Vintage

After the amazing transformation from book to movie of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men by the Coen brothers there was ample reason to hope that another McCarthy novel could be equally successfully adapted. Of course, in the end that ended up not being true of The Road, the post-apocalyptic father and son road trip film starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron.

In fairness, The Road was not the type of book that naturally lends itself to being made into a film. It contains relatively little action and scant amounts of dialogue. The bulk of the story is Viggo and his son – neither of whom are given names – walking along a road (go figure) scrounging for food and trying to find shelter, at least temporarily, while hoping not to run into the more dangerous vagabonds traveling along the same road. They have their share of luck both good and bad. From encounters with jerks who threaten their lives and flip their precious shopping cart to the discovery of an underground bunker full of non-perishable food items and a well-placed Coke machine, there were several moments of conflict; just not enough to keep an audience entertained.

These adventures are interspersed with flashbacks of Viggo’s time with his now deceased wife – Theron’s also-unnamed character – from before shit-hit-the-fan and man and son had to set out towards the ocean for some unclear reason. Such scenes had to be added and elongated for the film because there weren’t all that many in the book and, as we all know any film needs a strong female lead. That might have been the first clue that maybe this film was left better off in print form alone. Another reason is that anyone who read the book – which is a very large group of people – knew right off the bat that it would in no way be equaled as a film. Surely the filmmakers counted on pure curiosity from people wondering how the film would turn out to get them some sort of respectable draw at the box office. But really, this film, like so many other novels-cum-films, paled greatly in comparison with the original work.

It’s oftentimes said that a picture is worth a thousand words. That very well may be true, but perhaps not necessarily when it comes to on-screen adaptations of works of literature. A book like The Road, in which there’s not a whole lot of action, gains popularity because of the words themselves. The author’s use of imagery, tone and any and all other literary elements as well as the attention to detail allowed in each paragraph and sentence is what truly sets a work apart. A picture may be worth a thousand words but when it comes to putting pictures to what is written on a page, the exact words are rarely if ever captured.