Will Hollywood be faithful to McCarthy's masterpiece?

November 9, 11:14 AMHartford Speculative Fiction ExaminerAdam Durso

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McCarthy's novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007

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The film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road, directed by John Hillcoat is scheduled to hit theaters later this month.

The Road is a post apocalyptic tale about a man and a boy; father and son, “each one the other’s world entire”, as they trudge on foot through the ruins of America seeking salvation after an unspecified cataclysm pushes civilization to the brink.

The landscape is dead and barren, with sunlight dulled through a filter of gray ash. Plant life has withered away and animals have gone extinct from land air and sea, as though all the dominions granted to mankind by the biblical God have been repossessed.

Amid constant danger, The Man (Viggo Mortensen) struggles to protect his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and impart to him the ideals of goodness and love, tenets relegated to a world now lost, swapped instead for one of violence, fear and chaos.

The novel offered a new perspective for the “Post Apocalyptic” genre, focusing on the more immediate aftermath of the event, where most of its predecessors pick up many generations after the world is plunged into anarchy and darkness. An incredibly moving story, it possesses McCarthy’s signature unflinching tension and realism, imbued with many weighty religious and philosophical subtexts.

Clips for The Road depict a potentially great film, and will hopefully avoid overdramatizing a very minimal, albeit powerful story. To do so would undermine its thematic gravity and realism, something Ethan and Joel Coen avoided in their gritty, 2007 Oscar winning treatment of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. The Coen's film was simple, hard-hitting and lacked an original score, which really served to build the tension of the more crucial scenes. Hillcoat's film seems to take a much less subtle, more epic, effects driven approach to telling McCarthy's tale.

The Road opens November 25 everywhere, and also stars Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, and Guy Pearce.