In the future, all plant life is dead, the sun no longer shines, there is constant rain and snow, it is cold and strangers are deadly. What keeps a person moving? What would keep you moving? These are the questions pondered in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road.

Overall, the movie adaptation stays true to the novel. There are scenes that are out of sequence from the book. There is dialogue that has been added or shifted. There is more hope. All of these things worked in the movie because the movie stayed true to the central theme of the book: the father and the son.

The father wonders constantly if he should leave his son in this world. He wonders if the kinder thing would be to kill him. There is even a part of him that wants the boy to do kill himself, so he won’t have to. However, the death of this child goes against every fiber of his being, this child is what keeps the man moving, is what gives the man hope and what makes the father a better person. How can he destroy that? This theme in visual form makes all theories of what is kinder to do go away when presented with a little boy with a face.

There is little dialogue in the movie, so all of the emotion that comes into the movie has to be derived from the expression of the characters. Granted they are exhausted and that is easy to see; however, the love that they have for each other is a little harder to portray as they fight to survive. Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the father and the son manage to make the connection.

In typical movies, the love between two characters are often by presented by beautiful characters. Somehow the beauty of the people make love more believable. This standard myth is seen over and over again in films, but with The Road the characters are skinny, dirty and ugly, but the love that they have for each other is a thing of beauty and is not dependent on how they looked. The reverse is true. The father and son’s desolate state, made the love that they share even more poignant because it goes against all that is around them.

I’ve made no secret that The Road is one of my all time favorite books. The movie was set up to be disappointing to me; so often films waver from the novel and try to make something appear out of the book that was never there. I was expecting the same. This film did not. The movie held true to the theme of the book and I couldn’t look away. The words in the novel made my heart ache; the movie brought those words to a visual form that made me weep and I couldn’t look away.

Related Reading

• Confronting Life and Death in The Road
• Five Ways to Survive in a Dystopia
• Book into Movie: Horton Hears a Who