The Road (Film Analysis)

The Story

A few dogs, mere sacks of bones, remain in the wasted world, but other creatures — birds, insects, and fish — have disappeared entirely. There are scant remnants of fungi, but the landscape for the most part, is a vast, cold ruin of dust and ash. About ten years after the cataclysm, a man and his son journey toward the eastern coast, ostensibly in an attempt to escape the oncoming Appalachian winter. The man's wife and the boy's mother committed suicide soon after the boy's birth. Only one season, nuclear winter persists in this post-apocalyptic world, and the man and the boy continually struggle against varying intensities of bitter cold throughout their trek.

Rain and snow mix with ash and toxic particulates that permanently shroud the sky; the biosphere has changed, and the few remaining people wear masks to reduce the torments of the diseased air they must breathe. Towns, cities, and all manner of human-made structures remain only as heaps of cinders and ashes. The earth's devastation occurred quickly; the man recalls that the clocks stopped at 1:17 a.m. Most remaining humans are members of roving bands of cannibals, and all manner of goodness and grace have ostensibly come an end.

Although the story follows the father and son as they travel the road, the man's recollections and dream visions are interspersed throughout the narrative. He dreams of an uncle and his murdered wife, and he wonders what place these images have in this bleak and cold world of abominations beyond human imaginings. Humans in this world are so desperate that they procreate to survive: In one scene, the father and son happen upon a charred human infant on a spit.

The man has a gun with two bullets, and he instructs his son that, if need be, the boy must use a bullet on himself. The man is protector, nurturer, and caregiver to his son. Indeed, he has survived solely for the boy's sake. The man shepherds and instructs his son because he knows that within the boy lays the possibility of human goodness, but the man is dying, and along the journey he often coughs up blood.

The road is dangerous, and the boy and the man walk, half-starved, pushing an old shopping cart filled with the few bits of food, tools, and clothing they possess. They live in constant peril of encountering other survivors who literally and metaphorically evince the artificial landscape. The father and son refer to themselves as the “good guys,” and they talk often about a fire that they carry within.

The words are like mantras, and the father reminds the boy of them several times after encounters with the remnants of cannibalistic campers along the road. The father also tells the boy that good guys are lucky, and this often proves to be the case: For the road, the two chance upon morel mushrooms, rotten apples, an unopened can of soda, drops of gasoline or water that they siphon, and an undiscovered underground ...