The last Cormac McCarthy novel adapted for the screen won the Oscar for Best Picture. Nihilistic and violent though it was, the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men was still able to convey the poetry of McCarthy's spare prose. Disappointingly, John Hillcoat's movie of The Road does not -- either in strict cinematic terms or via the dialogue and narration in Joe Penhall's screenplay.

Declaring The Road leads to nowhere is an exaggeration, but it certainly doesn't take you anywhere you want to go. It's the story of a father, The Man (Viggo Mortensen), trying to instill survival skills in his young son, The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPHee), as they evade cannibals and battle the elements following an unnamed apocalypse. According to its Greek etymology, an apocalypse entails an unveiling or revelation. Evidently, not much was revealed during this one. While that may be the case in the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, as well as ring true to any comparable real-life experience (let's hope none of us ever finds out), it doesn't make this a movie worth rushing out to watch.

Its starting point -- in fact, the only contextual detail provided -- is that the world is dying. We're seven years into a Doomsday scenario and there's no Hollywood reprieve in the offing where the planet or humanity are concerned. Perhaps the best that can be said about the film is that the desolation and despair are palpable. What keeps The Man going is his determination to prepare The Boy for survival when he's gone -- to pass on the will and wiles to continue living. Toting their meager possessions, they head south across America toward the sea, narrowly avoiding cannibal slavers on several occasions. They encounter less threatening individuals on their journey, the most memorable being Old Man, played by Robert Duvall. Seismic tremors intermittently wrack the denuded, slate gray landscape.

The Man dreams about his wife (Charlize Theron), who was pregnant with The Boy when the end of civilization as we know it commenced. Because we don't get any details about how they survived initially, these scenes don't generate much sympathy, though The Woman's ultimate response to her plight is eminently understandable. Her son's fate drives the narrative and his relationship with his father is poignant in a basic, powerful way. It's complicated by the fact he's innocent in a particular sense, not having known what life was like before the Earth was blighted. Yet instead of being used to deepen the mystery of their predicament, his peculiar state of vulnerability is deployed to heighten the sentimentality.

The Boy poses profound moral questions about their behavior and circumstances that can't get any traction because their situation seems fully circumscribed. The bleakly existential nature of the proceedings, indicated not only by the archetypal character names (or lack thereof), serves to disallow a plausible payoff. The Road is a film in which ultimate questions siphon off dramatic tension rather than ratchet it up. The stakes are so high that the devices used to illuminate them flare out, falling back to the moviegoer as meaningless, inconsequential ash -- theoretically profound maybe, but excessively parched.

Tackling this book was a major challenge and judging by his harrowing Australia-set Western The Proposition, director Hillcoat was a fine hire, as was Mortensen. Still, without taking away from their efforts or from the production team in general, it doesn't strike me as the most complicated challenge to replicate a wasteland -- to evoke an atmosphere of loss and decimation. While most every choice made by the crew is first-rate from a craft perspective, avoiding the maudlin or the masochistic is nearly impossible. To indicate any hope with a camera angle, expression or wardrobe decision, for instance, seems Pollyannaish given the overall circumstances and to accentuate the bleakness can easily seem like piling on.

The most distracting and problematic example is the score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Working at cross-purposes to the narrative, the music is gushingly, inappropriately sappy; it sticks out as a concession made to concerned studio executives in the hopes of making the movie more palatable for mainstream audiences. Not only does it undercut the integrity of The Road, it raises suspicions about whether the story had enough harsh lyricism to begin with. It snaps the viewer out of the experience and forces one to ask what constitutes artistic success in such a forbidding context. Have we reached an existential dead-end or not? We're robbed of the opportunity to decide for ourselves.

(Released by Dimension Films and rated "R" for some violence, disturbing images and language.)