I saw The Road movie this weekend. Here are my thoughts:

I’m not a film reviewer, so I don’t need to pretend I can view The Road movie outside the lens of Cormac McCarthy’s book, but as more than a casual reader of the book (interested readers can preview my thesis paper on it here), I can’t even imagine this movie without the book.

The movie is a faithful adaptation, truer to its source than I ever expected. It’s a rare thing for a film adaptation to exceed the book, so I won’t hold it against the movie here. No Country For Old Men may have done it, but that was the Coens and not McCarthy’s best. And perhaps The Road is a bigger challenge. Not because it lacks for imagery or conflict or an emotional arc, but rather because the content of the book is unremarkable next to the depth and nuance of McCarthy’s prose poetry. The movie is a literal translation, but how do you translate the sparse punctuation or  short, plodding paragraphs that are so much a part of the empty world? A different filmmaker may have seen a way, but given reasonable expectations, this is an earnest adaptation that gives life to characters (the acting all spot-on) and offers some stunning visuals of the stark land.

Still, when I left the theatre, my first response was a big Why? Why a movie, at all?

We get a backdrop full of arresting images of fires, burned cities, broken telephone poles, and abandoned highways. We see emotion in exquisite expressions. For instance, I found it difficult, from the perspective of the father, to understand why the mother gave up, but Theron’s glassy stare into the face of despair reflects enough of the gloom she sees that I too would not have been able to hold her back from death. Perhaps this is it: the movie shows the gloom so clearly that I almost forgot why I was there. I almost forgot the fire the book lit in me: knowing that this ruined world is not real and that the only means we have for keeping it that way is our vision of hope for a better future.