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.

rated R

It’s only fair when looking at a movie so dripping in the influence of Sergio Leone to apply the simple standards of il buono, il brutto and il cattivo.

So, the Good: In throwing every imaginable genre convention at the wall, something is bound to stick, and “The Book of Eli” succeeds in many ways (if sticking to a wall can be qualified as criteria for success). The good Brothers Hughes, having demonstrated some fairly sophisticated taste in comic booky diversions with their underrated adaptation of Alan Moore’s “From Hell,” pull out all the stops to illustrate their vision of a lone preacher in a desolate wasteland, defending the downtrodden and generally doing unto others, mostly for worse than for better, as they would do unto him. The visuals, all initially storyboarded by veteran comic book artists and filmed with a dusty, bleached out severity by Don Burgess (“Forest Gump,” “Spiderman” and “Terminator 3”), are textured, sunburned and spectacular in every way a good pockeclipse should be. Give us a few more years, these images say, and we’ll surely turn our sky to lead, our rivers to sand and what passes as civilization to a crumbling echo.