What remains: The Road

The images that open The Road feature a leaf-lined branch warmed by the sun. Somewhere nearby stands a beautiful mother-to-be. Observing her is a handsome man stroking a horse. These fragments of a becalmed pastoral paradise are fleeting, vanishing as that same man wakes from his memory-laden dream. A handful of years have passed, perhaps seven, judging from the age of the boy who accompanies him, but the man appears to have aged decades, his face lined with grime-streaked gutters, his teeth half-rotted. Still, his transformation is nothing compared to that of the world he inhabits. The topography resembles a five-day beard on a wretched old man. Fires line the horizon, the sky’s an endless gloaming, and the colour green has forsaken us. Food is scarce, earthquakes are frequent, and what’s left of mankind has largely been reduced to foraging ghouls. At least there are still books. The man reads one to the boy. It catalogues animals, each of which is now presumed extinct.

The man (Viggo Mortensen) and boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are making their way south, on foot, in beat-to-shit puffy coats, with dwindling supplies and a revolver with two bullets left, just enough to ensure double-suicide should some horrendous murder suddenly become a certainty. Those aching memories of fecund nature and familial blossoming are the last vestiges of warmth and beauty available to them, though the dying landscapes they pass through possess an undeniable fascination, at least for those of us just visiting for a couple of hours. The most commonplace items become miraculous here: shampoo, Coke, toothpaste, a can of pears. Their magic is intensified by the boy’s first-ever discovery of their comforts—he was born into this. The preservation of his innocence is all the man lives for, his answer to the question of why go on. His wife opted for suicide, along with most people with sense or dignity.

The book is from Cormac McCarthy, author of All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men. Like No Country, The Road is a kind of western, the man with no name charged with chaperoning the boy through lawless terrain, their destination being the Gulf Coast and its vague promise of less hostile conditions for homesteading. Like the Coen Brothers’ film of No Country, The Road, scripted by Joe Penhall, is an unusually faithful literary adaptation, and director John Hillcoat, who last helmed The Proposition, easily one of the best westerns of the decade, offers a realization of McCarthy’s post-apocalypse that’s richly detailed, surprisingly suspenseful, and hauntingly vivid. A notable difference between the films of No Country and The Road however is that where the Coens nurtured atmosphere with an uncharacteristic paucity of scoring and voice-over, Hillcoat’s enlisted his old friends Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to supply the scoring, which is gorgeously mournful, so evocative as to be a sort of adaptation in itself. The problem being that there’s so much of it. Along with Mortensen’s weary voice-over—the pairing of disembodied voice and music recalls the films of Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line in particular—the hypnotic score lulls us during scenes where we should ideally be alert to the tiniest, most nuanced sound, gesture, and image. It’s hardly the worst problem for a movie to have—an abundance of something beautiful and well crafted—but it does finally swath everything in a single tone, unintentionally protecting us from some harrowing moments.

Yet his central reservation of mine felt less important upon my second viewing of The Road, which allowed me to better forget the source material and focus more on the tremendous emotional connection between the brilliantly-cast Mortensen and the very natural, wide-eyed Smit-McPhee. During the second half I realized how, beneath the unfathomably bleak milieu, The Road is finally a story about father and son, about what a parent lives for and what a child tries to retain as he carries on alone. The accumulation of moments of desperate searching and running, of laughter and play—rare, but memorable—and of mutual learning about how to negotiate with the unruly world becomes resonant, and unforgettably moving. So see The Road, and then, perhaps, see it again. There’s something precious amidst all that darkness.

