The Road Bum

The Road was released on DVD today and is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Cormac McCarthy, the same author of No Country for Old Men. When I read The Road I considered it to be one of the best books I ever had the pleasure of opening. It literally gave me chills. The relationship between father and son, and their will to live was both unnerving and inspiring. The biggest challenge for anyone when adapting a successful book is capturing the same essence that made the book a success in the first place. It is a rare occasion that an adaptation can recreate the imagination of an author or the reader. When I first learned of the desire to adapt The Road in a movie I knew it would not be an easy project considering the nature of the story, the settings, or the minimal characters, so I could only hope that the heart of the story would be captured and everything else would fall into place.

Viggo Mortenson plays a man traveling through a post-apocalyptic America. You never really now what happened, or why, you are just forced to be engulfed in this new grey world just as they are. The man’s only job is to protect his son from this destitute land, and from the few survivors that are forced to cannibalism to survive. Along the way the man and his son encounter a band of cannibals that force him to use one of the last two bullets he has left in his gun. The bullets that they intended to commit suicide with once all hope was lost. Eventually their journey is set on the reaching the coast. The father knows that there is nothing there to help them, but also knows that he needs to continuously give his son hope. It is this hope that will give them their much needed will to live. The man knows that his only hope for peace is to give his son the skills to survive once he is gone. Which he knows in his heart is soon.

The movie does take some license by giving the man’s wife an expanded role in their back story, but I don’t think that it gave anything to the story of the man or his journey. In the book she was hardly ever mentioned, and it was that mystery of her absence that made their relationship so heartfelt.

Other then that I believe director John Hillcoat tries to stay true to the book, despite a few other changes and omissions, but sometimes there is just no way to capture the purity of words from these pages, or the vast universe that is the readers imagination. It’s no wonder why there are so few successful adaptations of novels, but when done correctly it can really be an amazing journey. The movie wasn't bad but, I really wanted it to live up to my experience reading it, but unfortunately, it didn’t. So maybe I’ll just go ahead and read the book again.