Big Terrible Ideas: Cormac McCarthy On Screen
John Hillcoat’s film version of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ hits our screens early next year. Adam Lee Davies suggests it may prove a turning point in cinematic adaptations of the author’s work.

 

Cormac McCarthy has stood as American literature’s one undeniable colossus ever since the publication of Blood Meridian in 1981. His novels have long intrigued directors, but despite a body of work that builds on the cinematic cornerstones of lyrical imagery, mythic landscapes, savage violence and spare, quotable dialogue, McCarthy’s books have always been considered too uncompromising, dense and morally complex for easy translation to the big screen.

And yet, all of a sudden, McCarthy adaptations count as one of the hottest properties in Hollywood. So what changed, and why?

Until recently fans had to content themselves with Billy Bob Thornton’s beautifully photographed but dramatically undernourished 2000 adaptation of ‘All The Pretty Horses’ starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz as ill-starred lovers straddling the Mexican border. It’s perceived failure reinforced the notion that McCarthy’s books were too literary to adapt, too bleak for mainstream cinema audiences to bear or too expensive to mount.

The four Academy Awards and huge box-office returns of the Coen brothers’ lean adaptation of his desert-noir thriller ‘No Country For Old Men’ - originally written in screenplay form by McCarthy in the mid-Eighties then later worked up into a novel - changed all that. John Hillcoat’s upcoming screen version of ‘The Road’ starring Viggo Motrtensen as a father protecting his son from the horrors of a post-apocalyptic world looks likely to repeat the trick of reaching a large audience while refusing to dilute McCarthy’s merciless and terrible worldview.

A slew of McCarthy adaptations are now being lined up, with Andrew Dominik – Australian director of ‘Chopper’ and ‘The Assassination of Jesse James…’ - preparing to adapt ‘Cities of the Plain’, while Tommy Lee Jones is currently filming the McCarthy play ‘The Sunset Limited’ for American television.

Todd Field, director of the 2001 Oscar-nominated drama ‘In The Bedroom’ is presently working hard to crack Blood Meridian. An impossibly vicious account of a band of degenerate scalphunters carving their way through 1850’s Mexico, the book was long thought unfilmable, with Tommy Lee Jones and Ridley Scott being just two of the big hitters who tried and failed to wrestle it to the screen.

“His novels have long been attractive to filmmakers,” says Field, “for the very primal reason that his work examines our core, the two faces of violence that co-exist in every savage act – brutal strength of purpose holding hands with a desperate and cowering weakness.”

These are themes that are hardly new to cinema, but added to the barbarism that haunts McCarthy’s books, they can make for a tough sell. The times, however, are changing. “Undoubtedly, the success that ‘No Country For Old Men’ enjoyed, both fiscally and critically, has allowed some people to now see McCarthy's novels in a different light,” continues Field. “In terms of film adaptations, his books have commercial possibilities that heretofore never existed.”

The success of ‘No Country…’ points to signs that audiences may be more prepared to accept such McCarthyisms as explosive acts of brutal, arbitrary violence that go unpunished – or, better say, are unpunishable – in mainstream cinema than ever before.

Joe Penhall, screenwriter of ‘The Road’, suggests that the unimaginable horrors that McCarthy investigates in his writing are becoming more familiar to us by the day. “Post-9/11 we are frighteningly aware of what man is capable of,” he claims. “We’ve seen the randomness, the overheatedness, the irrationality of people’s vengefulness in Islamic terrorism, in American imperialism, in British foreign policy. People see these examples of extreme behaviour on the news every night and don’t know what to make of it, and McCarthy kind of does know what to make of it. By the time McCarthy’s’s stuff gets to the screen we’re not thinking ‘what a radical, harsh vision’, we’re thinking ‘yep, that’s a world I recognise’.”

So maybe the cinematic world has finally caught up with Cormac McCarthy.

God help us all.

Published in Guardian Unlimited 11.01.2010