‘The Road’: The Book To Screenplay Comparison

A bunch of new photos from “The Road” hit the web last week so we thought this was as good a time as any to talk about the film since we just finished the book penned by Cormac McCarthy (“No Country For Old Men,” “All The Pretty Horses”) and the script adapted by Joe Penhall.

Let’s start with McCarthy’s novel which surely some of you have read and some of you haven’t. As you’ve at least probably heard, the book centers on a father and son relationship in a post-apocalyptic landscape that is pitch-gray, bleak, dilapidated and scorched from some unnamed calamity. Something happened to the earth, but a nuclear fallout, some sort of natural disaster? The novel wisely never never says what was responsible for the catastrophe.

The story picks up in the middle of an austere travelogue, as an unnamed father (to be played by Viggo Mortensen in the film) and his around-nine to-ten-year old son (Australian newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) – journey to the West Coast in hopes that the warmer climate will keep them alive. The planet (or at least the U.S., it’s hard to say if it’s the whole world) is covered in ash and soot that obscures the sun, the moon and is like a sickly snow draping everything.

And that’s basically the tale. There’s no one around for miles and they’re not even sure other people really exist. They wander around for what seems like months before they encounter a living soul, but slowly and surely they start to come upon small glimpses of other life; mostly desperate road dog congregations that survive by theft, brute force and gruesome cannibalism. It’s a climate of desperation and anyone will take anything they can get to survive.

As they get closer to the coast, both father and son become ill and most of the time they are emaciated and perennially starving. Food, oil, and all basic amenities are scarce and everything one could possibly use from stores, gas stations and homes has been looted, pillaged and exhausted; any kind of resource be it even basic clothing is a commodity and worth being killed over. Needless to say it’s a treacherous terrain to be out in the open, much less the open road.

But the heart of the story is a tender relationship between a man and his child, it’s a love story in the most purest sense of the word. They are each others world and one cannot imagine existing without the other. The boys mother is long gone and while there are brief allusions to her death and dream sequences where she appears, her presence is minimal at best. The child is constantly in terror and fear and when the man needs to act his son is usually petrified, so he tries to instill him the idea that they are the “good guys” that they have the “fire” within each other and everything they do is righteous no matter if it seems off. But the child is wise and acts as the man’s barometer for goodness; he has an empathetic, kind soul and each pathetic and decrepit person they meet the boy is willing to meet with compassion, while the man – for the sake of survival – treats everyone with complete apprehension and aggression.

As for the script itself, well, screenplays are always truncated forms of films and they have to be for time constraints. You can never compare a book to a film, because they’re different mediums and the best you can ask is, ‘is it a good adaptation?’ and that’s unclear at first.

Having read the book, one can’t help but feel like the screenplay feels like a squeezed together greatest-hits of the key and most engaging moments of the book and well, that’s what film adaptations essentially are, but one can’t help but being slightly put-off by it.

Another element that’s different is prominent inclusions and flashbacks to the wife (Charlize Theron) in the novel that are obviously fleshed out to imbue more sympathy to the characters, but feel a little false and slightly manipulative.

The first half of the script – maybe this was an adjustment period – felt clunky and like the Cliff Notes of the novel. The desolate and barren landscape of the book seems to be cluttered with other road stragglers, scavengers and thieves almost immediately. Somewhere near the second half though, “The Road” starts to feel like a spot-on adaptation of the novel, adhering almost as closely to it as the Coen Brothers’ did with “No Country For Old Men” (and as adaptations go that was super faithful aside from a few elements near the conclusion).

Like any movie and in the end, it’ll all be in the execution. The pictures released do seem to capture the filthy and gloomy gray aura of the novel which at times feels like a rancid ache of wet rotten wood or the soot of a Chernobyl. Directed by former video director, Australian John Hillcoat, it makes sense that the filmmaker has tapped Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (also Aussies) are composing the score. Their work on “The Assassination of Jesse James” was sublime, but they have already worked together. Hillcoat directed “The Proposition,” a screenplay that Nick Cave himself wrote (Ellis and he composed that score too) and actually lensed Cave videos before he got his start in feature-length films.

“The Road” doesn’t look like it will appear at any of the fall film festivals (there’s always the unpredictable Telluride), but it’s due November 11 and also features brief appearances by Michael K. Williams (Omar from “The Wire”), Guy Pearce (“Memento,” “The Proposition”) and Robert Duvall.