by John P. Meyer

Things have come to this extremity: Spam is a cause for celebration.

Those familiar with Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road will know that it is his bleakest, darkest, most nihilistic work to date -- and given the outcomes of most of his narratives, that's saying quite a lot.

Aussie director John Hillcoat's film treatment of The Road is every bit as cold and hard and uncompromising in its depiction of the ugly truth set up by its premise as the McCarthy source material. That premise is that the Earth has been visited by a catastrophe which has left its ecosystem irreparably damaged: the sun is hidden by omnipresent clouds; the plants and trees are long dead; governments and infrastructures have collapsed. Those humans who aren't yet dead are well on their way to wishing that they were.

The movie, like the book, follows the arduous journey southward (towards a hoped-for warmer climate) of a man and his son. They push their grocery cart of pitiful scavenged supplies down the crumbling tarmac of abandoned highways, plunging desperately into the decaying bramble whenever a vehicle approaches.

(The only groups still operating motorized vehicles are armed bands of men who make their living by preying on those who are less well armed.)

The man (Viggo Mortensen, haunted-eyed and haggard) is on a mission that he knows he probably won't be able to complete: he's trying to deliver his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, late of Romulus, My Father) to a survivable future, the likes of which he can't really conceive. But he's making the effort, because the only other choice is to simply give up.

The latter option is the one chosen by the woman in the story (Charlize Theron), who we encounter only in flashbacks and in the fevered dreams of the man, as his subconscious feeds him no-calorie snippets of brighter times -- all now solidly behind him. The woman has gazed unflinchingly into the implacable face of the future -- her personal future, and that of her husband and son -- and made a conscious decision to avoid it.

The man has been as well-prepared as an ordinary person could be, given the suddenness of the (unspecified) disaster event. At the first sign of rioting in the streets, he opens the taps of the bathtub to fill it with water from a supply that's likely to be cut off without notice. He retrieves from a closeted shoebox the revolver that's probably resided there, unconsidered, for years. It, and the bullets that lend it potency, prove to be more valuable than gold (worthless in a world without a value system), or even canned food -- which assumes the role that other forms of wealth held before the great collapse. Duct tape and staples become medical supplies.

Food is the driver of events, and there's less and less of it to go around as supermarkets are stripped bare and only hidden caches of food remain to be found by enterprising scroungers (such as our father/son duo). Things have come to this extremity: Spam is a cause for celebration.

(Other, less savory food sources are being actively exploited by growing numbers of people desperate to survive at any cost. Think Soylent Green.)

The man and the boy encounter only a few fellow travelers. One of them -- an old man (Robert Duvall) who has unaccountably survived to this late stage of events without any apparent defensive capability or bargaining power -- naturally assumes these two are out to rob him of whatever he owns. Or worse. Instead, they share with him (at the boy's insistence) a hoarded can of fruit, and a campfire for the night. The men speak fondly of "old stories of courage and justice" -- which, by implication, have no further relevance.

(Some stories, though, are too terrible for the old man to relate -- such as the answer to this question, posed by the boy as the three sit warming themselves around the fire: "What happened to your son?")

The father makes it his mission to not only deliver the boy safely into whatever tenable future might await them -- he also instills in him a sense of right and wrong at the most basic of human levels. The fact that the man is willing to compromise on his own standards of morality in order to advance the boy toward safety becomes more and more evident to the boy. He must witness his father deteriorating both in terms of physical health and as an idealized force for good in the world.

The chance for redemption, when it comes, may prove as tenuous and temporary as the one way journey the boy and his father have just completed. Or, it may not.

John Jurgensen of The Wall Street Journal recently conducted a great and interesting review with author Cormac McCarthy on the patio of the Menger Hotel in San Antonio.

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