'The Road' and the perils of adaptation
Is there a reason why really great novels seldom make great moviesâ¢
OK, let's back up a bit. Yes, this is really about the "The Road." I saw a sneak preview of the long-awaited movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which was filmed largely in Western Pennsylvania.
The book is a brilliant, if grim, fable about the meaning of family when all else has been stripped away. It's just a man and his young son trying to survive and carry on the values of civilization after some unnamed apocalyptic event, when the only fresh food left seems to be, well, people. Somehow, the book is both a triumph of contemporary literature -- written in terse, spare prose that crackles like dry tinder -- and a breathlessly suspenseful, page-turning horror novel.
Everything seemed lined up for a great film, including a great cast (Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall), and a talented young director in John Hillcoat ("The Proposition"). Plus, they had the perfect location, the bleak hills and valleys of Pennsylvania in winter -- including the ghostly decay of Braddock, the charred remnants of Conneaut Lake Park, and the frozen shores of Lake Erie.
But the finished product is just ... OK.
It looks great, and the performances are solid, but it's missing something vital from the book. Clumsy exposition and overeager narration sap the story of its mystery -- whereas the book challenged readers to piece together this strange new world themselves. Too much emphasis is put on the few uplifting moments, which actually has the opposite effect. The lush, strings-laden score is distractingly cloying. And so on.
It's not a bad film -- quite the opposite, in fact. It may do well. It may win Oscars. But "The Road" is a big bummer for those who loved the book, and wanted that translated to the big screen.
That was never going to happen.
The source material is "difficult," and Hollywood's default stance is always risk-averse. The film sat on the shelf for a year after being made, which gave nervous studio executives and their focus groups time to tinker with it.
But really, there are some reasons great books rarely become great movies. Taking a broad view of movie history, a few loose rules soon become apparent:
1. You can't do it all. Keep it short. The great director Erich von Stroheim tried a literal adaptation of Frank Norris' novel "McTeague" in 1924. The resulting film, "Greed" was nine hours long. Not surprisingly, it got sliced into smaller and smaller pieces before reaching the screen. Because no one is going to sit through a nine hour film, there has to be a better way to do things.
2. Aim low. Lesser works by great authors often make better movies. So do good books by lesser authors. The complex themes and attention to detail common in great novels is hard to translate to the big screen -- there simply isn't time or space. For example, novelist Cormac McCarthy's masterworks, "The Road" and "All the Pretty Horses," didn't quite work as movies (in my opinion). However, his lightly regarded, smaller-in-scope book "No Country for Old Men" became an undisputed masterpiece onscreen in 2007.
Another example is "The Godfather" -- an extremely popular book, but nobody's arguing that it's great literature -- not even author Mario Puzo, who wrote it after tiring of his critically acclaimed literary works not selling. The movie, of course, is one of the great achievements in cinema.
3. Short stories and novellas tend to fit better as films than full-length novels. The film version of Annie Proulx' masterpiece "The Shipping News" is almost totally forgotten, while the short story that became "Brokeback Mountain" (2005) took home armfuls of Oscars. For science -fiction fans, Philip K. Dick's novella "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" became the immortal "Blade Runner" (1982), while so many of his novels have fallen flat on the big screen.
4. Cinema is an entirely different format than the novel. When in doubt, experiment. What makes a great novel doesn't necessarily make a great movie. Find the core truth of a story, and tell that. You can't include all the subplots and details, so don't try. Taking extreme liberties with the source material sometimes works shockingly well -- like "Apocalypse Now" (1979) dragging Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" into the Vietnam maelstrom. Curiously, "Heart of Darkness" was also a novella.
Obviously, there are exceptions. Some great, full-length books have become great movies. Against all odds and common sense, "Lord of the Rings" was faithfully adapted into a trilogy of strong movies. Legendary director Stanley Kubrick handled Nabokov's "Lolita" (1962) and Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) with the same deft mastery and wit he applied to pulp crime/noir fare like "The Killing" (1956).
Of course, there are worse things than trying to adapt a great book, and coming up short. Hey, it's better than adapting video games.
