The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a devastating look at life after the destruction and collapse of organized civilization, and a moving look at the lengths one father will go towards keeping his son safe. Told with the simplicity and power of Biblical language, the novel is alternately profoundly moving and emotionally gutting, violent yet hopeful. The film version is well-made, well acted, and looks like what one would imagine as you read the text, yet it’s missing that brutal poetry of McCarthy’s language.

The film version of The Road is case of an adaptation doing everything right, but still missing that extra spark to make it really ignite. McCarthy’s prose is deceptively simple, a muscular beast that brings to mind both the language of the church and Faulkner’s Southern Gothic cadences. No film can truly capture it, and The Road thrives upon it. But this version of the story adequate itself as best it can.

Director John Hillcoat moves the material along efficiently, making a few omissions of scenes of great depravity or disturbing findings. He creates a world in which life is quickly swirling the drain, and the roving bands of cannibals hidden amongst the ash and dwindling supplies loom largely as a new kind of all too real boogeyman. And he casts the two lead roles perfectly, Viggo Mortensen is stubborn survivalism and dogged determination to survive and protect his son. While Kodi Smit-McPhee plays the son, a character that is both strangely naïve and innocent yet highly aware that death lurks around every corner and could overtake them at any moment.

Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, and Guy Pearce appear in small supporting parts. The primary focus of The Road is on the father and son journeying towards the sea, no reason is given other than we’ve been taught that we’re supposed to go to the ocean, driving their by pioneering spirit and vague concepts like Manifest Destiny. Theron is the wife and mother of these characters, a woman who could no longer live in this world and chose to walk towards her fate one night, leaving them both behind. Duvall appears briefly in one extended scene as a blind elderly man they encounter, and Guy Pearce as a family man at the climax. These roles amount to little more than extended cameos, and occasionally feel like distractions. Why not just get unknown actors for such small parts, or were they needed to help finance the film?

I admit it, there’s a cardinal sin in reviewing a movie based on a book in how well it captures the book. An adaptation must take the essence and main points of the novel, remodel them to work in a new media, and have an artistic point-of-view. Demanding that a film be married to the text is a fools journey, and perhaps some of my reservations about The Road as a film are in direct contrast with my love for McCarthy’s writing. The film is great, but the novel has power that is more emotional. Could there have been a way for the film-makers to capture that power in the film? Perhaps, but perhaps McCarthy’s prose style is too acutely suited for the page and not the screen to correctly translate.