This movie is terrifyingly good

The Coen brothers are
masterful in this
suspenseful film.

By COLIN COVERT

STAR TRIBUNE (MINNEAPOLIS)

A man with dead eyes enters a dilapidated Texas gas station, flips a coin and tells the counterman to call it. What am I wagering, the worker asks. Everything, replies the customer.

Life is unfair. That’s the bottom line in “No Country for Old Men,” the Coen brothers’ blood-spattered saga of greed and guns on the Tex-Mex border. It’s a diagnosis, rather than a comforting moral. “No Country” is taut and spiky as a barbed wire fence, spellbindingly filmed, flawlessly cast and brilliantly acted. It’s the most heartfelt and soulful film the sardonic Coens have made.

At its core, though, is a bleak meditation on the nonlinear viciousness of life and our desire to rein in its Russian-roulette randomness with proverbs and conjectures masquerading as knowledge and certitude. It’s a heart-in-the-throat crime drama whose central mystery is existential.

The opening shots of desolate landscape could be Earth before man arrived, and a primordial sense of conflict informs almost every scene. Josh Brolin sights a distant antelope and squeezes off a round; the animal bolts away, wounded. Brolin tracks it and finds another blood trail leading to a drug deal gone bad. He hikes back to his pickup with $2 million and a vague plan for keeping it.

He stumbled onto a fortune, and as the cartel sends killers to retrieve it, he stumbles away from them as best he can. Quite literally: Before long, he’s hobbling on bloody bare feet as a pit bull snaps for his jugular. Predator becomes prey quickly in this drama, elation morphs into desperation. Only the strongest — and luckiest — have a chance to survive, and luck has a way of changing. God likes a joke.

“No Country” is adapted faithfully from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, adding a few Coenesque filigrees to the homespun talk while retaining the spare, poetic structure. Javier Bardem is exquisitely creepy as the coin-flipping psychopath who decides the fate of everyone he encounters on a whim. He’s a relentless golem who tells his victims not to mourn their luck, not to enter denial, not to degrade themselves with empty hope as he prepares to kill them.

“Everyone says the same thing,” he notes with a puzzled shake of the head. “You don’t have to do this.” Behavior is the only item Lady Fortune has no control over; undignified pleading is no way to spend one’s last moments.

Bardem’s opposite number is Tommy Lee Jones as the old-school Texas sheriff who hopes to save Brolin’s life. He’s seasoned but baffled by the vicious new wave of crime the cross-border drug trade has inspired, and maybe too outmoded to stop it. Surveying a pile of corpses that his deputy has proclaimed a mess, he reckons, “If it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here.”

The three characters fit together neatly as a feral id, greedy ego and controlling superego. Each tries to cope with life’s unpredictability with his own brand of stoicism.

But no theoretical overview can protect you against the cuticle-biting anxiety the Coens achieve. “No Country” is surpassingly elegant suspense filmmaking. For extended passages speech drops away. The masterfully conceived soundtrack and prowling camera show us every detail we need to understand the ever-twisting story.

When the film has you in its clutches, the sound of a far-off phone ringing or a glimpse of a shadow beneath a door can turn your blood to Freon. This is, quite literally, a terrifyingly good film.