Ethan and Joel Coen initially seem a most unpromising choice to adapt Cormac McCarthy's remarkable novel, "No Country for Old Men." Adept at the copout and the put-on, whenever they cannot fully comprehend their material or follow through on the logic of a particular work, they withdraw to an invulnerable position, hiding behind a joke - on their film, on the audience, even on themselves. Although the blank, frigid landscape of "Fargo" may prepare them for the arid emptiness of McCarthy's Texas, not even their first big hit, "Blood Simple," suggests the nihilistic violence of their new picture.

A combination of factors accounts for the success of "No Country for Old Men," however, including an admirable attention to the original source and some wonderfully understated performances by the principals. By following the book's terse chronicle of action and steadfast concentration on the surfaces of its people and its world, the movie conveys the uncompromising austerity of its vision. Without moralizing or melodrama, the picture suggests a devastating metaphysics of vacuity, a spiritual emptiness that mirrors the powerlessness of the characters to resist their destiny.

The relatively simple plot of escape and pursuit begins with an accident that sets that destiny in motion. A deer hunter, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), discovers the results of a drug deal gone wrong - a truck full of heroin, several dead bodies, and a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills. He takes the money, naturally, and, knowing that some unsavory people will return to claim the cash and the drugs, sends his wife away and skips town, dreaming of a new future.

The upper-level executives in the drug business send several stalkers after Moss, but the major pursuer, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), dominates the hunt; a killer several degrees beyond the level of a homicidal psychopath, he likes to use a slaughterhouse mechanism in his work, and leaves a trail of corpses in his wake. Among the law enforcement personnel chasing both Moss and Chigurh, a local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), always just a step behind, becomes something like the interpreter of the action, not only trying to save Moss and arrest the killer, but also trying to make sense of the situation, the people, of all the meaningless deaths he encounters.

The picture establishes some parallels between Moss and his pursuer, showing them more or less duplicating each other's actions, treating their own wounds, attempting the same methods of flight and pursuit, and exercising considerable ingenuity in concealing and searching for the stash. Tough and resilient, Moss escapes some tight situations, and even manages to shoot his nemesis at one point, but Chigurh embodies a kind of relentless fate, an unstoppable being who kills on a whim, kills without a qualm, and, following some perverse principle, kills because he promises to kill.

Although the movie presents Moss as its protagonist and shows his flight through the dreary towns of southern Texas in considerable detail, the sheriff and the stalker occupy the thematic foreground. Pale and deadly calm, speaking slowly and precisely, Bardem turns Chigurh into someone outside the boundaries of normal humanity - even the sheriff thinks he's chasing a ghost - whose talent for death seems almost otherworldly. As the most fully human character in the film, Tommy Lee Jones provides something like a moral center, reflecting on the devastation of landscape littered with corpses and the motivation that led to all that slaughter.

An accomplished and deservedly honored actor, Jones has probably never performed more skillfully. His seamed, craggy face reflects the look of the rough, dry country he traverses - a place hard on men, as a character points out - and even betrays his puzzled attempts to understand the horrors he encounters. He speaks some of the most resonant lines in the movie and finally expresses its dispiriting conclusions: a sense of profound despair, a perception of the essential meaninglessness of life and death, a sad recognition that the place where he thinks he maintains law and order is really no place for him, indeed no country for old men. 

No Country for Old Men

(R), directed by Ethan and Joel Coen

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