A River Runs Through It

There is one major talent, and here are two more: Joel and Ethan Coen, filmmakers with perfect pitch for American accents. They shot their first feature, "Blood Simple," in Texas, and they know that Texas is hard. What they have recently learned is that the border is harder still. Then there's the dark Magus of the Texas Hill Country, land of rock and grit and unforgiveness: the actor Tommy Lee Jones. The Hill Country is hard—look at his face—but again, the border is harder. These four talents, complemented by the plangent, austere cinematography of Roger Deakins, convert McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men" into a darkly beautiful border Western that breaks all the rules of the genre and (though not evident in the early movements of this raw, tragic tone poem) of the European policier cheapies from which it distantly derives.

Could the same story happen in the Florida Keys, or maybe on the docks of Marseilles, with the pockmarked French legend Eddie Constantine (a native Angeleno) playing someone like Tommy Lee Jones's Sheriff Ed Tom Bell of Terrell County, Texas—itself a hole at the bottom of America that contains only two towns, with civilization represented by Interstate 10, 65 miles to the north? The answer is "No way." Man's fate attends us all, but we grapple with our own in particular places, and where people talk and behave in particular ways.

"No Country" (which opens on Nov. 9) happens in bleak, low-rent places, near a border on which extreme violence is the rule, not the exception. It's a border that divides two cultures, each with histories written in blood. I can see why filmmakers are attracted to its visuals—they are powerfully seductive—but I prefer to see them on the movie screen because I know, like Sheriff Ed Tom, that there are people on both sides of the river who, if they happen to like your socks, will kill you for them. It's not only no country for old men; it's no country for young or middle-aged men, either. It's also hard on dogs, and hardest of all on women. Some women turn mean, and still others settle into a long resignation before they're even out of their teens. Horses do a little better. Surviving, as opposed to prospering, is often just a matter of luck.

Llewelyn Moss, a young redneck, played with laconic inscrutability by Josh Brolin, is on an antelope hunt when he comes upon a drug deal gone bad. At the scene are many dead, and there's a satchel of money, which Llewelyn takes. Two tours in 'Nam convinces him he's as tough as anybody. He hurries home with the loot and is immediately rude to his young wife, Carla Jean. (This Western, very definitely, is about Bang Bang, not Kiss Kiss.) But Llewelyn knows that bad people will be coming, and at least takes the precaution of sending Carla Jean away, first to Odessa, and as the noose tightens, to El Paso.

Various bad men come, and there is lots of Bang Bang, but the only bad man who matters is a killer named Anton Chigurh. Audiences are accustomed to bad guys of the glamorized evil-genius stamp: Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter, or Patricia Cornwell's Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. Chigurh is not a genius, just a merciless killer, played with chilling restraint by the fine actor Javier Bardem. Chigurh kills methodically, whenever it serves him: twice he toys a little, offering his potential victim a coin toss. The confused owner of a convenience store, not realizing that he's betting his life, calls the flip correctly, and Chigurh walks away.

After about a dozen killings in or near Terrell County, one of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell's young deputies suggests that they're chasing a lunatic. Sheriff Ed Tom says no. He doubts the man's a lunatic, and it's here, as the audience is expecting the final Bang Bang, that McCarthy veers straight into ethics and the degradation of manners that occurs when a culture loses all moral poise. Sheriff Ed Tom on the low standards of behavior in the county he's spent his life defending: "It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Anytime you quit hearing 'Sir' and 'Ma'am,' the end is pretty much in sight."