I’m a fan of dystopic fiction.  Something about heart-of-darkness theory, however bleak it may be fundamentally, shines an interesting light on the human condition.  It draws back the curtain on mankind’s most ugly corners and forces us to face the horrors of reality.  In order for this to be effective, there must be contrast.  Hopelessness without any spark of hope is just painful to sit through, especially in a form like film that excites many of of its audience’s senses simultaneously.

Like Blindness and other amazing dystopic novels before it, The Road doesn’t quite work when adapted for the screen.  A reader can focus her attention on the beauty and complexity of the human relationship at the center of the story, but a viewer is constantly reminded of the world’s ugliness by the set on which the actors stand.  As a result, much of the humanity can be lost - forcing the writer and director of an adapted novel to over-compensate in the humanity department.  In The Road, the over-compensation didn’t reach far enough.  The result is a world that’s just bleak: where women and small children are chopped to pieces with no hope of law to intervene, where groups of naked prisoners are imprisoned in basements and eaten one limb at a time by their captors, where the world of animals has gone extinct due to man’s collective short-sightedness.  The things an audience member can cling to - the beauty of this man’s relationship to his son, the pain of their having lost their wife and mother - are only given a handful of too-brief glimpses.

I have not read the novel, but my date for the film had - and said these shortcomings originated in the book itself.  Cormac McCarthy has an unction for misery - so perhaps he was insistent that the film be as true to the actual novel as possible, allowing for little true “adaptation.”