Robert Redford and Nick Nolte (Frank Masi, SMPSP / Broad Green Pictures)

Man’s helplessness before nature is one of the great artistic themes, inspiring terrifying and majestic cinema from visionaries like Werner Herzog, director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. A Walk in the Woods, on the other hand, comes to you from Ken Kwapis, director of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

To different degrees, I like both Aguirre and the Traveling Pants franchise, and vaguely imagine an unholy hybrid. But Kwapis’ adaptation of Bill Bryson’s sometimes raunchily funny travel book has completely extricated its dry elegance, not unlike the way Nick Nolte extricates a country bumpkin’s extra-large panties from a washing machine agitator in a small-town laundromat.

Robert Redford, who optioned the rights to Bryson’s book in 2005 and originally wanted Paul Newman to play Katz, plays Bryson, who as the film opens, is in the middle of an awkward television appearance plugging a paperback set of his previous travel books. The author, slightly befuddled before an unctuous host, is basking in the autumn years of his writing career, and his interlocutor charmlessly suggests that now that the Iowa-born author, who had lived abroad for 20 years, was back in America, he might want to write about home (hint hint).

Bryson, living in bucolic New Hampshire with his wife Catherine (Emma Thompson), takes the hint, and is inspired to learn that there’s an entrance to the Appalachian Trail right by his house. This fit septuagenarian is, after all, the same Robert Redford who convincingly survived through the storm of All is Lost, but friends and family demand that he take a hiking companion, who appears in the form of old Des Moines chum and recovering alcoholic Stephen Katz (Nolte).

This is not exactly how the real-life Bryson happened upon his tale. The now 79-year old Redford is a good three decades older than Bryson was when he made the journey (and is older than Bryson is now, almost 20 years after the book was published). The casting strategy turns a much-admired book into The Grumpy Old Men of the Traveling Pants, not an inherently bad thing but probably not what even Redford had in mind when he wanted to adapt the movie to the big screen.

Pants do indeed figure in various mishaps along the trail. While Nolte is no Paul Newman, if you were to typecast a veteran actor in the role of a recovering alcoholic lewdly seducing women along the Appalachian Trail, Nolte would likely be your first call, too. He turns in a lively performance in odd couple counterpoint to Redford’s addled man of letters.

Casting isn’t the problem. The script by Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman turns Bryson’s dry adventure into a salty journey to the grave, or worse, to mental disintegration. When the traveling grumps give up on camping for a motel run by Jeannie (Mary Steenburgen), they meet her elder mother (Mimi Gould) who in her senility can no longer communicate with Katz except to hold his hand.

Not coincidentally, Steenburgen and Gould are also in the cast of Last Vegas, another bad-boy comedy, AARP style. Aging stars may be a clumsy metaphor for a dying planet, and the old sports put in good performances. But fans of Bryson will miss the elegant touch he gave to his journey. Take this scene from the book, as the author prepares for his trek in an outdoor goods store. He quotes a salesman’s pitch:

“‘Now this has a high-density abrasion-resistant fly with a rip-stop weave. On the other hand, and I’ll be frank with you here’—and he would lean to me and reduce his voice to a low, candid tone, as if disclosing that it had once been arrested in a public toilet with a sailor—‘the seams are lap-felled rather than bias-taped …’ ”

Bryson’s mildly ribald aside is deathly dry in a book that’s a pleasure to read, but the filmmakers have turned it into an uncomfortable comedy; American Pie for nursing homes. A Walk in the Woods is full of breathtaking scenery, and may well inspire you to take a hike, but you probably won’t want to run into these people on the trail.

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A Walk in the Woods
Directed by Ken Kwapis
Written by Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman
With Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, Emma Thompson, Mary Steenburgen
Rated R for language and some sexual references, not that anyone under 17 would want to see it.
Running time 104 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you.