In “The Road,’’ the world has ended with a bang and a whimper. Author Cormac McCarthy’s lean prose has been lifted off the printed page and laid carefully into the soundtrack like antique china in a packing crate. “The clocks stopped at 1:17,’’ says the narrator. “A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.’’ That’s all we know about the apocalypse and all we need to know. 
 
 The movie takes place in an America that has been turned into an ash heap, with skeletal human survivors picking their way across the cinders. Kept rigorously in the foreground are a Man (Viggo Mortensen) and a Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the latter born shortly after the end came and thus a creature exclusively of this fallen world. 
 
 The two are traveling from the interior to the coast before winter comes - that’s the action of the movie. That, and keeping clear of marauding bands of men who would gladly skin them and eat them. Also, as the boy reminds his father, the two “carry the fire,’’ whatever that means. It could refer to decency and goodness, the guttering spark of humanity. It could just mean they’re still alive. 
 
 “The Road’’ has been poured straight from McCarthy’s bleak bottle and brought to the screen by Australian John Hillcoat, who turned the 2005 Outback Western “The Proposition’’ into an epic of blasted landscapes and bloody motivations. He’s the man for the job, yet in adapting this harsh, unyielding book for the screen, Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall pull their punches the slightest degree and thus too much. 
 
 Or maybe movies can only dully visualize horrors the best writers hint at. Hillcoat’s “Road’’ is true to the book’s profoundly moving post-nuclear stoicism, but it can’t quite get those biblical cadences that make McCarthy such a transfixing read. The Coens managed it with “No Country for Old Men,’’ so it can be done, but you have to be willing to go all the way into the dark. As a colleague said after seeing this movie, you need to show the baby on the spit. “The Road’’ doesn’t dare, can’t dare, and is the lesser thing. 
 
 What’s on the screen is disturbing enough. (Even at that, it has taken a year for the Weinsteins, the producers and distributors of “The Road,’’ to get the nerve to release the film.) As the Man and the Boy drag their shopping cart across what’s left of America, the enormity of the cataclysm is glimpsed forward and backward. A wife (Charlize Theron) who may have been the braver for opting out. An impossibly old man (Robert Duvall) like a figure out of “Godot,’’ unable to go on but still going on. A trap door in a kitchen that leads to something you’d better not think about. 
 
 There are other basements and further revelations in “The Road,’’ but Hillcoat avoids jack-in-the-box suspense clichés; the movie plods with a literalism that’s at times too reverent (as is Nick Cave’s score, piling on a sensitive “mournfulness’’ both redundant and unnecessary). Mortensen underplays his role admirably, and Smit-McPhee is gratifyingly unactorly. At the movie’s best we see their relationship shift as something crucial and inarticulate is passed from one generation to the next. 
 
 Like all end-of-the-world fiction, “The Road’’ brings iconic meaning to the smallest of gestures. A single kindness becomes the hope of humanity; a cruel act the path to hell. If I have mixed feelings about the movie, it’s because Hillcoat honors the story’s minimalism without bringing his own sensibilities to bear on the material. He’s spooked by the responsibility, and maybe he’s right: When the director does add a single furry detail to the final scenes, it feels like a surrender to sentiment. 
 
 At the same time, everything about the film is a welcome rebuke to the happy-face apocalypse of “2012,’’ a movie that turns mass extinction into the Greatest Show on Earth. In “The Road,’’ what has been lost is recognized as infinitely precious; what’s left is bitter and our due. 
 
 Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation. 
 
 © Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company. ||||| The Road 
 
 November 24, 2009 
 
 Cast & Credits The Man Viggo Mortensen 
 
 The Boy Kodi Smit-McPhee 
 
 Wife Charlize Theron 
 
 Old Man Robert Duvall 
 
 The Veteran Guy Pearce 
 
 
 
 Dimension Films presents a film directed by John Hillcoat. Written by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. Running time: 119 minutes. Rated R. 
 
 
 
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 Note: I first saw "The Road" in September at the Toronto Film Festival, as one of eight films I saw in three days. I wrote a draft of a review at the time and sent it. That review accidentally found its way into sight in October, long before the film was scheduled to open. I yanked it offline as quickly as I could. 
 