Father, son, and holy terror: Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro

Nick Cave, with friend

It begins with a sudden, shuddering, wholly irrational yet undeniable awareness of encroaching doom, Nick Cave’s chronicle of a death foretold letting us in on its ending from the title on down, so we can better appreciate the particular strange, sordid path it takes to get there. The Death of Bunny Munro is Cave’s second novel, his first in the 20 years that have passed since the publication of his debut And the Ass Saw the Angel. This one could be titled And the Asshole Saw the Angel of Death. Bunny’s uncharacteristic vision of oblivion—he’s normally the optimistic type—arrives not in the midst of some serene moment of contemplation but rather in a rented room at the Grenville Hotel, where he lingers in his underwear, drunk, with a prostitute standing by as he tries to placate his wife over the phone, who’s upset because among other things a madman’s running loose somewhere in England, wearing devil’s horns, and savagely attacking women. As his wife airs her fears, Bunny can see CCTV footage of the maniac on the telly. He’s not sure what to make of the guy, but as his story unfolds, we’ll come to see the horned killer as the flamboyant manifestation of Bunny’s Id, his even darker double, deprived of the most basic social skills that even Bunny can boast of, running rampant. The men represent two different kinds of ladykiller. “Some part of Bunny takes all this personally, but he is not sure why.”

Bunny is a salesman of high-end beauty products. His favourite radio program is Woman’s Hour, which he regularly, stupidly quotes when addressing his uniformly female clientele. Virtually everything in Bunny’s life is calibrated to yield more sex. His way with the ladies is perhaps hard for some of us to understand, “but there’s a pull, even in his booze-blasted face, a magnetic drag that has something to do with the pockets of compassion that form at the corners of his eyes when he smiles, a mischievous arch to his eyebrows and the little hymen-popping dimples in his cheeks when he laughs.” In short he is a devoted sexual predator, probably a genuine sex addict—rather unusually for a middle-aged man, he seems to have a hard-on all the time—and he uses whatever tools lay at his disposal to satisfy his need, which creepily enough is not so much for women per se as for their reproductive organs. Some of his buddies describe themselves as tit-men or leg-men, but Bunny is a dyed-in-the-wool vagina man. He fantasizes about vaginas, or even just clitorises, free-floating in space or collected in a little matchbox. He’s especially interested in celebrity vaginas, and has a special thing for Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavigne (who both receive special apologies in the postscript). In waves of inspired perversion and grotesquerie, Cave has accessed the murkiest, most reptilian depths of the male psyche to create this idiot monster. Not as monstrous as, say, the eponymous protagonist of ‘Stagger Lee,’ one of the most irresistibly sick songs in the mighty canon of Cave’s recording career with the Bad Seeds, but you can see how the two might get on together.

Cave, working at his day job

The novel follows Bunny from the discovery of his desperately unhappy and neglected wife’s suicide through his resolution to get right back to work selling and screwing, taking his young, helplessly dad-adoring son, little Bunny Junior, out of school and along for the road trip. What makes The Death of Bunny Munro palatable, even transcendent in its way, is firstly the brilliant, frequently hilarious wit, on par with the best early novels of Martin Amis, who’s crafted a few truly despicable protagonists of his own in his time; secondly its willingness to really sink into an explore Bunny’s sad little soul and seek out the parts of it that eerily reflect something in virtually all men; thirdly, the presence of Bunny Junior, genuinely innocent and wracked with a mixture of wonderment and grief; and fourthly, Cave’s already legendary facility with language. He’s often said that prose, as well as screenplays—he scripted John Hillcoat’s superb 2005 outback western The Proposition—are actually far easier for him to write than song lyrics, which demand a compaction that challenges Cave’s natural inclination toward storytelling, baroque description, and elaboration. His songs are littered with a dizzying array of characters immersed in private worlds of violence, madness and heartache. All three of these feature prominently in his new novel, even the latter, since, while he can hardly make any sense of it, Bunny does seem to miss his dead wife, is literally haunted by her. To say the very least, it’s tough to like Bunny, but it’s tougher not to become engrossed in his tale.

