Much of the meaning that the viewer may extract from The Road is as a result of the absences and deadness that the movie gives off. In the post-apocalyptic planet that the father and his son go on living in, all growth has been arrested. The narrator says powerfully at the start that "soon every tree in the world will fall"; and if they don't fall, fires will consume them. There is also an glaring absence of human community, at least until the end: the few people who still exist no longer trust each other--instead they wander in packs (or in pairs in the case of the father-son), always on the alert--it's an eat or be eaten situation. Encountering this lack of life and absence of a political order makes one appreciate these things a lot more, and also makes us wary of the ugly potential of nuclear warfare (which though not revealed to be the apocalyptic cause, is the one we are familiar with and therefore, practically and for the sake of life itself, have to always be mindful of).
But the story's focus is undoubtedly the evolution of the father-son relationship, and unfortunately this was done poorly. Not only did the actors seem unfamiliar with each other (Mortgensen approaches the son more like a 'buddy' enrolled in a Big Brother program), but the director made cheap symbolic attempts to bring them together, which, by virtue of their appeal to the audience's keen sense of what a father and son relationship is supposed to be like, seemed forced. The father, for instance, lets his son take the first sip from a coke can he found on the ground. A nice gesture, and one that many of us would also do in the same situation. But the way he did it was really fake, especially considering the circumstances (alone in a barren landscape), and the fact that the director clearly planned the gesture out, and focused on it, and (this is conjectural but still) THOUGHT THAT SIMPLY BY INCLUDING IT IT WOULD CONVINCE THE AUDIENCE OF THE FATHER'S DEVOTION, sours the movie for me.
And there were several other purely symbolic and not-very-well-executed gestures done by the father to cement his relationship with his son. He bathes his son before they dine on canned goods found in a bomb shelter (the kid's probably 10 years old, some kids have pubic hair by then> strange, unnatural scene). He is hostile toward the other people they meet along 'the Road', and barks at his son when the son 'wants to keep' one of them, like you'd keep a lost puppy. This is strange and forced for a few reasons. First, its another instance of the director's emphasis on symbolic gestures. Second, we might ask: why wouldn't the father want the companionship of another person for safety? Yet we can hear the replies to this: they'd been together for so long that another person would only pose risks to their safety, they've proven they can handle the dangers. The two men the father rudely pushed aside were very clearly not dangerous, however (especially when Viggo takes the weapons!) and also in need of companionship.
All I wanted from this movie was a more natural, believable relationship between father and son, free of cheap symbolic gestures that (obviously) try to convince the reader of their closeness.
