Cormac McCarthy: The Films

The novels “proved to be catnip to filmmakers,” as Chris Vognar puts it in the NYT, but it took a while. For decades, McCarthy worked in relative obscurity until his sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses (1992), broke through, winning the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award—and selling briskly. None of his previous works had sold more than a few thousand copies in hardcover. Horses, the first novel in the Border Trilogy, was also the first to be adapted for the big screen.

Working from a screenplay by Ted Tally, who had adapted Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs for Jonathan Demme, Billy Bob Thornton directed Matt Damon, who played the young cowboy John Grady Cole, and Penélope Cruz, who took the role of Alejandra, the daughter of a wealthy Mexican rancher. Damon “plays Cole as a sensitive lad dumbstruck by love,” writes Vognar. “Cruz, a native of Spain, does her best as a south-of-the-border lass. Thornton directs with lyrical respect for the source material, if not a whole lot of grit or imagination.” Released on Christmas Day in 2000, the movie flopped.

No Country for Old Men (2007) fared better. A lot better. Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of McCarthy’s 2005 novel, starring Josh Brolin as a Texas welder who happens upon two million dollars, Javier Bardem as the hit man sent to recover the money, and Tommy Lee Jones as the local sheriff, won four Oscars, including Best Picture, and sold a lot of tickets. As Chris Koseluk points out in the Hollywood Reporter, McCarthy actually wrote No Country for Old Men as a screenplay first, but found no takers. “In fact,” McCarthy recalled in 2009, “they said, ‘That will never work.’ Years later I got it out and turned it into a novel. Didn’t take long.”

Bardem “brings angel of death vibes” to his role, writes Luke Buckmaster in the Guardian, and Jones is given “a great, cryptic monologue at the end in which he reflects on two dreams, both involving his father. In some respects this visually straightforward scene, much of it captured in a single shot, is the pinnacle of Jones’s career.”

In 2011, Jones directed himself as White and Samuel L. Jackson as Black in McCarthy’s adaptation for HBO of his own 2006 play, The Sunset Limited. “Essentially a ninety-minute conversation in a Washington Heights tenement taking place in the immediate aftermath of White’s suicide attempt at a subway station,” wrote Christian Blauvelt in Entertainment Weekly, “The Sunset Limited plays like a talky condensation of McCarthy’s great theme: How do we create meaningful lives in a chaotic world where God is silent and death is inescapable?”

Years before he created Mindhunter for Netflix and David Fincher, award-winning playwright Joe Penhall (Blue/Orange, Sunny Afternoon) wrote the screenplay for The Road (2009), an adaptation of McCarthy’s 2006 novel directed by John Hillcoat. Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee play a father and son trekking across an America decimated by some unnamed catastrophe. “And as grim as The Road gets,” wrote Scott Tobias at the A.V. Club, “Hillcoat goes a little soft at the wrong time. Someone like Michael Haneke would have no trouble embracing this material’s uncompromising dreariness—in fact, Haneke already did his own post-apocalyptic film in Time of the Wolf—but Hillcoat allows the hard-won emotion of the final scene to veer decisively into sentimentality.”

In 2013, back when James Franco was still trying to do everything everywhere all at once, he cowrote (with Vince Jolivette), directed, and starred in Child of God, which premiered in competition at Venice and was based on McCarthy’s 1973 novel. Reviews were mixed. Scott Haze plays Lester Ballard, “a mentally degenerating Tennessee hills outcast,” as Robert Abele put it in the Los Angeles Times. Abele found that Child of God “fascinates like a song sung just out of tune but rhythmically sturdy enough to keep you listening in the hopes it’ll right itself.”

Later that same year, The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, and Brad Pitt, opened to reviews that weren’t so much mixed as churned. The Counselor was not McCarthy’s first original screenplay to make it all the way to the screen. For a two-hour episode of the PBS series Visions, director Richard Pearce asked McCarthy to write The Gardener’s Son, the story of a South Carolina murder committed in 1876, and it aired in 1977 and was nominated for two Emmys.

The Counselor, though, “tanked with audiences, irritated some prominent critics (‘A bleak waste,’ opined the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan), failed to land many nominations, and quickly disappeared,” writes Nick Kolakowski at CrimeReads. “What happened? The talent and star-power were certainly there. The plot has all the hallmarks of a high-octane crime thriller: lawyer makes a one-time cocaine deal, but the drugs are stolen in transit and a Mexican cartel is very, very angry about it. Lots of folks die in absurdly bloody ways, including decapitation by a scary little device nicknamed the ‘bolito.’”

Review aggregators have posted average scores well below fifty percent, but the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis seems to have had a grand time. “From all the ellipses, as well as the eccentric, mesmerizing poetry of his dialogue, Mr. McCarthy appears to have never read a screenwriting manual in his life,” she wrote, adding, “That’s a compliment.” For his part, Ridley Scott “manages all these swiftly spinning parts with impeccable control and a lucid visual style. The story may be initially elusive, but there’s a clarity, solidity, and stillness (the camera moves but doesn’t tremble) to his images that augment the narrative’s gravity and inexorable momentum.”

There will undoubtedly be more adaptations of McCarthy’s work in the years to come, and some day, someone is going to see the Blood Meridian project through to completion. “This book has long been the Holy Grail of American adaptation,” wrote Jonathan Romney for Film Comment in 2014, “and, to be fair, it would probably take Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, and Erich von Stroheim working jointly to capture the text’s visionary extremity, suggestive of Breughel among the sagebrush.”