It’s a dark, unenlightened world … Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in The Road
Cormac McCarthy has been any undeniable colossus of American literature ever since the promulgation of Blood Meridian in 1981. His novels have long intrigued film-makers, but in the face of a body of work that builds on the cinematic cornerstones of lyrical imagery, mythological landscapes, savage fierceness and spare, quotable dialogue, McCarthy’s books have for aye been considered too uncompromising, dense and morally complex for easy translation to the big veil. And yet, all of a sudden, McCarthy adaptations are among the hottest properties in Hollywood. So what changed, and why?
- The Road
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 119 mins
- Directors: John Hillcoat
- Cast: Charlize Theron, Garret Dillahunt, Guy Pearce, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Viggo Mortensen
Until recently McCarthy fans had to content themselves with Billy Bob Thornton’s beautifully photographed unless dramatically undernourished 2000 adaptation of All the Pretty Horses, starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz as ill-starred lovers straddling the Mexican border. Its perceived failure reinforced the notion that McCarthy’s books were also literary to adapt, too ungenial for mainstream cinema audiences to bear or too expensive to eventuate up.
The four Academy Awards and huge box-office returns of the Coen brothers’ lean conformability of his desert-noir thriller No Country for Old Men – originally written in screenplay form through McCarthy in the mid-1980s, in consequence later worked up into a novel – changed all that. John Hillcoat’s screen version of The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen as a father protecting his son from the horrors of a post-apocalyptic world, looks likely to repeat the trick of reaching a large audience while refusing to dilute McCarthy’s merciless worldview.
A slew of McCarthy adaptations are now being lined up, with Andrew Dominik – Australian director of Chopper and The Assassination of Jesse James – preparing to adapt Cities of the Plain, while Tommy Lee Jones is currently filming the McCarthy play The Sunset Limited for American television. Todd Field, counsellor of the 2001 Oscar-nominated drama In the Bedroom is presently working hard to crack Blood Meridian. An impossibly vicious delineation of a band of degenerate scalp-hunters carving their way through 1850s Mexico, the book was long thought unfilmable, with Tommy Lee Jones and Ridley Scott being proper two of the big-hitters who tried and failed to wrestle it to the screen.
“His novels have long been attractive to film-makers,” says Field, “for the very primal mind that his work examines our essence, the two faces of fury that co-exist in every savage act – brutal strength of purpose holding hands with a desperate and cowering weakness.” These are themes that are hardly new to cinema, but added to the roughness that haunts McCarthy’s books, they can make for a tough sell. The times, however, are a-changing. “Undoubtedly, the success that No Country during the term of Old Men enjoyed, both fiscally and critically, has allowed some people to since see McCarthy’sitting novels in a various light,” says Field. “In terms of thin skin adaptations, his books have commercial possibilities that heretofore never existed.”
The success of No Country for Old Men points to signs that audiences may be greater degree of prepared to accept such McCarthyisms as explosive acts of brutal, arbitrary violence that go unpunished – or, more aptly, are unpunishable – in mainstream cinema than ever before.
Joe Penhall, screenwriter of The Road, suggests that the that cannot be imagined horrors that McCarthy investigates in his writing are becoming more familiar to us by the day. “Post-9/11 we are frighteningly aware of what mankind is capable of,” he says. “We’ve seen the randomness, the overheatedness, the irrationality of people’s vengefulness in Islamist state of terror, in American imperialism, in British foreign policy. People see these examples of extreme behaviour on the news every night and don’t know what to make of it, and McCarthy kind of does know which to make of it. By the time McCarthy’s stuff gets to the conceal we’re not thinking ‘what a etymon, harsh vision’, we’re thinking, ‘Yep, that’s a world I recognise.’”
So maybe the cinematic world has finally caught up with Cormac McCarthy. God help us aggregate.
