FSF, March-April 2010 (28 page)

"Anything you like."

"No-no-no. You
have
to name yourself. Anything but Derek."

That smile again, so lucky, so glad to have won me over. Me. The Fairy Princess. “Can I think about it?” he asks.

"Sure. Take all the time you want.” I pull him toward the door. “C'mon. Let's go outside and look at the stars."

You can kiss me there, searching for your name, waking to a new life, following a star.

[Back to Table of Contents]

For a time it eluded me why anyone would want to make a movie of Cormac McCarthy's
The Road
, a book that has taken T. S. Eliot's famous line, “not with a bang but a whimper,” and seeks with punishing insistency to document that whimper. No matter how well mounted, I doubted that what would be essentially a zombie picture minus the zombies (roving bands of shaggy, crusty human cannibals standing in for their undead brethren), and minus the humor that zombies have come to evoke in the context of pop culture...I doubted it would do more than middling business, especially as it was slated for a Thanksgiving release. Not exactly holiday fare. Surely, I told myself, John Hillcoat's (
The Proposition
) gray-as-gristle film wouldn't garner the same attention as had the previous, less monotone McCarthy adaptation, the Coen Brothers’
No Country for Old Men
, and thus it would not have a profitable awards season re-release. It appears now that I was only half-right in my presumptions, as awards chatter for
The Road
has been off the charts.

Behind the scenes in all of McCarthy's fiction is a gray-bearded authorial presence who, complete with staff, stone tablets, and a pointing finger, either lurks in the shadows between adjectives and insinuates that all flesh is grass, or else steps forward in the narrative to intone epiphanies and declaim in booming tones, “Woe betide thee!” In the Faulkneresque novels that established his reputation (
Suttree, Blood Meridian
, etc.), this presence, this Biblical voice, is often a virtue and at the very least tolerable; but in
The Road
, basically an inflated short story that does not rank high in his canon, McCarthy's moral pronouncements seem enervated, a kind of Old Testament flatulence produced, one imagines, by the authorial presence trudging along at the same plodding pace as his characters, breaking wind at every step, releasing sour little poots that effect a rhythmic
woe, woe, told you so
as he proceeds along his (and their) doomful path. It's not the beat of a powerful engine such as you'd envision would propel the plot of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the fate of mankind, but then these are the end times, right? A little falling-off in performance has to be expected.

The plot of
The Road
, such as it is, involves two characters labeled the Man and the Boy (Cormac sure do love him some archetypes) who, years after an undisclosed apocalyptic event, possibly a massive nuclear exchange, follow a road leading (essentially) nowhere through a dying world, armed with a gun that has only two bullets and pushing a shopping cart that, for me, evoked a weird resonance with the Lone Wolf and Cub movies (based on a Japanese
manga
, these films document the revenge-fueled journey of a samurai and his three-year-old son, whom he pushes in a baby carriage). Having been abandoned by the Wife (Charlize Theron), who has gone off, presumably to commit suicide, and whom we see in flashbacks (too many of them for my tastes), they search for food, try to avoid cannibal gangs, encounter other travelers (notably Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce) and ultimately achieve something of a resolution. It's slim, yet sufficient to hang a movie on...but it's a not great movie. And given its skimpy furnishings,
The Road
needed to be great if it was going to work at all.

The relationship between the Man (solidly if unspectacularly played by Viggo Mortensen) and the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who can be seen to better effect starring with Eric Bana in the little Australian film,
Romulus, My Father
) is at the heart of
The Road
. As they wander through the bird-less, animal-less, almost lifeless landscape, unrelentingly bleak and gray, heading for the coast because it seems to offer a slim hope of survival, their love for one another is apparent. The Man tries in vain to toughen up the Boy, and the Boy arrives at a more complex view of his father, seeing his violence on display and sensing that he may not completely be one of the “good guys.” I had difficulty with the good guy/bad guy aspect of the relationship because it seemed too reductive and I felt that the Boy, born into this moribund world, having had some experience of its isolation and terrors, would not be the naïf he appears to be and would already have reached this understanding about his father, recognizing that theirs was a world of difficult choices and moral compromises.

