Post-Apocalyptic 'Road': The Best Cormac McCarthy Adaptations

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IF THERE IS ONE CURRENT American novelist who can manifest emotionally crippling, haunting fear in our hearts, it's Cormac McCarthy. If you saw "No Country for Old Men," you have an idea of what we're talking about. And if you read it, well, don't worry — we had those same nightmares, too.

It's hard to say exactly what it is about McCarthy's works that terrify us so, because there are so many different factors that are blood-curdling: Characters like Anton Chigurh from "No Country for Old Men" are relentless, sympathy-lacking killers with an almost mythical ability to avoid justice (and with no qualms about murdering innocent women), while landscapes are barren, bleak and unyielding, like the one protagonist Billy encounters while following a wolf into Mexico in "The Crossing." Nothing ends happily in McCarthy's books, and if you don't have Kleenex on hand while reading them, you're probably a jerk.

So you should probably take the same precautions this week, when "The Road," the film adaptation of McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 novel starring Viggo Mortenson, hits theaters Friday. Mortenson got a lot of practice doing the dark-and-brooding thing with the "Lord of the Rings" films, and he'll need all those skills when tackling "The Road," which focuses on a father and son attempting to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Think about "The Postman," add in some elements from "The Lion King" and a lot of "Mad Max"-like violence, and you might get the right idea.

But no amount of comparison can be as good as a McCarthy novel, which is why we're impressed (and honestly, a bit surprised) that Hollywood's versions of his visions aren't awful. Hopefully "The Road" will continue to do the man justice — until then, here are our favorite moments from the three other films centered on McCarthy's works.

"THE GARDENER'S SON"
Back in the day, McCarthy was commissioned by director Richard Pearce to write a screenplay for the PBS series "Visions." "The Gardener's Son," which was written in 1976, is still McCarthy's only published screenplay.

Based on actual events, the piece revolves around two families from very different economic standings. While the comfortably well-off Greggs founded The Graniteville Manufacturing Company in Graniteville, S.C., the Irish Catholic McEvoys come to work for the mill, lured by the promise of "a sealed house and a garden patch." Despite their different social standings, William Gregg, the family patriarch, acts kindly toward the McEvoys, and Patrick, the patriarch of that family, tends to the Gregg family's garden.

However, after William dies and his son, James, takes over, the McEvoys' son, Robert (whose leg was amputated earlier in the film after a bad break caused by James), grows to hate him: James is a cruel employer who attempts to pay Robert's sister, Martha, for sex and rejects families who have traveled to the mill looking for work. Predictably, the two face off, and soon, Robert is being arrested for James' murder. The best scene, however, is the one McCarthy crafts between the two, when Robert confronts James about his abuse of the family — and shoots him. As vicious as anything McCarthy has written since, the scene deals heavily with honor, hatred and social class — and one man's final revenge against the other.

"ALL THE PRETTY HORSES"
The first novel in McCarthy's Border Trilogy, "All the Pretty Horses" can throw McCarthy readers for a loop — it's got some romance. Unsurprisingly, the romance doesn't end well (if that was a spoiler for you, well, you don't know anything about McCarthy, huh?), but it's what comes before that, the main characters' descent into self-realization, that's far better. Although Billy Bob Thornton's film — which was supposedly hacked down from a four-hour runtime — seems condensed and lacking in development, it gets the basics across: Matt Damon stars as protagonist John Grady Cole, whose mother decides to sell the Texas cattle ranch that Cole loves. Desperate to discover more land he can roam, Cole and best friend Lacey (Henry Thomas, who you may recognize from "E.T.") head for Mexico, along the way meeting Blevins (Lucas Black, who was also in Thornton's "Sling Blade"), a young runaway who is good with a gun and obviously riding a stolen horse.

Their run-ins with the law end up splitting the three apart, but the emotional pendulum swings toward sentimental when Cole gets a job working at the wealthiest cattle ranch in Mexico and falls in love with the owner's daughter, Alejandra (a pretty but somewhat wasted Penelope Cruz). It's not the love scenes that are the most emotionally gripping, though — that honor falls directly on Blevins' murder at the hand of a rogue Mexican police force. That scene — and the reaction it inspires in Cole — will surely stick with you.

"NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN"
There's much about "No Country for Old Men," both the novel and film versions, that is wholly depressing: The ideas of inevitability, fate and greed all bounce around in a tale that focuses most on the ruthlessness of its antagonist, Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem), and the modern forces invading the quiet town that Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) has overlooked for decades. Although the film focuses heavily on Chigurh and his crimes, it's his misplaced idea of destiny and Bell's questioning certainty in society's well-meaning ways that provide its most chilling scenes.

Whether it's Chigurh using the flip of a coin to decide whether he should kill an old man and urging him to "call it" or Bell's uneasy dream about his father carrying fire in a horn (a concept that pops up in many of McCarthy's works), both sequences are indicative of what the author does best: Make you question everything you know about people's goodness and your own morals. To quote Chigurh, "you've been putting it up your whole life; you just didn't know it" — enough said.

Written by Express contributor Roxana Hadadi
Photo courtesy Macall Polay/The Weinstein Company