The first time I read Cormac McCarthy’s remarkable and haunting end-of-the-world novel ‘The Road’, I had the conflicting feelings that the novel was at once ripe for movie adaptation but also that doing so would be a massive challenge. The book is so bleak and restricted of colour and has few characters, other than the father and son, it would take a brave director to do it justice.

McCarthy’s novel is an unflinching and powerful work of art. The use of language is simple but its explorations of the deepest human emotions from love to despair are far reaching. McCarthy’s world is an America coated in ash, a grey and barren wasteland where an unexplained disaster has left few survivors. Those that do survive, walk the road looking for anything to eat from dusty tins of fruit to humans themselves.

Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat is the man given the task and privilege of adapting McCarthy’s novel and the results are mixed. Aesthetically, the film presents the world of ‘The Road’ much as I imagined it from the novel. The America of the film is a vast, grey unforgiving wasteland. Buildings are dilapidated, cars are burnt out, the skeletal remains of creatures long dead, strewn along roadsides and ash, a dead grey coating on all the eye can see, acts as an overriding symbol both metaphorically and literally, of the state of the land and civilisation and the minds of the father (Viggo Mortnesen) and son (Kodi Smitt-McPhee) who must navigate it. 

Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe is the man responsible for the remarkable but entirely appropriate palette of the film. Other than the flashbacks of the father’s life before the great apocalypse, the film is an almost relentless barrage of scenes involving the father and the son as they move toward the coast in a fruitless bid to find warmth and ‘good guys’- those people not resorting to cannibalism to survive. The colour of the scenes showing father and son on the road are drenched by Aguirresarobe in differing shades of grey, brown and black. The rain, howling wind and the sounds of thunder and lightning, all reminders of the world’s doom-laden scenario, are constant presences. The photography is perfect and for me remains the finest aspect of the film as it captures the way I saw the novel in my mind.

The overuse of flashbacks in the film is where I begin to find faults in Hillcoat’s vision.  As I believe I have established in this article, McCarthy’s novel is bleak and frankly rather depressing. A novel focusing on two starving characters in a grey world shrouded in dust and dirt always has the propensity to be so. However, these qualities and moods of the novel should not necessarily be seen as a negative. I never understand when people say, ‘I’m not sure I want to see or read a particular film or book because it looks and sounds really depressing.’ Yes, The Road is a depressing tale but some things we see and read are uplifting and some bring us down. Art exists to elicit emotions within us all but there is no rule that says it must make us happy or not depress us.

Anyway, I digress. My point is, Hillcoat’s departures from the novel by regularly employing flashbacks of the father and son’s home-life with the wife and mother played by CharlizeTheron in scenes that are nearly all filled with warm glowing shades of colour, shows his agenda to give audiences some relief from the scenes involving the desperate plight of the characters as they move along the Road. The novel does sparingly recall moments before the apocalypse was at hand as the father thinks of his wife with fondness but these moments are certainly not used as liberally as they are in the film. These scenes disappointed me initially as they strayed from the novel, something the Coen Brothers never did when adapting ‘No Country For Old Men’, but also as I felt, either due to pressure from Hollywood executives or from his own fears, John Hillcoat had copped out somewhat. The Road, to reemphasize, is a dark and bleak tale of the world ending and if the director or studio executives don’t feel the audiences can handle this, then the film should not be made in the first place.

Hillcoat’s countryman Nick Cave of the Bad Seeds, is responsible for composing the film’s score and I’m afraid to say his work here lends an aspect of weakness to the film. Those scenes that are not amongst the most deeply emotional and heart-wrenching are scored simply, minimally and well, but scenes such as Theron’s exit and death or the scenes of tenderness between the father and son and the father’s death are accompanied by overly sentimental high notes and strings. It is as though Cave is reminding the audience that these scenes in particular are where we should feel tearful and sad. This adds a patronising quality to the film and provides an uncomfortable sense that we are being manipulated into feeling certain emotions at different times. The performances and imagery of such scenes are powerful enough within their own right not to require such musical sentimentality to remind us, the viewers, how we should be feeling.

Overall, Hillcoat’s adaptation has elements to recommend it and similarly elements that render it weak. It is visually where the film is at its most impressive. Readers of my previous article on this site will be aware that I’m not CGI’s biggest fan but those shots of the destroyed, burnt-out towns that employ the technique are done both sparingly and impressively. The sense of the father and son’s isolation in a vast emptiness where millions of people once lived is vividly exposed in many of the vast long shots in the film and does provide a sense of the awesome scale of the apocalypse’s destruction. 

The Road is letdown by its tendency to veer towards sentimentality. The novel’s subject matter focuses on deeply traumatic and dispiriting events but the sense of despair, love, fear and tenderness the characters encounter as well as the ultimate futility of the characters’ journey could have been conveyed to audiences without forcing the issue via emotional reminders throughout and without equating to basic sentimentality. A good film but not a great film. I will end with the old favourite truism- the book is better.

o

Words by Charlie Graham-Dixon, Still taken from the move “The Road”