Double feature: The Book of Eli and The Road

Two post-apocalyptic visions. Only one of them reminds me of Mad Max.

From the shared brain of the Hughes Brothers comes The Book of Eli, a paper-thin allegory about a wandering Jew (except he's a Christian) who roams the land in search of a place to lay down his Bible. (Side note: if God's voice came booming from the sky and ordered you to go West, to an undisclosed location, wouldn't you expect Him to say where this place is, exactly? But no, He always instructs His followers to "go, uh, somewhere over there.")

So where to begin? The Hughes Brothers never were very tactful or subtle, but The Book of Eli may as well be a comic book. (It even looks like one.) It has the unabashed lack of realism within realism that riles my inner Samuel Johnson. In a battle scene, for example, painstaking effects simulate a gun's scatter-shot; forty-five minutes later, one errant bullet from the buckshot, lodged in the archvillain's leg, causing gangrene, proves a respect for and attention to real-life consequences. But then, between these scenes, a transport van--with no seat belts, mind you--flips over about twenty times, rights itself, and steadies. Out walks our heroine, unharmed. Fuck that. I've had to sit through all-day defensive driving courses, okay, and I know that velocity transfers, and when you're sitting inside a car that's twirling around like a hyperactive toddler in a spin-cycle, you're gonna look like old hamburger. Also, the same girl, in an earlier scene, narrowly escapes a rape in the lonely high-desert when Denzel Washington spears two evil-doers from a hundred yards. (This selective and predatory approach to cause-and-effect is why I so loathe the Jason Bourne trilogy.)

But worse than the movie's convenience-realism is its transparent agenda. The plot reads like a Sunday School sermon fancied up with guns and cannibals. Also, the absurd stab at profundity, when the hero, in a bit of amateur transubstantiation, turns out to be the very book he carries. . . which is the Bible, did I mention that? Come, now. This is John's Gospel as an action movie? The word made flesh with Al Green on an iPod? Gay. It's like one of those cringing John Ashbery jokes in Self-Portrait. Also, I get the feeling that a lot of material wound up on the cutting-room floor. Mind you, I'm not complaining. The only thing this movie does right is not run very long. But we welcome transitions.

Did anyone see that cardboard, piece of shit Bruce Willis standard Last Man Standing? Well, The Book of Eli reminded me of that, and of Mad Max, of course. It's hard news, learning that your movie is worse than some forgotten third-rate Bruce Willis filler from the late 90s. But as Sartre wrote, and as Eli confirms, we each get the war we deserve. D

Cormac McCarthy's The Road, like his Blood Meridian, is a dystopic dream-fever of violence and useless human love. The book is harsh and impolite but in its reticence and cold thinking it shows respect for life's cruelties, and gratitude for its mercies, however arbitrary and exhaustible they may be. As a film, The Road works well, so long as you know what not to expect: moral truths and just resolutions. Very little happens--although, in a sense, too much happens--and our only genuine contact with the world of the characters comes in The Man, a reluctant survivalist who, like Ratzo Rizzo, spends most of his time coughing, and then sleeping, and then being dead. But rather than explain all the ways in which The Road is like Midnight Cowboy after the nuclear winter, I'll contrast of few of its qualities with The Book of Eli.

Eli: only bad guys get eaten.

Road: everybody gets eaten.

Eli: hero becomes the King James Bible, then dies.

Road: hero dies.

Eli: despite living in a soapless world, women look clean and well-groomed.

Road: there are no women, because the last one was raped and eaten.

Eli: folks got lots of muscle, teeth, and shoes for being itinerant, starving marauders

Road: folks got kidney failure and tuberculosis.

Eli: movie ends with a skinny girl picking up a sword to wield at tyranny and injustice.

Road: movie ends.

So, my verdict on The Road should be obvious. But let me add one final point in its favor. Flashbacks usually are a crutch, at best, and a pernicious lie, at worst, but in The Road they really carve up the present into jagged, miserable chunks of memory. The next time I see a flashback in a movie, if it doesn't recall the time when The Man's wife walks out into the woods to kill herself, because she can't stand to live in a world without flowers, well, I may just turn that movie off.

Also, The Road has Omar in it. Omar stealing a shopping cart full of food. Omar standing in the wilderness naked as a jay. With a knife. And a shopping cart. B+

Slothrop: Koko loathing the Bourne trilogy is a D at best. I don't care if Care Bears triple-flipped like ninjas to save the day at each and every last perilous moment, all those films have Matt Damon and because its a trilogy that means that's three Matt Damons, which means that's three more Matt Damons than most other movies, which means you say Thank You and Please, May I Have Another.

Koko: Did you not read the Invictus review? That movie also had Matt Damon. Sometimes he isn't enough.

Slothrop: My aim here is not to be persnickety for this is but a minor quibble; however, Inviticus "has" Matt Damon, and the Bourne Trilogy "is" Matt Damon. It is a matter of substance measured in degrees. And so if a little Matt Damon is not enough in the former case (what director would foolishly only have "some" Matt Damon? Another reason that movie probably sucks a lot––you don't give a man a pinch of cocaine early in the night only to tell him his beer will have to suffice for the remainder of it), a lot of Matt Damon is always enough no matter how bungled and false everything else in the film might be.

Koko: Is this 1997? Are we seriously disputing the meaning of "is"? Well, guy who hasn't seen The Good Shepherd, let me quote a major player in this conversation: "I don't care if Care Bears triple-flipped like ninjas. . . all those films have Matt Damon" (italics mine). So if you're going to start laying down some Bill Clinton smoothness, I'm just saying.

Slothrop: I can and do admit when I'm wrong. And I was wrong here. It should have read "All those films is Matt Damon." Thanks for pointing out my syntactical foible. But it's quite obvious what I'm really trying to say, which is that I'm going to name all my children Matt Damon and have them watch the Bourne Trilogy instead of Sesame Street because I'll be a good father who knows best.