No exit in Texas.

It's hard to say that I was actually entertained, at least in the usual sense of the word, by No Country for Old Men. Even with its moments of often dark Coen brothers humor, the film is so unrelentingly bleak that not all that long ago Hollywood would not even have nominated it for a single Academy Award, much less awarded it Best Picture, Best Director(s), Best Supporting Actor (Bardem), and Best Adapted Screenplay, and nominated it for two others (cinematography and editing). But that's largely what it's all about: change. Change in the very nature of violence, or at least in the way we perceive it, and change in the way our literary and cinematic narratives present it, or at least in the way Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers present it. As the laconic Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones puts it in the opening voice-over, "The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it.... But I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand." Not only does the subject matter of No Country for Old Men go out and meet something akin to pure nihilism, the Coen brothers, following Cormac McCarthy's brilliant novel quite closely, have found, on every level, the consummate cinematic means for communicating not only that which cannot be understood but also the fact that the word "understand" has no relevance in this climate.

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Let's start with the story, which takes place in 1980 in an area of Texas near the Mexican border. Following two sequences that introduce us to a particularly dark character described in the novel by the sheriff as "a true and living prophet of destruction" (more on him anon), we follow one of the film's main characters (Josh Brolin) into the middle of arid, open, dry-as-dust plains, where he comes upon what one of the later characters in the film will describe as a "colossal goatfuck," to wit the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad, with the blood-drenched ground strewn with shot-up vehicles, bloated corpses, and a dead pit bull. Now, it is pretty much of a given for anyone who has read Cormac McCarthy that the novelist is not about to bother with such niceties as explaining why who killed whom, or for whom who and whom were working. Or why. But it is also pretty much of a given that Hollywood will generally fill in those blank spaces and offer audiences the "comfort" of some kind of causal thread to soothe--partially at least--the discomfort brought about by the witnessed violence. The Coen brothers on the other hand had the integrity to build only enough of a narrative superstructure to communicate the ultimate, fatalistic meaningless of violence. Nothing else. The closest we get to a source will be a man who looks like a corporate executive sitting in what looks like a corporate office that can be reached only by an elevator whose access code gets changed by a computer after each use. But we have no group by which to identify him, and he too will fall victim to the particularly dark character described above, and God knows whom he's working for....

And then there's the Josh Brolin character, a free-spirited welder who lives in a trailer with his sweet but quietly strong wife (Kelly Macdonald, who amazingly covers over her thick Glasgow accent with a spot-on delivery of the south Texas drawl). At the scene of the colossal goatfuck Brolin comes across not only a substantial amount of "Mexican brown" heroin, which he leaves alone, he also quickly finds the inevitable satchel of money meant to pay for it, which, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, since otherwise we wouldn't have a movie), he does not leave alone. And thus begins an odyssey with Brolin staying just ahead not only of the living prophet of destruction but also of various other bad--and good--guys. The movie creates Brolin's character in such a way that we have no choice but to root for him, even while we want to give him a good shake for his total foolhardiness. He is, as I've said, a free spirit willing to face impossible odds in order to get hold of something he has never had--money; he also has enough smarts to heal his own wounds and to devise strategies to keep himself alive; and when it comes to confrontation he is able to more or less hold his own ... up to a point.

And so, good moviegoers that we are, we expect one or more of several things to happen: a) Brolin will somehow manage to get away with the money and live happily ever after with his sweet but quietly strong wife; b) the sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones, who has brought more than a handful of desperadoes to justice over his long career in the movies, will either kill the living prophet of destruction or send him off to jail to be executed (this is Texas, you may recall); c) the seemingly-in-control-of-everything cowboy (Woody Harrelson) hired by the executive mentioned above will take control of everything and bring about some form of closure. These are our Hollywood-generated expectations, and we expect at least some of them to be satisfied.

None of them are. Just at the moment late in the story when we are sure that the film is about to erupt in some kind of climactic confrontation, we suddenly find ourselves following the sheriff to a motel room where the Josh Brolin character lies dead in a pool of blood. Instead of providing us with a nice, linear string of events that lead us to the demise of a character for whom we have been rooting, the Coen brothers simply give us death. Period. The film does not even afford us the opportunity, so essential to the usual cine-experience, of seeing. In one sequence Brolin is talking with a woman sitting by a swimming pool, and in the next he--and the woman--have moved into the past tense characters throughout No Country have been careful to use when referring to the dead ("It's just a bunch of Mexican drugrunners." "They were. They ain't now"). Nothing in between. As for the cowboy in whom the film encourages us to place a great deal of hope, he's already dead, shot through the head by the prophet of destruction with the unlikely weapon of a shotgun with a silencer. And the sheriff? Well, unlike many Tommy Lee ]ones characters, this one always finds himself one step behind: he even turns up in the motel room where the prophet of destruction stands hiding, but then simply walks away, lacking both the cunning and the instinct to meet that something he didn't understand. When last we see him he is facing the boredom of retirement, with his wife (Tess Harper) standing with an oh-my-God-am-I-going-to-haveto-live-with-this-the-rest-of-my-life expression on her face.

