The Roads Not Taken Is a Plea for Compassion

At face value, Sally Potter’s new film, The Roads Not Taken, is the story of a man experiencing flashes of what would have been as he struggles with what is. Beneath, it’s a story of American apathy toward the mentally handicapped. If one scene toward the movie’s end is taken in context with Potter’s personal history—Potter’s older brother lived with Pick’s disease, a condition akin to Alzheimer’s and defined by aphasia, before passing away in 2013—then the broader intention feels clearer: The Roads Not Taken is a plea for compassion for people grappling with neurological disorders.
Leo (Javier Bardem), having left his apartment in the dead of night to go a-wandering in the streets, runs into Tazeem (Ray Jahan) and Rahim (Waleed Akhtar) who, in contrast with every other stranger he meets, treat him with kindness and dignity. They try talking with him. They wrap him in a blanket and soak his feet in warm water. Eventually, in a riskier move, they call the police for help, but all ends well and he’s soon reunited with his daughter, Molly (Elle Fanning). Given how little patience most other characters in the movie show poor Leo, Tazeem and Rahim look like superheroes. For a not-insignificant chunk of viewers, the depth of their kindness will likely come as a tonic in our worldwide moment of uncertainty and social distance.
But there’s another 70 or so minutes of movie surrounding this one touching beat, and considering the source, they’re surprisingly constipated. At her best, Potter is a decisive (if peculiar) filmmaker with graceful command over her material. In The Roads Not Taken, she’s seems stricken by indecision. Taking place over the course of a single day, the movie flits back and forth from Leo’s real life, spent with beset-upon Molly as she tries to get him to the dentist and optometrist, to his imagined lives: In Mexico with Dolores (Salma Hayek), his sweetheart, and on an island in Greece by himself, stoically trying to finish his novel. If the film invites nothing but pity for Leo’s deteriorated state, what we see of him in his fantasies makes him look like a selfish asshole. (That’s more or less how people he interacts with in these vignettes receive him, at least.)