For mankind, a long stretch of grim ‘Road’

There was a stand-up comic years ago who did a bit about mankind being the true hard-shell pest of planet earth, destined to persist long after the roaches die off.

That theory is borne out in "The Road," but it's not funny. The movie is a well-made but almost unbearably grim adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's bestseller, set some 12 years after an unspecified catastrophe has obliterated almost all life.

A few bedraggled humans stagger on, and "The Road" follows a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they make a desperate journey from the mountains to the sea, scrounging for canned food, hiding from roving bands of men who are eating the only high-quality protein left — other humans.

That adds up to about two monochromatic hours of cannibal gangs, barren landscapes, falling ash and gray rain, interrupted by flourishes of unspeakable depravity and flashbacks of the man trying to persaude his dispirited wife (Charlize Theron) not to kill herself.

Now, "The Road" did manage to sneak on to Oprah's reading list, so you know there's some uplift in there somewhere. You'll find it, eventually, but it's of McCarthy's peculiar variety — when the most moving line in a movie is "Do you eat people?" you know you're in for a tough time.

That said, "The Road" is clearly made by someone with a love and understanding of the text — Aussie John Hillcoat (who made an underrated movie called "The Proposition") fought for years to adapt the book and for another year to modify the movie after the studio (Dimension) balked at his initial cut. (Dimension's selling it as an action movie. It isn't.)

Hillcoat gets at the way McCarthy's bleak narrative reduces the father/son dynamic to an existential nub — captured in the father's heartbreaking attempts to explain their desperate situation in terms the boy can understand, a philosophy of "good guys" and "bad guys" borrowed from old westerns that's both corny and apt.

"Are we still the good guys?" the boy asks, as his father is forced to take increasingly drastic action to protect him.

The man and the boy, the cart, the road — McCarthy and Hillcoat reduce life to a bleak essence. There is the journey, your family, your stuff, and it doesn't take long to determine what's important.

What's important to Hillcoat and "The Road" is that he can find actors strong enough to draw viewers into this two-hour nightmare. Mortensen is strong, but young Smit-McPhee is given a nearly impossible load of work here, and some of his line readings are inevitably stiff.

Robert Duvall is good as a wandering, blind loner, and Michael K. Williams has an almost unintentionally funny bit as a wary survivor — he's the same guy who played Omar in "The Wire," and you laugh when you realize he's wound up in a place worse than Baltimore. *

Produced by Nick Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz and Steve Schwartz, directed by John Hillcoat, written by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, music by Nick Cave, distributed by Dimension Films.