Trailer for Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

Saturday, June 13 2009

Trailer for Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

jstn:

I’ve been excited for any news of the movie, but this has me worried. My favorite aspect of the book was its oppressive sparsity; literally the only description of the apocalyptic disaster is “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” The details of the event just aren’t important, all your attention is focused on the survival of the man and his son and their relationship. You know as little as they do, and they don’t care because they’re more concerned with finding something to eat. I really liked that; a catastrophic event of the proportions described would leave no media to explain it, much less news reports of tidal waves, fireballs, and tornadoes, oh my. The one-sentence description in the book also leaves you with the impression of humanity fucking it up for itself in one horrible but plausible moment, rather than epic wrath-of-God type stuff.

So, I’m skeptical but still hopeful. I’m trying hard not to pass judgement on the addition of the wife/mom character, or the sheer number of people in general (you only encounter a handful in the book), but it’s disappointing they’ve already stooped to one major disaster movie cliché in what I was hoping would be a decidedly anti-disaster-movie disaster movie. 2012, coming out a couple weeks later, should have the other side of it covered.

I must say I agree with Justin’s assessment. Stuff blowing up? Panicked newscast footage? Charlize Theron looking entirely too composed for a woman on the verge of end-of-the-world doom? What I’m hoping is that the Day After Tomorrow-ish aspects of the trailer are really just to pull in audiences, and that they’ll only make up a very small part of the finished product.

It opens, conveniently, the day before my birthday. Kidder, let’s rent out a theater for our party and call it “Scott and Caroline’s Postapocalyptic Quarter-Life Crisis Celebration.”

I think I can’t watch this film. Maybe it’s unfilmable; after all, this is set in a time in which the natural world is near-dead; every thing is ash and gray. And the economy of the language, how McCarthy says so much in little details (when the disaster happens, the father’s first act is to start filling the bathtub with water, which tells you so much about the character in just a few words), doesn’t really lend itself to great filmmaking.