[rating=9.00]
“The road, for me, is not an adventure. It’s like going to the toilet. It’s just something I have to do.”
The strength of dabbling in absurdity is that, once presented with the opportunity to explore the mundane, the mundanity seems downright surreal. “The Road: Part One” is buoyed by an increasingly frustrated Louie, seemingly irreversibly disgusted with touring life — its only saving grace being the performances themselves. We can imagine a younger Louie reveling in the spoils of the vast American landscape, but that Louie is now covered in years of experience, disappointment, and — as evidenced here — an acute case of impending jadedness.
“The Road: Part One” embraces subtle escalation by more or less building itself around a conversation between Louie and Mike, his naive and entirely not jaded driver whose aloof greeting at the airport lays the groundwork of annoyance which eventually births Louie’s diatribe on the pain of small talk and the destructive force of general indifference. Though Mike responds by crying, Louie’s attempt at explaining his aversion to making new friends on the road is at least as noble as such an admission could ever be. Of course, Louie’s explanation of this aversion provides a raw connection between the comedian and his driver — though certainly not the sort of connection Mike had imagined.
Can we really blame Louie? The short answer is no; the long answer is “no, but…” — small talk is a waste of time, but only a waste of time as egregious as all other wastes of time in which we, and Louie, actively engage. When Louie loses his luggage near the end of “The Road: Part One” at the Atlanta airport and then just buys a new, almost identical piece of luggage and a stack of black t-shirts for the continued journey ahead, it’s hard not to take this as something a bit more than just the obvious. We might risk the journey to shed our baggage, but we’ll simply just gain new baggage along the way.
A continual toilet, indeed.
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