere more so than in The Road. As father and son make their uncertain way through the novel, the boy is plagued by nightmares. Instead of comforting him – all but impossible in the circumstances – his father denounces the kind of fantasies we have just witnessed: “When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again, then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you can’t give up. I won’t let you”. It is true that the father himself, as he weakens, experiences “rich dreams” from which he wakes reluctantly. But at the book’s beginning he is much stronger, which is why it opens with that creature out of Hades.

To do the opposite – to paint a false idyll – seems both counter to McCarthy’s design, and counter-productive. So why do it? My guess is that the director – John Hillcoat – hoped to echo the et in arcadia ego moment at the beginning of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, that frisson engendered by the sight of a severed ear in the grass. But in Hillcoat’s hands, the transition from clichéd dream to horrid reality resembles nothing so much as the return from a commercial break to the main programme. Had he been patient, he could have inserted that scene – or something like it – into the actual commercial break that occurs in both book and film. Searching a looted store for pickings, the man finds a single can of Coke in a vending machine. To his son it’s a treat, but to the father it’s an artefact with a Proustian bouquet, the communion wine of a lost America. Yet here, when Hillcoat could conjure up all manner of ghosts and Rockwellian images, he chooses to remain faithful to the text.

His greatest infidelity – hinted at in the opening – concerns the inflated role of the wife (played by Charlize Theron), whose presence, though attractive, tends to dispel the necessary claustrophobia. She has but one crucial scene, in which she argues death’s case, comparing an easeful suicide with the inevitable alternative (as she sees it): “Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won’t face it”. Her husband maintains that they are survivors. The woman’s response is not in the movie. In McCarthy’s original she says: “What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film”. One of the movie’s producers – Bob Weinstein – is on record as calling The Road a “zombie movie”. And there is indeed a scene here – when father and son watch helplessly as another mother and daughter are hunted down by a blood-crazed gang – that could come undiluted from a zombie flick.

But who needs monsters when America has been transformed into a vast concentration camp, with landscapes resembling those found in Primo Levi’s If This is a Man? At times this is made explicit, as when the boy is described as looking like “something out of a deathcamp”, or when some of the cannibals’ victims – skeletal but living – are liberated, only to be abandoned. Such failures of altruism disturb the boy, and he worries his father with the question, “Are we still the good guys?”. Such is the power of the veteran Viggo Mortensen – increasingly a latter-day Gary Cooper – and epigone Kodi Smit-McPhee that we never doubt the answer for a moment. When we see them pushing a supermarket trolley along the macadam, the pair are carrying not just their worldly goods, but the movie. Though Hillcoat’s direction is sober, he is no match for the genius loci, the great guru of wintry landscapes, and probably the only director (dead or alive) capable of matching the emotional intensity of McCarthy’s prose – Ingmar Bergman. So it is Mortensen and Smit-McPhee who shoulder the burden all the way to that southern beach where the dead ocean laps. Because they have been so convincing throughout, the poignancy of their last exchanges becomes hard to bear, especially if you happen to be viewing the film in the company of your own son. Misgivings about Hillcoat’s direction return only in the final scenes, when the boy encounters a ragged version of the idealized family seen at the start. They have a healthy dog. How different it is from the only canine McCarthy describes: “A trellis of a dog with the hide stretched over it”.

Before aligning himself with this new family, the boy has a question: “Are you carrying the fire?”. Because it is a metaphor, this fire is never seen, of course, but if it were to appear, I imagine it would look something like the flaming horn in the passage from Dante that Primo Levi teaches his young friend in If This is a Man. And that’s the big difference between The Road and Zombieland – the latter doesn’t recall Levi (or, for that matter, Dante). J. D. Salinger, maybe, in that our guide to the United States of Zombieland is a neurotic young man (known only as Columbus) who has avoided zombiedom thanks to his obsessive compulsive habits.

Intent on returning to his home in Ohio, he encounters ragged loner Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and diverts to Florida. When the pair hook up with a couple of sisters, their destination alters again. The cannibals in Zombieland are all infected with some form of mad cow disease, whereas those in The Road are merely humans with unrestrained appetite. The scenery, however, is much the same; looted malls, jackknifed trucks, wrecked transportation.

In the course of their picaresque adventures among anthrophagous fellow citizens, it emerges that Tallahassee is not really mourning his puppy – as he has hitherto maintained – but his son. At this point The Road and Zombieland might seem to intersect. But Zombieland is not interested in emotion, only in action and laughs; nor does it have much time for vertical relationships (the one father figure who emerges – Bill Murray – gets unceremoniously whacked). At its undead heart, Ruben Fleischer’s perky movie is another immigrant story of unrelated souls bonding in adversity and forming a new community, whereas The Road is more Old Testament than New World in its emphasis on the unbreakable bond between father and son.

Clive Sinclair's book Clive Sinclair’s True Tales of the Wild West was published last year.

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