rated R

A wise man once said, “All life is suffering.” As noble truths go, it’s as respectable a starting point as any to begin a journey of acceptance, self-discovery and enlightenment. Novelist Cormac McCarthy, Pulitzer prizewinner and quite possibly the world’s most popular fun-sponge, would remind us, however, that a burden shed must first be carried, and that true enlightenment may only become attainable through thorough exploration of the miserable, crumbling, inescapable darkness that is the rule of waking existence. Welcome to “The Road.”

As directed by John Hillcoat (responsible previously for the grisly Outback western “The Proposition”), the screen adaptation of McCarthy’s novel cleaves mercilessly close to the original text. The brutally austere story of a man and his boy hardscrabbling their way to a distant sea on bag-wrapped foot across a blasted, collapsing (and decidedly American) landscape unfolds with a hushed, pensive deliberation. Elegantly avoiding any explanation of the cataclysm that has apparently driven the planet to so completely dismantle itself, the focus remains throughout on the mournful ecology of despair that forms when every last valuable thing is pitilessly stripped from one’s world. Homes are fallen to moldering rubble. The food has all been eaten. Friends have all wandered away to expire alone in ditches and puddles and under tarps in the basement. Birds and animals have become the things of storybooks and the only life a forest may know is the flames that reduce it to ash.

Viggo Mortensen, popularly recognized as the striding drifter and self-exiled King of “Lord of the Rings,” is a casting coup as “the Man,” re-sculpting his iron intensity into an effigy of ratty newspapers and wire hangers. Starving, ill-equipped and coughing up blood every morning, his single guiding warrant is to safeguard his son and prepare the boy for an inevitable life on his own.

In times where death is qualified as a luxury, hope takes the form of two remaining revolver shells, and the difference between “good” guys and “bad” guys is measured by how much gorging they’re willing to do on the tender flesh of their brothers and sisters and babies, the Man’s tenacious conviction to maintain some, if any, grasp on established human morality is matched only by his desperation as the lines become increasingly gray with every bitter mile. As their encounters with the wretched remains of humanity grow progressively dire, suspicion submerges into paranoia, defense into offense, and protection into murder. The boy, played with an authentic apprehension by newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee, acts as the singular brightness and only perceptible source of charity and goodwill left in this feast of famine, observing the Man’s unbinding with credible anxiety and convincing emotion.

Strict McCarthy loyalists may be slightly disappointed with the expansion of the role of the Man’s wife, played with an overly-conspicuous luminosity by Charlize Theron. Witnessed in flashbacks and dream sequences, her scenes, inflated well beyond their original scope in the novel, and dispersed a little too evenly throughout the story, arguably provide the audience with some counterpoint to the relentless severity of the proceedings, but ultimately distract from McCarthy’s position.

This one deviation is forgivable enough, however, for as much of a Tom Waits lullaby as the whole thing is, all the horror, confusion and defeat is permeated with a surprising, and apropriately proportionate, sense of tenderness. Perfectly described with a plaintive, restrained score by previous Hillcoat collaborators Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, there’s a distant, yet distinct, pulse of faith thumping gently from under the ashes. Desperation can breed reliance, it says, and honest devotion to those you love may deliver a soul from the most ragged of edges.

Another wise man once said,  “Survival is the slowest form of suicide.” McCarthy’s fable may be the longest, most emotionally complex paraphrase in history. Turns out, inconvenient as this truth may be, we are all walking this road, and nothing and no one gets out alive. Just give in, embrace the suffering, and steel yourself for the best movie you’ll ever see that will make you want to kill yourself.