Louder Than Words

In Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, action speaks for itself.

by Sam Adams

LOADED: Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) protects his found fortune. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

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Cormac McCarthy's prose is as dry and cold as the desert after dark. Shorn of quotation marks, apostrophes and other fripperies, his books transpire in a laconic deadpan that speaks volumes without having to say too much.

Joel and Ethan Coen love nothing more than to let characters with tangy regional accents rip their way through mile-a-minute monologues, but in adapting McCarthy's No County for Old Men, they willingly subordinate their style to his. The characters speak grudgingly, if at all, and long chunks of the movie transpire without a sound being uttered — although when they do speak, it's usually worth waiting for.

No Country opens with shots of the Texas plains, unbroken dust-covered landscapes stretching back to a horizon stacked with vertical bands of color. The terrain is at once desolate and peaceful, as yet untouched by the rivers of blood that will soon begin to flow.

The torrent is unleashed when Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) spots a wounded dog through his rifle site and follows it to the remnants of a drug deal gone fatally wrong. Bodies are sprawled in the dirt, amid SUVs and pickups perforated by automatic weapons. Following the trail of blood, he finds a document case stuffed with hundred-dollar bills (one that, in fact, looks suspiciously like the one Fargo's Jerry Lundegaard left buried in the Minnesota snow).

Llewelyn's discovery sets two men chasing after him. Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a sharp-tongued but vaguely sorrowful sheriff, and Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a conscienceless killer who looks as if he's just risen off an autopsy slab. Lank black hair drooping to his shoulders, he'd be a comical figure if anyone dared laugh. His vacant eyes are less than soulless, a life-sucking void. A single stare from him is enough to reduce a garrulous gas-station clerk to quivering abjection, a sensation Chigurh savors by prolonging their encounter until the man is nearly crazed.

At first, Chigurh is a mere hired gun, a deadly functionary charged with retrieving the money for his well-heeled employers. But once he's dispatched them both with a few quick, noiseless shots, he starts to seem more force than man, a machine grinding slowly, inexorably forward. His every movement seems calculated for only for one purpose, and his brain admits no thought that would deter him from his task.

Against a creature so frightening, Llewelyn would seem to stand little chance, but through a combination of resourcefulness and sheer thickheadedness, he escapes death again and again, gunning down a snarling dog as it leaps for his throat or shambling across the border into Mexico leaking blood from a shotgun blast. No less dogged if a shade more bemused, Ed Tom follows on behind, urging Llewelyn's wife (Kelly Macdonald) to persuade her husband to turn himself in before Chigurh catches up with him.

Taking their cues from McCarthy's shaved-down prose, the Coens linger on the mechanics of the hunt, watching Llewelyn turn a curtain rod and the cord from a window blind into a ingenious method of hiding his loot, or on Chigurh as he calmly picks shotgun pellets out of his leg, his hands moving as if he's been practicing all his life for this moment. The movie's pace is measured, almost uniform, but it's the closest thing to an action movie the Coens have ever made.

It's also, since Fargo, the movie that wrestles most directly with the existence of evil. The Coens' critics like to paint them as vapid stylists, but few American filmmakers have demonstrated their moral seriousness. No Country for Old Men is gripping and fantastically entertaining, but it's also almost unspeakably dark. Death is doled out dumbly, not as a punishment for moral infractions but simply for the sin of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. McCarthy kills major characters in the gutter between paragraphs, and the Coens follow suit, denying them the dignity of a cinematic death. One moment you're alive, and the next someone is wiping you off the soles of his boots. It's fitting that Chigurh's favorite weapons are a pneumatic plunger used for killing livestock and a silenced shotgun whose muffled whoosh is almost laughably out of proportion to its grisly result. Like Chigurh's tools, No Country makes a tremendous impact without making a lot of noise.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

No Country for Old Men | Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen |A Miramax release