THE ROAD
by Les Phillips

Thinking about the unthinkable, or depicting the unimaginable - these tasks will always fail; but the attempt can be useful. A Holocaust story, or a postnuclear narrative, can honor the dead, offer a cautionary tale, send a political message, or use crisis and disaster to heighten moral lessons. But which lessons?

I haven't read Cormac McCarthy's The Road.. Friends tell me it's scary, shattering, and morbidly depressing. The Road, the current film version directed by John Hillcoat, is all these things, and more; and it is not exactly a feel-good holiday classic. A man and his son (Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) have survived into the first stages of a nuclear winter: the sky is always gray, the planet is cold and getting colder, everything is dead except for gangs of wretched, predatory humans - some are cannibals - who prowl the North American ruins for food and weapons. The film shows you awful things - I looked away more than once. The director has a genius for the hideous and a talent for surprise. The acting is good, certainly, though Mortensen is necessarily playing a principle rather than a person. (Smit-McPhee is extremely compelling as the son.)

But, ultimately, The Road is sentimental, and even a little smug. Father and son keep telling themselves that they are "the good guys," that they are "carrying the light," fighting against the savages not just for survival but for some kind of virtue. (Here cue the music, which reaches for some sort of high-class inspiration. I kept worrying that "Fanfare for the Common Man" was about to pour forth. The Road shouldn't have any music.). The Road will show you mass graves and cannibalism and marauding psychopaths, but it's not about to actually test the notion of whether the good guys can really remain good in the post-apocalypse. The cheat goes further: The Road presents what can only be described as a happy ending.

So there are two moral lessons here. The first is unimpeachable: hold tight to those you love, because that's all you've really got in life, at bottom. The second is highly questionable, even damaging: we are the good guys, the other people are not, and the good guys will win in the end if they persevere and remain "better" than the other people. (Is that not the kind of thinking that creates holocausts in the first place? I do agree that eating people is wrong; that belief may be necessary, but I doubt that it is sufficient.) The titles roll, the horror's been tucked away, and the audience goes home to its goodness, cleansed by disaster-porn.

I think everyone should go see The Road, so that they can question it, talk about it, and talk back to it. Hold tight to those you love.

*

In Chris & Don, a Love Story, a documentary by Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, Chris was Christopher Isherwood, and Don is Don Bachardy, the boy on the beach who enchanted the celebrated expatriate writer one fine California day in 1953. Isherwood was thirty years older than Bachardy. The partnership endured, more or less happily, for thirty-three years, until Isherwood's death in 1986. So the older man is long gone, and there's not much footage of him; most of his contemporaries are gone too, though we do get some welcome commentary from Gloria Stuart. So the film is necessarily more about Bachardy - the famous relationship as seen and told by him, but also about his own art, his family, including his deeply troubled brother, and his long widowhood. 

I'd read that, as he aged, Bachardy developed an uncanny physical resemblance to Isherwood. I hadn't realized that he also sounds like Isherwood. His reminiscences are cheerful, loving, appealing, and apt. There are brief old clips of Auden and Somerset Maugham and Stravinsky, and longer interviews with Leslie Caron and Jack Larson (very interesting) and Liza Minnelli (defending her performance in Cabaret). But mostly we follow Bachardy as he putters around the old homestead and chats with us. He is affectionate, realistic, and clear-eyed about Christopher. If you seek clear, wise advice about how to grow old with your beloved (no matter the beloved's gender or age), Bachardy is worth hearing.

Don Bachardy is a painter, and Chris & Don is full of his art. Most of us leave notes (or emails) as casual communication; Bachardy and Isherwood made sweet, loving drawings and cartoons for one another. The filmmakers have animated some of these cartoons as commentary on their creators. This was a brilliant decision. The cartoons are bright and empathetic (Bachardy's paintings burst with color, like Bonnard's or Chagall's), and the annotations by Bachardy and Michael York (the film's narrator) are splendid. 

Chris & Don is a summing up of two unusual, challenged lives, ultimately well and peacefully lived.

©2009 Les Phillips
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