Adapting Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Editor’s Notes: The Counsellor opens in theatres tomorrow, October 25th.

The Counsellor marks Cormac McCarthy’s venture into screenwriting. While a number of his novels have been adapted to the screen, McCarthy has never had sole input into the screenplay – the closest he came was holing up with the Coen brothers to co-pen the script for No Country for Old Men. That movie aside, we must question whether or not McCarthy’s novels transition well to the screen. Ostensibly, they should. His novels read like film treatments. Each moment is plotted out in meticulous detail, so much so that seconds on screen take pages. The genius of McCarthy is that these many pages don’t elicit boredom. His cadence moves at a rapid-fire click while his assonance and alliteration prohibit the reader from breaking free of the rhythm of ominous and nefarious moments.

His novels read like film treatments. Each moment is plotted out in meticulous detail, so much so that seconds on screen take pages. The genius of McCarthy is that these many pages don’t elicit boredom.

However, with the exception of No Country, these moments and rhythms are often lost in translation, something that is most obvious in the 2009 adaptation of The Road. Admittedly, the problems of adaptation to not belong solely to The Road, but the adaptation of McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel – as it reads so much like a film treatment – offers an indictment of the film industry’s inability to adapt without playing down to their audience.

What I mean to suggest here is that the adaptation of The Road is ruined by the studio’s refusal to embrace the novel’s ethos. Changing the message of the novel is not venal and often works out for the better when it provides two different perspectives that center on the same characters. Stanley Kubrick is famous (or notorious) for his adaptations that differ – often greatly – from their source materials. The common threads in his and Stephen King’s The Shining are the characters’ names and their presence in a hotel, but the source of the haunting and the overall development of characters are polar opposites. To a lesser extent, Kubrick’s reading of A Clockwork Orange varies from Burgess’ novel, and his film version of Lolita is Lolita in there is a young girl – albeit fairly older than in the novel – named Lolita and she is pursued by – a much older – Humbert Humbert. Kubrick is not the only auteur to take such liberties with adaptation. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood is based – quite literally on a one-and-a-half page excerpt of Upton Sinclair’s 500-page novel, Oil.

However, an adaptation does disservice to its source material when its adaptive difference are solely there to commercialize it and make it palatable to the masses, which is what The Road does.

This is not to say that The Road lacks all merit. The performances is decent. Viggo Mortensen is believable as a man who survives solely because of his warrant, his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Smit McPhee is also fine, though a bit whinier than the boy in McCarthy’s novel.

All in all, the adaptation suffers from the need to satiate audiences, the misunderstanding that the end of days needs to be exciting, and the belief that an audience can’t infer the gravity of silence on the big screen.

But performances aside, the film refuses to adopt the nuances of the novel that make it superb. Simply put, the film version of The Road exemplifies the need to make something from nothing The problem here is that the nothing of McCarthy’s The Road is vital to its power. McCarthy’s work pits the desire to survive against the presence and fate of nothingness, thus posing the question: why do we push to survive if survival is ultimately futile?

Perhaps this theme is one that is simply too depressing to subject audiences to for two hours. Or perhaps there was worry that watching a father and son for two hours would not generate $270 million dollars.

Regardless, the natural urge to survive is often lost in the film The Road. Granted, the need to survive is apparent. The landscape is gray, burnt, and barren. Eviscerated remains line the road, the father and son get increasingly dirtier and emaciated. Cannibals are often present as is the paranoia that accompanies isolation.

However, the mysterious urge to survive in a world plagued by devastation is missing and is often replaced by Mortensen’s voice over and unnecessary dialog between the father and son. This is the primary difference between the film and the novel. In McCarthy’s work, the text is consumed by the description of the setting and the sparse dialog becomes almost indistinguishable from the characters’ surroundings. In effect, McCarthy paints a picture of action and describes each movement, while director John Hillcoat and writer Joe Penhall choose to tell us what is going on in the father and son’s head. In effect, the exposition heightens melodrama and decreases the study of survival. To have the father say, “I’ll kill anyone that touches you, cause that’s my job,” seems redundant when we can see the father perform the role of hunter, gatherer, and protector. The father’s lament, “When I have nothing else, I try to dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings,” is a beautiful line, but one that could be summed up by an emerging smile while watching his boy drink a Coca Cola for the first – and presumably only – time.

Furthermore, the persistent existence of elegiac violins (to symbolize hardship and sympathy) and guitar / synthesizer scranner (to show moments of suspense) detract from the sense of isolation, as if the filmmakers have little faith in the actual content of the tale. What I mean to suggest here is there is no soundtrack to isolation. There is nothing, and this is from where the isolation stems.

All in all, the adaptation suffers from the need to satiate audiences, the misunderstanding that the end of days needs to be exciting, and the belief that an audience can’t infer the gravity of silence on the big screen.

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Dustin Freeley

Staff Film Critic. Visit my personal blog at moviesaboutgladiators.com

Dustin Freeley has been a lecturer in the English departments of Hunter College, Berkeley College, and the College of New Rochelle. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society and co-founder of the website MoviesAboutGladiators.com.

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