The Road

September 11, 2007 draft:

My LOOONG awaited review of The Road. Yeah I've been putting it off for quite a while, sorry it's just the procrastinator in me. The Road isn't exactly an easy pill to swallow. Yes, it is a very faithful adaptation to the Cormac McCarthy novel. Yes, scenes and dialogue are lifted almost verbatim from the book. So is there anything wrong with the script?

Well, I can tell you one thing, the script reads very much like the novel, very much so in that scene for scene are basically lifted from the source.


I guess one of the problems with the road is that it is structurally unsound for cinema. This is a story about a man's simple quest to find safe haven for his near the pacific coast. Now in a novel, we have the ability to mess with structure, a story can be told linearly, or nonlinearly. A story could be told from multiple perspectives and can be told either in first or third person form, and on the rare occasion, second person. You can't capture that same type of feeling in movies necessarily and that usually translates to a difference in the medium. Film is a strictly visual medium. Novels are have the ability to be anything.

This is probably one of the more difficult scripts to review simply because it is the rare novel that gets turned into a film in which I have read. I loved reading The Road, but it wasn't an easy story to get through, nor was it a tough read per se. The novel was strangely compelling but I couldn't understand why I kept plowing through the novel. This is a damned if you do damned if you don't movie. What made the novel such a success to me doesn't translate well onto the screen even if it's exactly almost like the novel.

Here's the thing, if you were to say that a novel's adaptation depended on how faithful it is to the source material, then by all means, The Road is beat for beat perfect. There's not one moment in the novel that wasn't present in the script, even the little moments between father and son.

So are there problems in the script? I suppose so. I guess the main weakness in the script is that is simply due to the fact it is a script. A lot of the "charm" of the novel for me was how simple the story was, yet I don't think that sort of simplicity in storytelling would translate very well to film. It is a story about a journey, a story about hope. Of course, one reason for this is possibly because I've read it almost back to back. The script does capture the tone and feel of the novel very well, but I think that there's something lost in translation here. I can't pinpoint it for whatever reason, perhaps I will one day.

My problem with this adaptation is that it doesn't feel very dangerous. All the shocking scenes are included but it doesn't feel like the man and his child are in too much danger. Where's the constant threat of meeting the other people? The paranoia the character must have felt as he goes on a long and dangerous journey to bring his boy to safety? Moments like that are easily conveyed in the novel through the prose and exposition but in a script it's a lot more difficult as the writer would have to externalize it. The novel allowed the space and time for the dread of the post apocalyptic life to settle in. There's little of that in the script because we're constantly on the journey to reach the coast.

One of my major gripes I had with the novel was how they treated the dreams that the man had. Now this could be considered a bit of a bitch fit but I hated how that instead of having the man dream of his past, it was treated as just a flashback. One of the motifs in the script as well as in the novel was that once you start having good dreams that meant that death was near your door. The man kept having these dreams of the days with his wife just before and during the apocalypse. Every dream he had was a constant reminder of what he sacrificed to keep his child alive and it was something that gnawed away at the character in the novel. It was the perfect opportunity to use this setup and it was completely disregarded. It doesn't really impact the story in a broad sense but it's one of those little details that help brings the entire package together.

On the plus side of things, it is very faithful to the novel. I won't go into the the story as much because I've read it and I suppose people who are fans of the novel would enjoy the experience of watching the novel on the big screen. Now with all my negativity, that doesn't mean that the script wasn't well written. The action lines and descriptions were very clear and concise. The relationship between father and son is the same in the novel as it is in the script. Truly a story about the power of love and hope.

I guess if you check down all the boxes and compare and contrast, yeah it's good. I just wish I liked it as much as the novel. But alas, I think the main weakness of the script is simply because it has to compete with the novel.

3/5