The novel was prompted by Hillcoat’s suggestion that Cave write him a new screenplay. The screenplay quickly became something else, but its origins are detectable in its engaging use of present-tense, and its forward motion. (Oddly enough, there are some fundamental similarities between this story and that of Hillcoat's new film The Road.) It’s also consumed with visuals, Bunny’s attention to minute physical details, even nail polish; Bunny Junior’s attention to all the strange things he encounters on his journey that need interpreting, usually with the aid of his trusty child’s encyclopedia; and Cave’s attention to the spoils of popular culture cluttering contemporary England. It all winds up to a bizarre, entertainingly hallucinatory finish, which also bears a certain cinematic flourish, though it reminded me most readily of the flipped-out ending of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s epic television series Berlin Alexanderplatz, which Cave is a confessed fan of. (There's even an appearance from a moustahced musician character that could be a Cave stand-in, aligning things even further to Fassbinder's hilarious cameo in the last episode of Alexanderplatz.) Cave has also said he’d like to see The Death of Bunny Munro made into a television series, something that would allow for more expansive character development. But in the meantime the novel has already spread beyond the confines of the page and can also be found as an audiobook, read by Cave, with music by Cave and Bad Seed/Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis, and an iPhone application, in which you’re supposed to be able to actually see Cave read you the book. “Which all sounds like fucking nightmare to me,” Cave quipped at a recent bookstore appearance I managed to catch in Toronto. But that’s hardly a dissuasive sales tactic. Cave’s been serving up his nightmares for public consumption for 30 years now, and there’s a great many of us who still can’t get enough of them.

On The Road, again

The Toronto International Film Festival gets underway tomorrow, and among the most anticipated titles screening, for me and I think many others, is The Proposition director John Hillcoat's much delayed adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen. Below is a review of the novel I wrote for Vue Weekly when it initially came out a few years ago.

* * *

A man and a boy move along a wasted highway and through bush in tattered clothes, a shopping cart holding all their worldly possessions jumbled under a tarp. They carry a revolver with two bullets. They forage for hard-to-find items like food, gas and shoes, and are perpetually concerned with gathering sufficient materials to build a fire.

They head south, toward the Gulf Coast, for fear of not surviving another winter in colder terrain. The landscape they traverse is burned up, cloaked with ash, bereft of sounds of life and nearly all colour. Nights are “dark beyond darkness,” days “more gray than each one that had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”

All around them are dead cars, dead buildings, cadavers, “shriveled and drawn like latter-day bog folk, their faces of boiled sheeting.” Other living beings are few and far between and almost always best avoided at all costs. Despair has made ghouls of most survivors, and the man vows to protect the boy at all costs, believing his life to be of some as yet undetermined but superior, even sacred value. “If he is not the word of God,” the man thinks, “God never spoke.”

This is the story, rendered in a vigorous, austere version of the author’s exalted prose, of a pilgrimage to nowhere, in a forsaken land where art, order and progress have collapsed in their meaning. With the millennium having passed, new, less abstract fears singe the surface of modern life. The Road (Knopf, $30) offers an apocalyptic vision as demonically inspired as that of Cormac McCarthy’s masterwork Blood Meridian, except that now the apocalypse is complete, ubiquitous and absolute. Perhaps ironically, in this post-world virtually absent of all hope, the goodness of the man and the boy somehow holds fast to the novel’s thread where once, in novels like Blood Meridian, evil toppled everything.

Author Cormac McCarthy

Perhaps it’s a tough sell, this short novel about a future where all is truly lost and only blind faith (such as the father’s) or ignorance (the boy was born into this destroyed world) pushes our protagonists forward into ongoing nothingness and danger. Even the memory of beauty is so painful to maintain (“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins”) that the man chooses to discard the last photo he carries of his dead wife.
There is no direct mention of what caused the great catastrophe, but it possesses all the signs of a nuclear winter. And the death of nearly everything seems to be a worldwide phenomenon.

Yet, in the ashes of all our collective dreams, McCarthy uncovers surprising reveries of wonder and fragile pleasure: the rediscovery of Coca-Cola, the chemical beauty of a flare exploding over a pallid sea, the smoothness and delicate grace of fine china, the primitive music to be eked from a crudely constructed flute, the underground miracle of a perfectly preserved bomb shelter. And there are the exchanges between the boy and the man, who share many brief, terse but loving dialogues:

That hurt, didn’t it? the boy said.

Yes, It did.

Are you real brave?

Just medium.

