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A brutal masterpiece

“No Country For Old Men,” the title of the eagerly awaited new film by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, is something of a misnomer — the blood-soaked landscape of this riveting exploration of the dark recesses in the American psyche is no country for anyone of any age.

The Coens bring together all the moviemaking craftsmanship they’ve honed in their heralded career to date in adapting Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, and the results are astonishing, especially when you realize how simple the basic premise is — deceptively simple.

A number of characters pass in and out of the story, set on the windswept Texas-Mexico border in 1980, but the film focuses primarily on three men.

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is an antelope hunter who lives a bare-bones life in a trailer park with his sweetly oblivious young wife Carla Jean (Scottish actress Kelly McDonald, doing a very convincing West Texas twang).

While out hunting one day, Moss comes over the top of a hill and is nonplussed to find a scene of utter carnage below him: a dozen shredded corpses, five bullet-riddled pickups, a huge cache of heroin in one of the truck beds — and a satchel containing $2 million in crisp Benjamins.

What would you do? Well, duh — he grabs the bag and takes off, of course. But he’s smart enough to know that someone connected to this bloody debacle will come looking for that money.

That someone would be Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hulking sociopath with an unhealthy pallor, dead, red-rimmed eyes and the worst big-screen hairdo since Harrison Ford’s last movie.

By the time Moss is on the run with the swag, the movie has already introduced us to Chigurh in heart-stopping fashion.

In the very first scene, in fact, he is shown being handcuffed and taken into custody, then rising up behind an oblivious deputy at the police station and strangling the cop with his own cuffs. He then steals a police cruiser, pulls over a stranger and politely asks him to exit his vehicle.

He does this so no brain matter will splatter the interior of the vehicle when he subjects the bewildered man to his favorite weapon, an air-powered cattle stun-gun that fires out a retractable six-inch bolt with enough force to crush a skull.

Representing the thin line of restraint between these two protagonists — but always a frustrating step behind — is Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a crusty local sheriff.

And that’s about it. Except it’s not; there’s so much more going on beneath the surface. At its core, the film is about the theme that marks all of McCarthy’s work — the life-and-death aspects of the soulless strain of violence that runs like a crimson river through America’s history.

More specifically, it’s about the endless variety of ways in which men (it’s almost always men; McCarthy doesn’t have much use for womenfolk) commit violence, and the equally varied reasons they use to justify it, even if only to themselves.

In mesmerizing style, the Coens weave through figurative side streets and back alleys while seamlessly and artfully bringing together every technical aspect of moviemaking — photography, sound, camera work, lighting, and the bleak, wind-swept landscape, which almost qualifies as a character in itself.

Of course, the actors and the dialogue are the most critical elements, and again, the film is superb on both counts.

At the ripe old age of 39, Brolin, who long ago squandered his early promise on schlock TV shows and films, gets the redemptive role of his career, and he grabs it in a death grip.

Moss is a taciturn, vaguely discontented cowboy in a world that has just about finished passing him by. As such, Brolin must do much of his acting nonverbally, and he aces it in such deliciously tense scenes as the one in which he silently sits in a hotel room with an ear cocked to the door, knowing that the wolf has found him and is silently approaching at that very moment.

Bardem, a veteran Spanish actor, is simply incredible. His Chigurh, who sometimes trades off his cattle gun for some kind of mutant shotgun equipped with a silencer the size of a beer can, is hands-down the spookiest film sociopath since Hannibal Lecter.

Chigurh is an unstoppable killing machine, so far beyond the point of knowing or caring about right and wrong that he often falls back on flipping a coin and asking his potential victim to call it; if the right call is made, the sap just might walk away.

And Jones, fresh off his Oscar-worthy turn in “In the Valley of Elah,” is simply perfect as Bell. With his craggy, granite visage — which should qualify as some sort of national monument by now — he seems like he was born to play a character in a Cormac McCarthy film adaptation.

His Ed Tom Bell is a one-man Greek chorus who knows he’s slowly losing his lifelong battle against the encroaching chaos eating away at society, but if he’s gonna go down, he’s damn well gonna go down swinging.

The film’s dialogue is lean and spare — the Coens make amazing use of pure silence in any number of scenes — but what words there are come in highly entertaining black-humor wrapping, with Bell getting most of the best lines.

“It’s a mess, ain’t it sheriff?” a deputy observes in one scene when he and Bell stumble upon Chigurh’s handiwork.

“If it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here,” Bell replies.

Later, there’s this exchange between Bell and his wife (Tess Harper), as he prepares to head back into the fray one morning:

“Be careful out there.”

“Always am.”

“Don’t get hurt.”

“Never do.”

“Don’t hurt no one else.”

Pause. Chuckle. “Whatever you say.”

My favorite line, however, comes in a brief scene in which Bell commiserates with another lawman about a country that slowly seems to be going mad: “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Anytime you quit hearin’ ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am,’ the end is pretty much in sight.”

When the film’s end comes into sight, it will catch many viewers by surprise — and not necessarily in a good way, as it cuts across all expectations of what has come before.

Still, it feels fitting; this is the uncommon film that doesn’t condescend to fill in all the blanks, but rather invites you to do so yourself. It demands that you pay close attention, even as it whiplashes you with one unexpected jolt after another.

A lot of people just don’t like to work that hard at the movies — and indeed, on the way out of my screening, I heard several muttered comments about the ending, all variations of: “What was that about?”

Think; it’ll come to you.

For those who welcome a change-of-pace challenge at the octoplex, “No Country For Old Men” is a brutal, relentless, remorseless rush.

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