Coloured Family Cheese

Ways and Means: The Book of Eli vs. The Road

February 16, 2010

[**SPOILER ALERT**]

If you haven’t already seen The Road and/or The Book of Eli, the two films serendipitously made available for our entertainment at the very same time (the last time I can remember something like this happening was when Oliver Stone’s W hit the screens as George Bush’s approval figures and administration hit bottom), here’s serving notice that I’m about to give everything away in each.

In both The Road, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of the same name, and The Book of Eli, a man faces life after The End, on a planet that’s barely responding to life support, much less capable of supporting life. Both are unwaveringly devoted to a single aim, maintaining a tenuous toehold on their wits and their humanity. They’ve chosen an itinerant life pressing toward a goal they feel uncertain they can reach, and which may not exist at all. Because they’re American movies, these men could be cowboys, arguably—high plains drifters or low-country shepherds, but quietly desperate ones to be sure.

But these aren’t the same kind of man of course. And, the equalizing effects of Everything Everywhere Ending, these are certainly not the same kind of movies.

The protagonist of The Road, called simply the Man, is white and devoted to getting himself and his young son—but mostly his son, called simply the Boy—south. What’s south? Warmth, he hopes, and maybe something to eat. In the brute logistics of a world without plenty or mercy, food in any form has become the only substance worth anything, as only humans have survived the sudden flash and rumble that finished off the planet. Pursuant to this fact, cannibalism and enslavement—either in sexual servitude or as a captive, roughly maintained food source—is the prevalent threat for all survivors. And so the Man and his son take to the titular road, pushing their shopping cart of scavenged food, foraging where they can for anything left in the ashes.

Crucially, the Man is played by Viggo Mortensen, the Last Earnest, Soulfully Weathered Hero the post-apocalyptic world has left (and that incidentally, the last one our pre-apocalyptic one has either, at least in the movies) with the single exception being, of course…

…Denzel Washington, playing the book-owning namesake of The Book of Eli. Washington, probably the last consistently bank-able leading man in Hollywood, ushers the justifiably legendary Hughes brothers back after 8 years (their last adventure in film? The Alan Moore (Watchmen) comic book adaptation From Hell) from material that was mostly beneath them (USA’s Touching Evil, anyone?) playing a Black man devoted to getting himself and his book—but mostly his book—to safety.

Washington and Mortensen are gifted with the kind of gravity that makes even the most tired premise feel plausible, or at least worthy of an hour-and-a-half’s worth of attention (playing the Lone Handsome Savior of course, and several times over, but specifically the New York Detective in a Battle of Wits With a Madman, or Mysterious Swordsman Whom We Hope Our Hobbit Friends Can Trust). And they’ve used that gravity carefully, maintaining their authority by playing both very good men and very bad men tremendously well, but they’ve done it mostly through excellent choices of roles and almost entirely avoiding comedy (less true in Washington’s case, but still, Carbon Copy came out almost 30 years ago). They’ve maintained that Serious Actor profile by playing serious roles seriously.

In Road and Eli, they wander into the most serious premise science fiction can provide for us, the end of the world. What do they find?

Mortensen’s character negotiates a world devolved to a state which honors no social covenants of any kind. Any community that could form between human beings, now the only animals occupying a dead world, is based on food, meaning that all communities are cannibal tribes or scavengers of finite and diminshing resources. Every encounter winds down to one party’s power kill or enslave the other, or to resist death or enslavement.

Mortensen’s power is the most desperate kind. Facing core existential choice, he has only the Off Button; two bullets in a revolver. To be or not to be, one for my baby and one for the road, etc. In the book the movie’s based on, McCarthy mentions cults ruled by human demi-gods, borne on litters down the riven tarmac by chained supplicants and followed by catamites (which I had to look up, too: they’re “boys kept for sexual practices”). Clearly this is a world in which single parenthood takes on a horrifying cast and you keep your hand on your gun to resist a fate far worse than death. Gun, tarp, blanket, shopping cart, and whatever canned goods the looters missed—ready for the world.

Apparently the Book of Eli takes place in a West Coast armageddon, because the survivors hang onto their sunglasses, or goggles if they’re secondary characters, with startling care, and generally appear to have decided to take up permanent residence at Burning Man. Or at least that’s their Look. In the Eli apocalypse, it is apparently important to hang onto your iPod and Beats By Dre headphones so you can listen to Al Green’s “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” as you fall asleep in an abandoned building (who would think to look for you in a service-able shelter? Or think to investigate that tinny music coming from it?). Indeed, you can carry your iPod in your Oakley backpack. This apocalypse will be brought to you by KFC Wet-Naps, GMC trucks, Apple Computers, Oakley, Ray-Ban, and whoever provided Mila Kunis’s totally hot boots—love!