3/22/2023 0 Comments Cormac mccarthy the roadmovie![]() ![]() The Road follows a man and a boy, father and son, journeying together for many months across a post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a great, unexplained cataclysm. “The Road” is directed by John Hillcoat who received international acclaim for his 2005 film which starred Guy Pearce, Ian McShane and Danny Huston. ![]() Oscar winners Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron make brief but resonating appearances. In the movie “The Road” father is played by Oscar nominee, (), and son by newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee. They have nothing just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food–and each other. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. Stacey D’Erasmo’s most recent novel is The Sky Below (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winner bestseller from acclaimed novelist Cormac McCarthy (), “The Road” is a post-apocalyptic dramatic thriller about a father and his son walking alone through burned America. It is the most radically secular book I’ve ever read, and it challenges us: Are you willing to lose this, all this that you see around you, for a war, for energy, for a religious belief? Watching the images roll toward us recently from Japan, I felt, because of McCarthy’s novel, that I had seen them before. The Road brings us, essentially, into a kind of near-death experience that renews our deep love of this world, the only one we’ve got. The wooden desk, the tube of ChapStick, the scratching dog, the pile of binder clips, the face of the beloved: We feel tremendous relief that they’re still here, a nearly unbearable pleasure in their ordinary presence. We know what’s missing from the world he describes, because when we raise our eyes from the page, we see it all around us. Every element that McCarthy erases from his landscape-buildings, cars, people, bridges, farms, animals, daylight, music-are immediately summoned up, via this subtraction, by the reader. Yet the magic of The Road lies in what it does to one’s perception of the world as it is, and my hunch is that this is why it was a best seller. You cannot help but want the man and the boy to make it, to want the novel to make it, to want language itself to make it over the abyss. He uses few colors, little dialogue action is pared down to a very limited, exhausted register. ![]() ![]() There aren’t that many things left: a scattering of trees, a road, a man, a boy, ash, a tarp, perhaps a tin can or two of food. McCarthy’s radical simplicity of elements, which seemed mannered to me in his other fiction, is here just the way things are. The Road, however, despite its speculative premise-a father and his small son traverse a postapocalyptic world somewhere in America, heading to the sea in the infinitesimal hopes of rescue there-is perhaps the most visceral novel I have ever read. Prior to The Road, I had little interest in McCarthy’s work-I never could bring myself to care too much about those cowboys and their ponies and all that violence. You certainly can’t make him turn the pages of The Road in about a day and a half, which is what I did. You can lead a horse to the apocalypse, but you can’t make him stand around in it for long without a considerable supply of carrots. That The Road was both a hardcover best seller and a paperback best seller cannot be entirely attributed to its being a pick of Oprah’s Book Club or to its winning McCarthy the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. ![]()
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