The shining stars of the film are the production design by Chris Kennedy, a longtime collaborator of Hillcoat's, and the astonishing cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe, who previously photographed one of my favorite weird films,
Obaba
, a picture about a mythical province in Spain overpopulated by lizards, and is currently filming the third
Twilight
movie, to which he can't help but add a touch of class. Thanks to this pair, the post-apocalyptic world is rendered with crushing effect, dressed in smoke and ash and deftly used CGI—there are images both horrific and ghostly here that will remain with you long after the lights come up.

Why, then, is the film so uninvolving?

In the modern world, much of the way we assess quality is based on how things are presented to us.
The Road
came branded as a masterpiece, the product of a great writer, profound and insightful, and—to top that off—it was anointed by the Empress of the Vox Populi, the Great Purveyor of Middlebrow Intellectualism, Oprah, as a novel that should sit on the shelves of every American with a sensitive soul, a moral code, a love for children, and a fondness for pork butt recipes. If the book had been published as, say, the debut novel of an unknown writer, it would have received some good notices, some “meh,” some that basically said, “Been there, done that,” and would have been largely ignored, consigned to the ignominy of the science fiction bins. It's a thin book, not all that revelatory, well written yet unremarkably so, and, despite its brevity, it becomes intermittently tedious. In other words, it doesn't blare “masterpiece,” nor does it cry out to be turned into a movie.

The release date of
The Road
was pushed back nearly a year amid apocryphal reports that the film was “a mess.” It is now, if ever it was, no longer a mess, but it has the desanguinated feel of a picture that has been tweaked and retweaked until some essential vigor has been lost. Perhaps this was done in the interests of fidelity, yet in retrospect it seems that Hillcoat might have served the novel better had he been less concerned with replicating the text and brought more of a personal vision to the project.

Then there's the score by Nick Cave, Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three, and Pierre Andre. I had expected something harsh and stirring, something redolent of Jonny Greenwood's score for
There Will Be Blood
, but the mush of swelling strings that annotates sections of the film reminds us, despite the horrors onscreen, that what we're seeing is an Oprah moment, a story about family, about love's resilience or the triumph of the human spirit over tribulation or some similar do-wah-wah. I suspect this was a producer's decision, but whatever, it's off-putting, not a little insulting, and detracts from the potent imagery on display. We're being induced to have a mass pity party for humankind...and this, I suppose, lies at the core of the book's appeal to the Oprah corporate franchise hive mind, that we can love one another even while eating one another, that we can wax teary-eyed and remorseful over a world we're too busy consuming to care about, so we've been given this movie to weep over in order to make us feel bad (albeit in a good kind of way) about our decline and possible demise. It's as if we've been invited to participate in our own wake, to commiserate and murmur consoling sentiments such as, “Why? We were such a decent species! Why?” And at the end of the function we'll all gather in the street to join hands and sing a few verses of John Lennon's “Imagine,” the “Kumbaya” of the aughts.

At any rate, to paraphrase Bilbo Baggins,
The Road
goes ever on and on, lots of walking, more walking, unrelieved trudgery, and then, mercifully, after having made 119 minutes or thereabouts feel as dreary and misspent as a week in post-apocalyptic Poughkeepsie, it ends.

I suppose there must be a Hollywood movie in which a novelist is portrayed as heroic, brave, or at least good-hearted. The best I can come up with at the moment are Peter Lorre's inquisitive, somewhat craven Cornelius Leyden in the 1944 spy movie,
The Mask of Dimitrios
;
Adventures of a Young Man
, Martin Ritt's forgettable attempt to sew together a movie out of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories;
Mother
, the Albert Brooks comedy about an emotionally stunted science fiction writer who moves back in with his Mom in order to learn why he keeps screwing up his relationships; and the unremittingly awful, platitude-riddled Gus Van Sant film,
Finding Forrester
, that gave us Sean Connery's Salinger-esque recluse who, during his last days, mentors a basketball-playing, ghetto-dwelling young writer and babbles some generic nonsense about honor prior to kicking the bucket. Generally writers are depicted as they are perceived by the industry, as a necessary breed of vermin, some few of them eccentric and lovable in their way, like genius pets, yet mainly a scummy bunch, devious, deviant, pathetic, pompous and conniving, eavesdropping on others, stealing their lives and lines. (I've heard book editors espouse more-or-less this same view, wishing half-jokingly that writers could be eliminated from the publishing process—a wish that may soon be fulfilled). Of course, the characterization isn't entirely unjustified, since writers are by nature somewhat vampiric.

