Some thoughts on The Road
JA
February 10
As a huge fan of Cormac McCathy’s original novel, I was eagerly awaiting John Hillcoat’s film version of the The Road, which has at last been released in Australia two months after its US premiere. Adaptations are tricky things – on the one hand, they need convey something like the emotional heart of the text, whether this be a mood or a theme, or even something as small as a scrap of dialogue. On the other, they need to be aware that screen and paper are two markedly different mediums, and so be brave enough to digress, change and bastardise if necessary. Hillcoat does both in his version of The Road and results are at once powerful and jarring.
Having directed The Proposition, which in its own way was also a brutal, bloodied meditation on family and love in a ravaged landscape, Hillcoat was probably a natural choice to take over the reins for The Road. As Mark Mordue wrote in the December ALR, the backdrop is a wonderfully imagined wasteland – bleak and rubbled, yet restrained enough in its use of CGI to remain frighteningly close to what we know. Hillcoat and his team borrowed as much from real life as they could – eight miles of abandoned highway in Pennsylvania, locations in post-Katrina devastated New Orleans, even plumes of smoke scissored and pasted from shots of September 11.
The movie also thankfully stays true to the tone of the book – slow-burning, repetitive, poetic. The threat of cannibalism, something that for me was suggested rather obliquely in the book, is brought into sharp and bloody relief. Hillcoat chooses to heighten these scenes just a fraction, but far from allowing the film to descend into cheap action, this underscores the terror faced by the man (Viggo Mortensen) and the boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and the very real choice of suicide.
Still though, no rendition can be perfect (and my love for the book probably means that the bar was set extraordinarily high). For all the deftness of scenery and mood, parts of the film felt disjointed. In the book, the internal narrative of the man made great use of blasted, biblical language and even the actual dialogue, which was few and far between, had great power in its spareness. But for some reason when translated onto screen, this sometimes felt forced and overdone, almost as if the writers were too concerned with exposition and trying to make sure that the audience ‘kept up’ than with feel. Equally, I couldn’t help but find the flow, which was so easy and contemplative in McCarthy’s novel, a little choppy – more like a series of beautiful shot mini-tragedies than an ongoing journey into the hopeless unknown.
Any more criticism would probably act as a spoiler, so I’ll close in agreement with this snippet from Margaret and David, who incidentally gave it four stars apiece: ‘nothing could really match the absolute gripping nature of the read, even though this film gives it a very good shot’.
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Comments
10 Feb 10 at 13:27
Interesting your response to the film. I suspect mine would be similar - but I don't plan to see the film of 'The Road', because I loved the book so much.
While I can understand the allure of turning 'The Road' into a film - although I'd way rather see 'Blood Meridian' as a film - for me fiction/narrative that works so much like poetry is best left in its original form - or, like 'Heart of Darkness', which despite all its postcolonial problems is still for me an incredibly haunting poetic novel, is taken somewhere completely different when adapted to the screen, ie 'Apocalypse Now'. And Coppola is a genius equal to the task.
...10 Feb 10 at 15:42
I agree that it seemed disjointed. There were some beautiful shots in there that he didn't linger long enough on. My two main problems were that I felt I was watching a film I had already seen, having such a vivid memory of the book, and also the ending, which frustratingly we can't talk about without spoiling it for anyone who hasn't seen it! But needless to say I felt it undermined much of the film, and made no practical sense.
...10 Feb 10 at 16:26
Yes I agree about the ending Chris - but can't say anymore so as not to ruin it for those still wanting to go! Perhaps we'll do a post-script discussion with spoiler warnings much later...
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