In the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed novel The Road, John Hillcoat remains extremely faithful to the spirit and essential plot of the book. Its tale of a post-apocalyptic epic journey with a father (Viggo Mortenson) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) struggling to survive is a poetic and heartbreaking tale in either format. One of the essential components of the story is the father attempting to teach his son how to remain one of "the good guys" in a world of thieves, murderers and killers. The man states that they are "carrying the fire" of the goodness of humanity, remembering a time in which things were better, and his wife (Charlize Theron) was still alive. Despite the inherent horror of the situation even in the past, flashbacks are used to demonstrate the father's mourning for his wife, and the boy's mother, whose face he sees in their son's.
Both in the book and in the film, the role of the wife is presented in flashback gradually throughout the work - the wife, after the collapse of the planet and of civilization, eventually takes her own life after succumbing to despair and loneliness. McCarthy's novel makes use of the wife as a shadow, a presence that is notably absent throughout the present horrors of their situation. In the film, however, she is a much stronger and more pervasive presence, becoming a character unto herself - though one whose fate we are reasonably certain of even in the beginning of the film.
Hillcoat adapts the fragmented nature of the novel in a very unique way in this film - in the novel, the narrative is very distant, third-person, with the events being depicted in a very detached way. The omniscient narrator is doling out information as he or she sees fit to do so. However, in the film, the flashbacks explicitly take place in the father's mind, thus informing the audience about the character himself. By remembering the wife so often, he is attempting to hold on to a happier past with his complete family, as well as making himself feel guilty for not protecting his wife enough to prevent her from killing herself. By inserting the flashbacks into a character's mind, it becomes part of their thought process and therefore much less episodic. The novel's scattershot nature exemplifies the lack of direction that humanity sees in this world; Hillcoat changes that to link the father's struggles to protect his son with his failure to keep his wife alive.
Hillcoat, in adapting the film to screen, focuses much more on the world of the past as a contrast to the bleak future that awaits them. Scenes like the bathtub scene with the father help to show the father's desire for the simple comforts of the past - he sees his wife's face reflected in his son's as the grime is washed away, helping him to remember the niceties of civilization, which is now lost. Shots of busy and bright civilization in the flashback scenes are contrasted starkly with the grey, bleak and dead landscapes of the apocalypse. In this way, Hillcoat presents a stronger connection with the past, using the flashbacks as a way to hold on to what is good, and to teach the son about the "fire" he is supposed to be carrying into a new future.
