Of all the great American novelists of the late 20th century, perhaps none worked as hard for recognition or with such great dedication to a bleak and nihilistic vision of humanity as Cormac McCarthy who died last week at the age of 89.
McCarthy was already in his late 50s when the small literary audience he’d built up over the course of five novels published since the 1960s ballooned into a widespread popular audience with the publication of the first of his “border trilogy” novels, All the Pretty Horses in 1992.
From then on, though he remained largely reclusive and reticent to give interviews, he enjoyed decades of late-career critical and commercial success. As the world caught up with his writing and eagerly awaited the publication of new works, Hollywood predictably came calling.
Four of McCarthy’s novels found their way to screen, one play was adapted for television and he penned one original screenplay.
With his sparse style, penchant for bleak landscapes, surreal settings and often minimalist plotting, it’s easy to see why his work has attracted filmmakers, even if not all of their attempts to translate him to screen have been as satisfying as they promised.
All the Pretty Horses (2000)
Western enthusiast Billy Bob Thornton directed this critically derided and behind-the-scenes beleaguered version of one of McCarthy’s more gentle tales. Matt Damon and Henry Thomas were miscast and too old for the teenage roles they were supposed to be playing and Thornton’s epic four-hour initial cut was mauled into melodramatic love-story sentimentalism by Miramax boss Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein.
Looking to capitalise on the success of 1997’s schmaltzy romantic epic Titanic, Weinstein also insisted on marketing the film as a sweeping western romance, much to the eternal ire of Damon who exasperatedly pointed out years later that the film’s original intention, like its source material, was not to be a love story but rather a story “about life being bigger than these people and just crushing the passion out of them”.
The film bombed at the box office and effectively brought about an early end to Billy Bob Thornton’s once promising career as a director. Though he claims to have held on to his original four-hour cut, Thornton’s version was never shown to the public and it’s not known whether McCarthy got to see the director’s original vision nor what he thought of the final product.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
The most commercially successful, critically lauded and celebrated of McCarthy film adaptations became in the hands of the Coen brothers an exemplary neo-noir western in its own right and one that won the duo four Oscars.
Bringing their own bleak sensibility to McCarthy’s already dark “crime don’t pay” 1980s set Texas tale, the Coens managed to pull off the difficult trick of creating a work that both honours its source material and stands on its own merits as one of recent American cinema’s most memorable creations.
Javier Bardem is unforgettable as the dead-eyed angel of death Anton Chigurh, Tommy Lee Jones shines as the jaded sheriff narrator Ed Tom Bell and Josh Brolin almost manages to convince you that his resourceful tough Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss may just ride off into the sunset with the pile of cash that doesn’t belong to him.
It’s a suitably violent, desolate and depressing experience but one which certainly by its end, as Jones delivers his final cryptic monologue, satisfies McCarthy’s belief that as he told the New York Times in a rare 1992 interview: “The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”
The Road (2009)
Australian director John Hillcoat’s adaptation of McCarthy’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning and multimillion best-selling tale of a man and his son doggedly trying to survive in an unforgiving postapocalyptic world, managed to mostly successfully follow the narrative of the novel while providing a memorably nightmarish cinematic vision of its setting.
Starring Viggo Mortensen as “the Man” and Kodi Smit-McPhee as “the Boy”, Hillcoat’s adaptation met with quiet approval from McCarthy. As screenwriter Joe Penhall recalled in a 2010 article published in The Guardian, McCarthy, after an initial screening told the apprehensive filmmakers “it’s really good” and “a film like no other film I’ve seen”.
The Sunset Limited (2011)
Adapted from a 2006 play, this simple but effective two-hander was adapted by McCarthy’s friend, actor Tommy Lee Jones, for HBO. Starring Jones as a nameless suicidal professor and Samuel L Jackson as an ex-con who stops him from throwing himself in front of a subway train, it’s a dialogue-heavy chamber piece that sees the two men delving into deep philosophical questions of faith and suffering. Jones’ direction is solid if safe but it’s eminently watchable thanks to the strength of the performances and its deftly crafted and delivered dialogue.
Child of God (2013)
Perhaps the most frustrating and shambolic screen adaptation of McCarthy’s work was helmed by actor and sometimes overly ambitious director James Franco — who has also made cinematic mincemeat of the works of McCarthy’s great literary influence William Faulkner. Here Franco tackles McCarthy’s short novel about a violent, antisocial outcast named Lester Ballard (played by Scott Haze) driving himself mad in the backwaters of 1950s’ Tennessee, where McCarthy himself grew up.
Though Franco relishes in depicting the degradation of his characters and the relentless grim realities of their environment, the final film fails to make a case for its existence, in spite of its commitment to its source material. Though not as terrible a film as many critics decried it to be at the time, it doesn’t pass muster as an adaptation worthy of the spirit or vision of McCarthy.
The Counselor (2013)
McCarthy’s only original screenplay was written for this much maligned and much misunderstood, twisty, violent and unrelenting pessimistic neo-noir set in the morally murky world of the Texas-Mexico border. Directed by Ridley Scott and featuring an all-star cast that includes Javier Bardem, Michael Fassbender, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz and Brad Pitt, it’s a darkly madcap take on the “drug deal gone wrong” plot that reveals many of McCarthy’s literary concerns, writ large and surreally for screen.
Though it was slammed by critics, it was perhaps helped a little by the madness of the Trump era, gradually receiving a more receptive re-evaluation as a film that has more resonance than it was initially given credit for. Scott’s direction is some of the most free and imaginative of his career and if nothing else, you’re unlikely to forget the sight of Cameron Diaz having sex with a Ferrari.
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