Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is a real tour de force and a thing of beauty.
It works pretty perfectly at the level of its sentences, building a picture of a desolated world and an essence of human closeness that might struggle to survive when all else is gone.
It is a highly literary work, biblical in its cadences and naked in the way it approaches its theme. It was rightly praised on publication in 2006 and will stand the test of time.
The film version is a disaster. While borrowing the book’s classy sonorousness, and sticking close to its atmospherics and plot, it somehow fails to raise itself above the ground.
Like Mad Max on Mogadon, the film is enraptured with its own depressiveness, coming on like the worst New Year hangover you’ve ever had. It had no choice but to be bleak, but somehow — unlike the book — the bleakness is here weighted down with cliché.
I can’t explain it — Joe Penhall is a very gifted adapter, John Hillcoat is an interesting director, Viggo Mortensen is a fine actor, and the material, as I said, is first rate — but somehow the film trudges damply along and is relentlessly grey.
I think the challenge resided in the extreme literary nature of the thing. McCarthy is often adapted, and sometimes quite effectively (All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men), but this time the effort to do justice to the book has proved overwhelming.
It’s a greater challenge, too, because the material is about as tied to its original voicing as Waiting for Godot. (Imagine what a film of that might be like.)
Things that the prose can do very quietly and devastatingly are approached in the film only via horror-film mechanics, assassins and cannibals seeming to appear not out of any mysterious, dehumanised conditions but from the halls of Central Casting.
This won’t stop many from finding the film to be a noble simulacrum of a great book. Oscars and plaudits are likely to come its way, but looked at without prejudice, the film is a case study in how not every literary work is suitable for film adaptation.
What was poetic in the novel often seems pretentious on screen; what was tender and slow in the book often seems icky and ponderous in the film.
Every film project is a dream of possibility and there is talent and hope all over The Road.
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But for me the film turns out to be a study in stagnation, not revelation, and a disappointing, unexpected example of how the best road is sometimes the one not taken.
The Road
Cert: 15
