But as Hillcoat saw it, the Oregon setting was proving to be too picturesque. "It's a beautiful day," the Australian-born filmmaker said somewhat dejectedly. "I hope it clouds up."
It was a fair summation of the film's tonal balancing act. In adapting McCarthy's National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, Hillcoat and Penhall (as well as the actors and production team) toiled to weigh hopelessness against faith, the worst of humanity opposite the possibility of civilization. But for some, including one top distributor of specialized film who passed on the Nov. 14 release, the cinematic version of "The Road" was ultimately still too bleak to appeal to moviegoers.
So even as the filmmakers were ratcheting up the story's danger and despair, they also were pushing to make the movie as uplifting as possible, emphasizing its intrinsic father-son love story and promoting the notion that the Boy embodies some sort of messiah. Along the way, movie version also became much less a story about a post-nuclear catastrophe and more a tale of climate change and a dying planet.
"The fact that my character keeps going," a reed-thin Mortensen said during a lunch break from filming under the waterfall, "is inherently hopeful and optimistic."
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A course correction
PUBLISHED before "No Country for Old Men" was fashioned by Joel and Ethan Coen into their Oscar-winning masterwork, "The Road" represented a course correction for McCarthy. While its pages overflowed with his typically baroque diction and slightly pretentious lack of punctuation, the novel wasn't anchored by the epic narrative sweep of "No Country," "Blood Meridian" or "All the Pretty Horses" (and the rest of McCarthy's border trilogy).
Instead, its story focused on a dying man and a young boy struggling to remain alive as they traveled through a barren land with little food or water and even less consolation.
In addition, "The Road" was more contained (287 not very crowded pages) and personal than McCarthy's previous novels -- one he described, albeit elliptically, in a rare interview on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," whose host had picked the novel for her influential book group.
"I like to think it's just about the boy and the man on the road, but obviously you can draw conclusions about all sorts of things from reading the book, depending on your taste," McCarthy said on the talk show. Tellingly, the 75-year-old author dedicated the book to his elementary-school-age son, John.
