The Tripod

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I watched a book, and I read a movie: Broken vistas, petrified landscapes, charred everything. Bleak and prophetic, The Road reveals a vision of a world devastated - abandoned by its maker. Mankind is left for dead, to fizzle out in a paroxysm of derelict hopes. The last bonds of human affection are tenuous, receding from the phantom of a mocking legacy. Cinestudio opened the semester with a screening of the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, directed by John Hillcoat.

The Road is a fable for modern America, an expression of the author's dwindling optimism for the human condition. I don't believe it's too generous to say that its popularity, as both book and blockbuster, indicate a confident step - an embrace - of the era of the cinematic novel. But what it may also represent is a step away from the novel. Cinema is finally able to reach the same expectations of style and imagination as its literary counterparts. Cinema and literature are refining the rules of a good story. Be clear, concise, and beautiful. The Road was all these things. The problem is, both the book and the movie had these things. The movie exemplified the strengths of the book.

On-screen dialogue was seldom, sparing, but the message wasn't in the words. That is why this book is so beautifully cinematic. As a silent movie, it still would have delivered McCarthy's message with force. The austerity was deliberate. An absent soundtrack captured the mode of the story. The movie, faithful to the story, took many of its cues from McCarthy's style, and put on a production of equal caliber.

The book is organized by blocks of text that resemble episodes or scenes more than chapters. In style, voice, dialogue, and tense, it reads more like screenwriting than novelistic writing. That's okay. That's the direction creative prose is headed. The observation that McCarthy's stylistic elements translated so eloquently to the screen is an indication of the cross-media strength of his writing, a movie friendly style.

McCarthy has proved himself over the breadth of a 30-year tenure as chronicler of the American Southwest and an educator of reality. His literary worth is permanent. His writing figureheads the fast-climbing synthesis of the novel and the screenplay, and perhaps it even anticipates a crossing-over of the forms. But will cinema siphon readership as the combination of convenience and force make investing time in the original novel unnecessary? The film gave McCarthy's readers a chance to revisit and rethink the significance of the author's frank style and what its easy and revitalizing transition to the screen means for the survival of the novel.

The film debuted in late 2009, with a screenplay adaptation by Joe Penhall, starring Viggo Mortensen as a father propelled by the wasting hope for his son's future and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy. Charlize Theron enters briefly as wife, mother, and victim of the nihilist fallout.

A cursory review of the novel, side by side with a copy of the screenplay by Joe Penhall (available at scriptcollector.com), shows only minor discrepancies. "The man" becomes "A man," and due to on-screen time constraints much of the prose is synopsized, but nothing appears lost in translation. The dialogue is left mostly unaltered. McCarthy's conversational style makes use of brief alternations and responses, leaving meaning mostly in the space of what isn't said. Given the organic taste of the verbal exchanges between father and son, Penhall had his work cut out for him. The rapidity of dialogue is fit to the audiences' shorter attention span and ability to see beyond words. Mortensen is an adept actor, and Smit-McPhee and Theron deliver outstanding interpretations, but again their work was cut out for them. The perfection of McCarthy's style is that in the details and behaviors he chooses to highlight there is often little debate about what he intended the reader, now the actor, to infer. McCarthy's vision leaves only the most profound interpretation salient.

A common complaint - almost an axiom - is that movies aren't, or can't be, as good as the book. Not so. The cinema adaptation complements the reading, and the reading paves a straight way for the cinema adaptation. Instead of tyrannizing the imagination, the movie reinforces the visual, stylistic, and character interpretations formed in the reading. From McCarthy's lucid outline, and with the computer graphics techniques now at their disposal, Penhill and Hallcoat recreated the ash-choked world with a harrowing realism true to the imagination. Though the movie remains dependent on its source, in many ways it enhances the reading.

McCarthy's work heralds the next evolution of creative writing, a blueprint set out and informed by the growing prevalence of movies as a part of our shared American culture. Modern sophistications in movie-making technology and in storytelling techniques have enabled the seamless transfer of novels to the screen. Penhill doesn't skew the story's artistic integrity, he magnifies its impact.

For its genius and its grandeur, The Road as a story remains terribly depressing. The movie delivers two hours of elegiac visuals, a grim exposure of the human condition. Don't expect to leave the theater buoyant, and expect a haunting compulsion to read the book cover to cover the same night, straining it for any instance of redemption or revitalization. For now, it's necessary to experience The Road in both media. I can recommend neither above the other.

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