 
 
 I saw the movie a second time at a press screening on Oct. 27 in Chicago. I see festival films again whenever I have the chance. I find the second viewing makes the good ones better, and the bad ones worse. Such is the case with "The Road." 
 
 "The Road" evokes the images and the characters of Cormac McCarthy's novel. It is powerful, but for me lacks the same core of emotional feeling. I'm not sure this is any fault of the filmmakers. The novel itself would not be successful if it were limited to its characters and images. Its effect comes above all through McCarthy's prose. It is the same with all of McCarthy's work, but especially this one, because his dialogue is so restrained, less baroque than usual. 
 
 
 
 The story is straightforward: America has been devastated. Habitations have been destroyed or abandoned, vegetation is dying, crops have failed, the infrastructure of civilization has disappeared. This has happened in such recent memory that even The Boy, so young, was born into a healthy world. No reason is given for this destruction, perhaps because no reason would be adequate. McCarthy evokes the general apprehension of post-9/11. The Boy and The Man make their way toward the sea, perhaps for no better reason than that sea has always been the direction of hope in this country. 
 
 
 
 The surviving population has been reduced to savage survivalists, making slaves of the weaker, possibly using them as food. We've always done that, employing beef cattle, for example, to do the grazing on acres of pasture so we can consume the concentrated calories of their labor. In a land where food is scarce, wanderers seek out canned goods and fear their own bodies will perform this work for the cannibals. 
 
 
 
 Although we read of those who stockpile guns and ammunition for an apocalypse, weapon stores on the Road have dwindled down. The Man has a gun with two remaining bullets. He is a wary traveler, suspecting everyone he sees. He and The Boy are transporting a few possessions in a grocery cart. He encourages his son to keep walking, but holds out little hope for the end of their journey. 
 
 
 
 I am not sure the characters could be played better, or differently. Viggo Mortensen portrays The Man as dogged and stubborn, determined to protect his boy. Kodi Smit-McPhee is convincing as a child stunned by destruction, depending on his father in a world where it must be clear to him that any man can die in an instant. The movie resists any tendency toward making the child cute, or the two of them heartwarming. 
 
 
 
 Flashback scenes star Charlize Theron as the wife and mother of the two in earlier, sunnier days. These sequences show the marriage as failing, and these memories haunt The Man. I'm not sure what relevance this subplot has to the film as a whole; a marriage happy or sad -- isn't it much the same in this new world? It has a lot of relevance, however, to The Man and The Boy. In times of utter devastation, memories are what we cling to. 
 
 
 
 The external events of the novel have been boldly solved, and this is an awesome production. But McCarthy's prose has the uncanny ability to convey more than dialogue and incident. It's as dense as poetry. It is more spare in The Road than in a more ornate work like Suttree; in The Road, it is as evocative in the way Samuel Beckett is. If it were not, "The Road" might be just another film of sci-fi apocalypse. It's all too easy to imagine how this material could be vulgarized, as Richard Matheson's novel was in the 2007 version of "I Am Legend." 
 
 
 
 How could the director and writer, John Hillcoat and Joe Penhall, have summoned the strength of McCarthy's writing? Could they have used more stylized visuals, instead of relentless realism? A grainy black-and-white look to suggest severely limited resources? I have no idea. Perhaps McCarthy, like Faulkner, is all but unfilmable. 
 
 
 
 The one great film of his work is the Coens' "No Country for Old Men," but it began with an extraordinary character and surrounded him with others. The Road is not fertile soil, providing a world with life draining from it. McCarthy's greatest novels are Suttree and Blood Meridian. The second, set in the Old West, is about a fearsome, bald, skeletal man named Judge Holden, who is implacable in his desire to inflict suffering and death. ("Blood Meridian" is being prepared by Todd Field, director of "In the Bedroom.") 
 
 
 
 Hillcoat's earlier film, "The Proposition" (2005), written by Nick Cave, seems almost McCarthy-like. Something in McCarthy's work draws Hillcoat to it, and you must be a brave director to let that happen. Writing this, I realize few audience members can be expected to have read The Road, even though it was a selection of Oprah's Book Club. Fewer still will have read McCarthy's other works. 
 