The centerpiece of No Country's nihilism is, of course, that prophet of destruction, a character with the unlikely name of Anton Chigurh, an even more unlikely hairdo (something between a pageboy bob and a Beatles mop), and an occasional silly smile that fits in with absolutely nothing. We originally suppose that Chigurh, perfectly played without showing a thread of motivation (no method acting here) by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, works for one side or the other of those involved in the colossal goatfuck. But then he has the nasty habit of killing off just about anyone with whom he comes in contact, such as a driver whose car he wants and therefore shoots between the eyes with a stun gun after politely (the way an arresting officer would) asking him to hold still. Or not, as is the case of an old storekeeper whom Chigurh engages in a dialog that leads to a terrifying coin toss. The language here no longer has the slightly florid contours of Coen-speak, but rather has a no-exit feel, created by McCarthy and maintained by the Coen brothers, bordering on the theater of the absurd, rather as if Ionesco had written a play set in Waco, Texas. Chigurh lives by a code of honor, but it is a wholly personal code, enforced by murder, with no cultural payback whatever. Chigurh's closest relative is Hannibal Lecter. Like Lecter, Chigurh is beyond evil. He is instead a logical extension of the power paradigm of the law of the father, a law that can lead only to the transgression of its very statutes.

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And so, by film's end, Chigurh sits in the bedroom of the now widowed sweet but quietly strong wife, obliged by his personal code of honor to kill her, since the Josh Brolin character, through no fault of his own, did not deliver the money in exchange for his spouse's life. She does get the option of the coin toss, but here the Coen brothers go a step further than Cormac McCarthy by leaving the situation open-ended, once again depriving audiences of the satisfaction of seeing and therefore believing that they can know that which cannot be understood. The ultimate object in No Country for Old Men is Chigurh's weapon of choice, a pneumatic stun gun that knocks cattle out so that they may be "humanely" slaughtered. With the stun gun as a metaphor, the Coen brothers lead us to a nihilistic awareness, to which the politics of the times we live in are also leading us, that we are all animals awaiting meaningless slaughter. It's all a matter of a coin toss as to when, not whether, we get that bolt in the brain that leaves us lying helpless on the ground, waiting for the true and living prophet of destruction to come and slit our throats.

No Country for Old Men is as pure a piece of nihilism as you're going to find in the cinema. This in and of itself does not make it a brilliant film. Nihilism is a subject that you can talk to death, or that you can sugarcoat in order not to fall into total despair. What makes No Country for Old Men a brilliant--and courageous--film is that the Coen brothers, following Cormac McCarthy's lead, have made this nihilism such an integral part of every aspect of the filmmaking process, as I have tried to suggest above, and in such an uncompromising way, that there is simply no way out. Most movie audiences will not accept this. I hear that people, hanging onto one last shred of possible comfort, are arguing over whether Chigurh kills the now widowed sweet but quietly strong wife at the end. There is some comfort in knowing. But there is no argument, and there is no knowing, since the film never shows what happens (and puhleeze don't tell me that it happens in the film because it happens in the novel).

The only one in the film to talk about nihilism is the Tommy Lee Jones sheriff, and his observations simply deal with the fact that this country that has now laid bare the meaninglessness of its violence for all to see is not a country for old men and their now worn-out sense of order. And so, in the film's last sequence, the sheriff recounts to his wife a dream in which he and his long-dead father are out riding toward a mountain pass. The father rides on ahead, carrying fire in a horn. And the sheriff knows that his father will be waiting for him when he gets there. Again, comfort. Comfort in the feeling that, in life, the father and his laws will be there to bring order into the chaos. Comfort in the feeling that, in death, the father, the keeper of the fire of the gods, will be there to help make sense of death and dying. But it's only a dream. And so Jones's last line is, "And then I woke up," following which, after a couple of cuts, the screen goes black for four seconds, with only the sound of a ticking clock to remind us of the futile inexorability--or the inexorable futility--of it all.