The Road

This is probably not a film we’ll watch at Cinegogue, but reading through a discussion on Facebook about it makes me pause to capture some thoughts.


Of course, read no further if you don’t want it spoiled but wish to experience it firsthand unsullied by anything I say here…

I was loaned a copy of The Road with the comment that it was depressing…and not just depressing, but that it was unrelenting in the weight of isolation and depression to the point where my friend said she was wondering with each successive scene, “Why am I watching this?” Which naturally begs the question, “Then why would I want to watch it?” But my friend knows me well, and my natural affinity for darker hues.

The Road is another journey into the land of post-apocalyptic wonder – minus the wonder.

Let’s face it – it’s bleak, oppressive, burdening, and numbing. Our eyes strain for something of life, of redemption, of grace. In the special features, the most frequently mentioned summation was that it is the story of a father and son’s love for one another. Someone quoted a line from the book, “They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire."

It actually sounds a lot like the Old Testament.

Six months into a two year reading of the Bible, that line summarizes much of the land I’m walking through. I know people say, “Look for Jesus everywhere – he’s everywhere!” And with that hindsight reflection from my easy chair of grace, that’s a wonderful luxury indeed. But to read the Old Testament on it’s terms as they wrote and read and breathed and experienced it, there was no Jesus – only an often seemingly forlorn hope held to under a lifelong inversion with little or no sun – and few patches of bright green vegetation or variegated flowers.

And yet there is a hope there - pre-Jesus - that isn’t buried under the ash. There is something of a dance to this shuffling through ash that is the Old Testament – and that, more often than we’d care to admit, that is our life. Even Lamentations has some brilliant rays of hope unseen and yet believed.

And perhaps that’s what’s missing from The Road. Father and son alone, surrounded by death and dying, stumbling upon corpses or near-corpses, walking in fear, ready to take their own life at any moment, and when other souls are encountered, there is avoidance and suspicion. Perhaps the thought that they were “each the other’s world entire” rather than a warming notion is actually fingering the pit to avoid – and pointing out the difference between it and the Old Testament narrative. They did live as if they were “each the other’s world entire” when there was still much humanity all around them. I’m not going to watch it again to confirm this, but the indication I picked up was the family that ultimately took in the boy after the father’s death had been following them, and were perhaps the ones right over their heads when they were hiding out in the food cellar. But in fear the father continued to choose isolation, to stay on the run rather than risk connection.

Of the four film categories I shared in a previous post, I would put this in the fourth – for there is parable here. Not a pleasant one – it’s more like the parable told about Abimelech in Judges 9 about the trees wanting to anoint a king. It’s a dead end story told as a warning (the author and filmmaker may not have intended it so, but that’s how I heard it at any rate). I believe a large percentage of us who walk “under the sun” spend many days “shuffling through the ashes” of life. Fear and despair engulfs us, enshrouds us; we turn inward, we trust no one. It’s learning to dance in the ashes, to have our eyes open enough, our heads lifted enough to even see some beauty in the midst of the ashes, beauty in the soot-covered face of a stranger others would fear and strip and leave naked beside the road. It was in just such a desolate first-century landscape that Jesus went about “doing good and healing all who were oppressed of the devil.” Jesus didn’t come to a garden, and he didn’t leave a garden behind. He came to a people in a land of darkness, the land of the shadow of death. And his very presence was light. Light danced through their ashes, brought glimpses of beauty, shared garments of praise. And ultimately was lifted up on a bloody gallows because rather than withdraw in fear he loved to the uttermost.

And laid down his life for his friends.