Palmerston North Film Society Launch

The first film of the 2010 season is on Wednesday March 3rd at Downtown Cinemas Palmerston North. There are two screenings one at 5.30pm and the other at 8pm. New members most welcome.

The Road
Directed by John Hillcoat
USA 2009 111mins 35mm
March 3rd 5.30pm and 8pm

Our opening film for the year is a Palmerston North premiere courtesy of Downtown Cinemas. The film is based on Cormac McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

The story is straightforward: America has been devastated. Habitations have been destroyed or abandoned, vegetation is dying, crops have failed and the infrastructure of civilization has disappeared.

The principal characters are simply called The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and The Man (Viggo Mortensen). The lack of names makes us focus on the general rather than the specific. No reason is given for this destruction, perhaps because no reason would be adequate. The Boy and The Man make their way toward the sea; perhaps for no better reason than that sea has always been the direction of hope in the USA.

The father, fearing for his health and sanity, is sustained only by his love for his son and his need to protect him. Encounters on the road with a thief (Michael K. Williams) and an old man (Robert Duvall) rouse his vigilance. Compassion comes easier to the boy, who was born just after the apocalypse. All he knows comes from his father, except for a found can of Coke that still holds its fizz and a bomb shelter — stocked with water, packaged food, battery-fuelled lamps and warm blankets — where the boy experiences the creature comforts of a forgotten age.

The world is a decidedly brutal one: early on the Man and the Boy meet a band of thugs travelling on a big truck, checking abandoned cars for fuel, searching for food. They try to hide but are discovered. With the Man’s gun trained on him, the thug offers to bring them along, says they have food, but his cracked, desperate smile and rotted teeth reveal he’s lying. He is the first of a number of bloodthirsty mercenaries the Man and Boy encounter.

Despite the Man’s insistence that they’re “the good guys” because they would never eat people, he is slow to show compassion to others, unlike the Boy, believing his “every man for himself” approach is the only thing that will keep them alive. There seems to be no imaginable future for them. Even a discovery of an enormous cache of packaged foods doesn’t last. Their clothing is not sufficient to keep them warm; thieves take their survival necessities, and even if they reach the coast, it’s not clear anything will improve.

Eye for Detail
An apparent CGI aerial shot is a digital recreation of actual destruction by Hurricane Katrina to Empire, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. The shot shows large, twin boats on a highway in front of a bridge over the Empire Lock on Louisiana state highway 23. In the movie rendering, a large city skyline appears on the horizon, where in actuality there would be only the rural peninsula of Plaquemines Parish.

Screenings are at 5.30pm and 8pm at Downtown Cinemas
Members only. Palmerston North Film Society Membership is available at the door before each screening and lasts for one full year.