McCarthy peppers The Road with a few brilliant, tense and explosively violent encounters, while in quieter scenes he mines spare poetry from simple activities and bursts of a survivalist’s necessary sense of invention. He also casts a much bigger image of the earth’s destiny that’s shot through with a detached, scientific sort of awe: “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

But the splendour of what is lost nonetheless gets the final word, with memories of all the good things we know and take for granted rising to fill the novel’s final paragraph. McCarthy describes the brook trout that once inhabited mountain streams and his description calls the reader to see our world with clearer eyes and to grasp onto the ache of all things cherished that may soon slip away: The trout “smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of things that could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

The Proposition: Hillcoat and Cave renovate the western, conjure devils in the outback, get spooky, poetic, violent as all hell

Set in the 1880s Australian outback, The Proposition shakes the dormant Western genre to life from its opening shoot-out, in which the ear-shattering pings of bullets perforating a tin shack echo amongst hysterical cries and bodies shudder below shafts of scalding sun in fear and maybe some kind of demented ecstasy. This is the colonial nightmare unfiltered, moulded by a loose but lean narrative shape and mined for the sort of savage poetry that allows us to recognize it as being very much about our conflicted human souls.

“I will civilize this place,” proclaims local authority Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) once this chaos subsides, revealing no hint of irony as he viciously pistol-whips whimpering young Mike Burns (Richard Wilson) and offers Mike’s older bother Charlie (Guy Pearce) the ultimatum of journeying into the godforsaken hills to assassinate eldest brother Arthur (Danny Huston) or else condemn Mike to death: this is the cruel proposition of the title. The Burns clan are Irish outlaws in a lawless land, murderers and rapists the lot, and a smear on the dream of expanding the British Empire into this country otherwise inhabited solely by men regarded by the enlightened invaders as less than animals.

The Proposition is only the third feature in as many decades from director John Hillcoat, and it fits thematically into his small but distinctive body of work, intelligently dealing as it does with how the mechanics of state violence and control shape communities. As for writer Nick Cave, though he contributed to Hillcoat’s 1988 prison drama Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, The Proposition marks the proper screenwriting debut of singer-songwriter, and through this fresh collaboration the best in each becomes manifest. The work is both historically and politically sophisticated, and also infused with the Old Testament poetry and fatalistic romanticism that distinguishes Cave as one of the finest, most unapologetically literary lyricists alive (evident not only in Cave’s Joseph Conrad-inspired script but also in the whispery, eerily desolate score supplied by Cave and Bad Seed/Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis).

There is a brutally clear beginning and end to The Proposition, bridged by a stream of evocative middle. With context and complexity of character supplying our sense of penetrating deeper into the film’s heart of darkness, atmosphere equals story here—what’s so memorable are often moments of reverie that linger between bursts of violence, details like the branches twisted into arthritic claws by sun and thirst, flies blanketing the backs of witnesses to an almost bleakly comical, seemingly endless public lashing, or the delicate surfaces of the fine china and English rose garden treasured by Stanley’s wife Martha (Emily Watson), the film’s lone woman and one source of its scattered moments of genuine tenderness.

No one’s left uncompromised yet neither is even the most aberrant character drawn without some trace of humanity, the marvellous cast deserving much credit. Winstone’s Stanley, red face and black eyes pinned down into glistening watermelon seeds, seems hopelessly numbed to human suffering but is consoled by Martha’s pride and the innocence he tries to maintain in her through keeping her isolated from the wretched town he oversees. Huston’s devil crouched in the wilderness seems to have no difficulty reconciling his acts of malice with his love of poetry, nature and the family that drives him literally to tears. And Pearce’s soul-drained searcher, tortured, resurrected, betrayed by his master and abandoned to an even deeper loneliness than is suffered by the others, is the actor at his finest, bringing a ragged humanity to an archetype rendered far more obliquely in the spaghetti westerns of the ’60s.

I can’t think of anything like The Proposition out there these days—but then I’m not sure anyone ever made movies quite like this. It’s funny—and inspiring—how a dead genre can still bring out the best in some of our best filmmakers, Hillcoat, Jarmusch, Eastwood, et al.