Movie Reviews: Taken and The Road

I watched two movies recently: The Road and Taken.   Both movies portray good men whose marriages have nonetheless fallen apart, and who are trying to maintain a relationship with their only child under challenging circumstances.  I've been reading about social dynamics and marriage recently, so these movies providing a contrast in how a director portrays a man dealing with these challenges.

I expected to enjoy The Road since I had loved the book by Cormac McCarthy, and I didn't have high expectations for Taken beyond a fun action flick.  My impressions were exactly reversed.  I thought Taken was terrific -- and during The Road, I found myself spontaneously standing up and yelling at the TV screen.  My roommate too.  We hated watching it. Read more.

And it all had to do with social dynamics surrounding the leading male.  Here is my take on it, with minor spoilers.  (These aren't exactly recent movies.)

The Road

The Road takes place in post-apocalyptic America.  Nothing grows, the world is dead, and the only survivors are ragtag scavengers and roving bands of gangs. A father (Viggo Mortensen) and son have survived the devastation.  It is revealed that his wife (Charlize Theron) had survived too, giving birth to the son soon after the apocalyptic event.  But she had eventually committed suicide, growing depressed and not being able to hack it. The story follows the father and son as they try to keep alive in a dead world.

The problem with the movie portrayal, as far as I'm concerned, is that every main character -- father, mother, boy -- acted weak and weepy far too often.  McCarthy's award-winning novel, in contrast, had a stronger undercurrent of resilience.

Take the father.  He basically allowed his wife to commit suicide and condoned his son acting like a helpless wimp.  It was like he had a split personality: completely competent in one domain (dominant survivalist) and completely incompetent in another (passive husband and father).  This is a guy who had succeeded where so many others had not. He knew how to find food.  He had delivered the birth of his own son.  He knew how to keep his boy safe.  He was a survivor.  I can understand him being desperate, exhausted, or dispirited, but that's different than pathetic and weak.

Take the boy. The boy, probably 7 or 8, was a burden to his father throughout the movie -- crying all the time, incapable of running every time running was actually necessary, and generally incompetent.  Even worse, the father put up with it.  Look, I can understand how a child accustomed to the luxuries of civilization might be all weepy and soft initially, but children grow up fast when they have to (and that's true of both boys and girls).

Furthermore, this boy had never experienced civilization.  The wasteland was all he knew.  He would have been a tough-as-nuts survivor by age 7 or 8, and a boon to his father.  When the boy cried at a late moment in the movie that actually merited tears, the effect was lost because he had been crying at every little damn paper cut all along.

And what's with calling his father "pa-PA", with the intonation of a European school boy?

Good child actors are rare for a reason -- it's hard to act so far beyond your actual life experience.  And I couldn't help but feel that this child actor was told to imagine how scared and helpless he would be in a post-apocalyptic world, and thus, acted scared and helpless in every scene. But a boy actually brought up in that world wouldn't have acted scared and helpless all the time.

And now for the wife.  What kind of wife commits suicide, leaving her husband and son to survive alone?  The reality is that such a serious external threat would have bonded the husband and wife more closely than ever.  It's like seeing a scary movie with a girl -- the fear bonds you to the person you're with.  Or how a common enemy can unite disparate people.  They were all each other had.

This woman was tough enough to survive childbirth with only her husband to assist, and then was too emotionally fragile to keep going?  Please.  Emotional fragility (male or female) is a modern phenomenon.  And if her husband was as competent a survivor as he must have been -- and provided they had enough food to maintain a sex drive -- then they would have been having some hot, hot sex.

Now, I found all this rather surprising because the movie plot is pretty much the same as the book, but I don't remember having this same reaction when Cormac McCarthy told it.  He is usually quite an astute observer of sexual dynamics (an ill-fated comment I made just before popping in the DVD).  I'll have to go re-read the book.

I also know there was a stronger religious component to the book, and the father basically create a religion of survival to help sustain the child and prepare him for a time when the father might no longer be around.  It wasn't believable in the movie.

The Road is a stunning visual spectacle, and almost worth watching for that alone.  What made the movie a disappointment was the unrealistic portrayal of human social dynamics under survival conditions.  It seems like the director could imagine what a devastated physical landscape might look like, and assumed the same emotional devastation in the characters.  He wasn't as successful at conveying the underlying thread of human resilience that McCarthy had woven through the post-apocalyptic landscape: father and son keeping the fire alive. 

The book was about the father's strength, the movie was about everyone's weakness.

Taken

Taken stars Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, a former CIA agent who is divorced from his wife and is trying to re-establish a relationship with his 17-year old daughter.  Mills has left his job to move closer to her in LA, but he is overshadowed by the new step-father, an obscenely wealthy man who seems to be doing a terrific job of turning the daughter into an entitled brat. The daughter goes on a trip to Paris with a friend, they promptly get kidnapped, and Mills has only a few days to find her captors before she faces an unpleasant fate.  The movie follows Mills to Paris as he takes justice into his own hands.

Like in The Road, the male lead has a broken marriage in his past -- this time, due to divorce.

Initially, it's not clear why Mills and his wife got divorced.  At first, before you know he is a former special agent, he comes off as a washed-up loser.  But in a brilliant scene while barbecuing with his buddies -- who also seem like washed-up losers -- you learn they are all secret agents.  The sex appeal of these men goes shoots through the roof -- from 4's to 9's in three lines of dialog.  It's masterful.

At that point, you want to dislike the ex-wife for running off with obscenely rich guy.  But then a scene later, you learn that Mills had never been home during their marriage, always away on missions, and you start to sympathize with the wife.  A marriage when the husband is never there isn't much of a marriage.  That is just one characteristic example of the complicated, subtle, and shifting social dynamics throughout the movie.

Another example is the relationship between Mills and his daughter, which is a push and pull of emotions.  You want to love her as much as Mills does -- and you can see glimpses of why he loves her -- but her occasionally spoiled behavior is off-putting, making her an (almost) unsympathetic character.  Needless to say, usually when someone is kidnapped in a movie, they are entirely sympathetic.

So the daughter goes to Paris, gets kidnapped, and then Mills kicks ass the rest of the way.  And while he kicks ass, he doesn't exactly follow the Geneva Conventions (why some critics didn't like it).  It's not a spoiler to say there's a happy ending.  And in the end, you see how Mills' ex-wife becomes sexually attracted to him again (subtley, unspoken), how Mills has re-established his status over the step-father, and how he has re-built his relationship with his daughter.

Taken is full of standard action movie devices that are completely unrealistic: 96-hour deadlines, unbelievable car chases, out-numbered combat scenes, and evil conspiracies.  But what makes the movie shine are the constantly shifting social and sexual dynamics, and how the movie captures the complicated realities of divorce for all involved.

The Road had a novel premise, but the human element fell flat -- the director took a brilliant novel about the strength of a father and son surviving in the harshest conditions imaginable, and yet somehow managed to make them seem weak.  That's why the movie failed.

If you can only watch one, watch Taken.  But read The Road.