All this leads us to consider
Gentlemen Broncos
, the latest picture from Jared Hess (
Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre
), a member of the isn't-everyone-quirky school of filmmaking (Wes Anderson, president).
GB
isn't a very good movie, yet for anyone associated with the science fiction field, be it fan, editor, or writer, it may hold a morbid fascination. It concerns a withdrawn home-schooled teenager named Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano), a friendless loner who lives with his quirky mom in a geodesic dome and writes bad science fiction stories, a pastime that inspires him to attend a fantasy writer's camp where he meets a quirky teenage girl, Tabatha (Hailey Feiffer), a quirky young filmmaker, Lonnie (Héctor Jiménez), and super-quirk Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jermaine Clement of
Flight of the Conchords
), a famous, ultra-pretentious science fiction writer with a ghastly upper-crust accent (think Thurston Howell III with a bad cold) who's in the midst of writer's block and a career crisis—his publisher just rejected his latest novel. In addition there's also the quirky Dusty (Mike White), who's been appointed Benjamin's “Guardian Angel” (a kind of non-secular Big Brother program) by his mom's church and comes accompanied by a large yellow snake. At the camp Benjamin submits his novel,
Yeast Lords
, to a contest judged by Chevalier, who promptly swipes it, does a superficial rewrite, and submits it as his own work. In the process he changes Benjamin's hero Bronco (played in visualizations of the novel by Sam Rockwell) from a bewigged space cowboy into a bewigged space-going tranny named Brutus who at one point has his genitalia reconfigured by evil aliens.

These visualizations (some of which we view as Benjamin wrote them, others as envisioned by Chevalier), complete with rocket-powered reindeer, does with optical enhancements for surveillance, and Rockwell going joyfully over the top.... They're ridiculous, yet they're the best part of the movie. Indeed, without them the movie would be no more than a collection of caricatures. The picture never feels as if its sails are full, as if it's driven by any real spirit. This is due in part to the fact that Angarano as the brooding, pissed-off Benjamin doesn't have the clueless
je ne sais quoi
of Jon Heder or the frantic energy of Jack Black, Hess's previous lead actors, and thus
Gentlemen Broncos
lacks a sufficiently appealing character with whom we can identify. Then too, despite Hess's professed affection for science fiction, he has chosen to lampoon rather than to parody—his caricatures are drawn as clods, buffoons, and charlatans of various stripes, and the literature is depicted as the work of idiots. It isn't that the genre (or any group) is devoid of clods, buffoons, and charlatans—often all three qualities are present in the same person—yet neither is it devoid of intelligent, thoughtful people. Not so, however, in Hess's version of our little corner of the universe.

There are a few things to like in
GB
, scenes and characters and snatches of dialog that would have been better off embedded in a different movie. Rockwell, as mentioned. Hess's eye for the culturally bizarre remains canny, and in his role as Dr. Chevalier, Clement has some good moments, though his unctuous, Bluetooth-wearing twit is too tired a creation to elicit more than a grin or two. The whole thing has the air of a TV skit that's gotten out of hand.

Frankly, I'm fed up with the disrespect that films like
GB
represent, and until Hollywood proves they can give me and my colleagues their proper due, I intend to boycott all movies featuring portrayals of writers. The studios have a lot to make up for—even journalists, the mimes of our profession, are portrayed in a kindlier light than fictioneers. I'm looking for something to boost our self-esteem, something ennobling and heroic like maybe
James Joyce and the Temple of Doom
or
Bret Easton Ellis Vs. The Mole People
. Anything of the sort will do. Maybe when Arnold Schwarzenegger gets tired of playing politics, he can reunite with John Milius and shoot the picture that many of us (us writers, I mean) have been champing at the bit to see:
Conan The Intellectual
.