 
 
 I've been saying for years that a film critic must review the film before him, and not how "faithful" the film is to the book -- as if we're married to the book, and somehow screen adaptation is adultery. I realize my own fault is in being so very familiar with Cormac McCarthy. That may affect my ability to view any film adaptation of his work afresh. When I know a novel is bring filmed, I make it a point to not read the book. Yet I am grateful for having read McCarthy's. ||||| "The Road" is a road you'll wish hadn't been taken. Not because anything's been badly done, but because there's a serious imbalance in the complicated equation between what the film forces us to endure and what we end up receiving in return.Given that it's based on Cormac McCarthy's somber novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a devastating report from the end of the world witnessed by a man who's been there, it's no surprise that the film is for the most part profoundly depressing.What is disappointing is that despite numerous strong areas, including fine acting by Viggo Mortensen and young Kodi Smit-McPhee as father-and-son survivors of an unnamed apocalypse, what we've been given is no more than a reasonable facsimile, an honorable attempt at filming an unfilmable book.As adapted by British playwright Joe Penhall and directed by John Hillcoat, best known for the slickly violent "The Proposition," "The Road" turns out to be good at shocking and upsetting us, but it lacks the compensating emotional heft that would make absorbing those shocks worth our while.For while Chris Kennedy's formidable production design places us in an uncomfortably real space, absent McCarthy's haunting language, "The Road" for the most part is not so good at transcendence, at making us feel, as the book definitely does, that there is reason for us to endure its pitiless descriptions of what Joseph Conrad described in "Heart of Darkness" as "the horror, the horror."What Conrad was likely talking about, and what "The Road" devotes considerable time to on the screen and on the page, is the terrors that humans inflict on each other. One of the provocative questions this story asks is whether staying alive is worth the savagely inhuman actions necessary to make survival possible.Unwilling to begin on a totally downbeat note, "The Road" opens with what turns out to be a dream flashback to a time just before the unspecified catastrophe happens, a time when Mortensen's unnamed man is married to Charlize Theron's unnamed woman and their first child is on the way.Ten years into the post-apocalypse, the mother is gone, the unborn child is a young boy (Australian actor Smit-McPhee) and the world has changed. It's a blasted, blighted, ashen and slowly dying Earth, shaken by quakes, lighted by out-of-control fires and filled with dead cars, empty buildings, deserted bridges and very few people.To stay alive in this world, you have to keep moving, wearing the most utilitarian rags you can find (Margot Wilson did the excellent costume design) and pushing the shopping cart that contains all your possessions. It's a vision of a world largely without us that completely chills the soul.The casting of Mortensen and Smit-McPhee is one of the film's strengths. With straggly hair and a great wild look, Mortensen is convincing as a harried survivor, and the rapport he has with the more innocent and soulful child played by Smit-McPhee is excellent."I've never had a better acting partner," Mortensen has said, "someone I knew had my back, and he knew I had his."One of the great fears of those few survivors is cannibalism, something the strong inflict on the weak, and scenes that hint at that are among "The Road's" hardest to take.The man's greatest fear is that he will die before his son is old enough to protect himself, and the son's greatest fear, paradoxically, is that he and his father will somehow lose the essence of their humanity in the drive to stay alive. "Are we still the good guys?" he asks his father plaintively. "Are we carrying the fire?"This pair have their affecting moments, as does Robert Duvall as a kind of barely alive human lump, but absent McCarthy's transformative prose, which has a power even images can't improve on, what we are left with is more endurance test than anything more elevated.If it is to do more than horrify and depress us, "The Road" is in need of a finer sensibility, and that is simply not on offer.
– It’s a thankless job adapting a literary darling like The Road, and, sure enough, director John Hillcoat hasn’t gotten much thanks. Critics have mixed feelings about the bleak post-apocalyptic film. Here’s what they’re saying: Despite good acting, the film is merely adequate, “an honorable attempt at filming an unfilmable book,” writes Kenneth Turan of the LA Times. “To do more than horrify and depress us, The Road is in need of a finer sensibility.” A devoted Cormac McCarthy fan, Roger Ebert wrestles with his review. “It is powerful, but for me lacks the same core of emotional feeling,” he writes. “I'm not sure this is any fault of the filmmakers.” The movie can only “dully visualize horrors the best writers hint at,” says Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. Still, it’s a “welcome rebuke to the happy-face apocalypse of 2012.” “The Road isn't a masterpiece,” writes Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer. But it stuck with him, “its images of dread and fear kicking around like such a terrible dream.”