Posted by
BLOGASSAULT on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 7:25:11 PM
I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's book The Road in short order, finding it hard to set it down. In the
LA Times On The Set section writer John Horn talks with the people who are making the movie version. It is always funny how the book is never good enough for a movie. They have to not only change things but add them too, and this one is no different.
WITH THE incessant threats -- cannibals, thieves, starvation, dehydration, hypothermia -- the Man and the Boy face, it would seem unnecessary to make their survival even more difficult, but that's precisely what Penhall ("Enduring Love") and Hillcoat chose to do.
The film's most obvious departure from the book -- outside of the elimination of the novel's vaguely nuclear "long shear of light" that stopped clocks at 1:17 -- is its redoubling of the book's fleeting flashbacks of the Man and his final days with his desperate and suicidal wife (Charlize Theron). Throughout the movie, the filmmakers also have amplified McCarthy's already vast peril.
The book told a story that delved into the relationships of a father and son and the difficulties and depression of life after all ways of sustaining it is left to scavaging. But what it dealt with is living. Staying alive for your son, and keeping life sacred. As this article says, it tells a different stories to different people. But one thing this story doesn't tell is this;
So even as the filmmakers were ratcheting up the story's danger and despair, they also were pushing to make the movie as uplifting as possible, emphasizing its intrinsic father-son love story and promoting the notion that the Boy embodies some sort of messiah. Along the way, movie version also became much less a story about a post-nuclear catastrophe and more a tale of climate change and a dying planet.
Climate change never once entered my mind while reading this book. Yet, this books story line makes it easy to turn a nuclear holocaust into climate change. You can't get a movie funded in Hollywood without mentioning climate change, global warming, or taking a stab at President Bush.