Suspensed

Tell me something. What's the most you've ever lost on a coin toss?

I've read the Cormac McCarthy book, certainly his most accessible to then, that the Coen Brothers made into their latest release, No Country for Old Men, and read most of the screenplay, so I was prepared for the crazy violence, the Texas desert and, most of all, the un-Hollywood ending, so when I was watching it in packed Century City AMC on Sunday night at 8:05pm I was not only caught in the relentless suspense of the story, at the same time I was thinking about how to describe the work.

At one level, it's simply a perfect literary adaptation, true to the source material in both plotting and spirit, true down to the offbeat, ruminative ending, bringing it alive in jackpot images not unlike the successful adaptation of Tolkien by Jackson.

At another level it's a sterling set of actors, roles, performances, not a weak link in the bunch, with high-wattage bigscreen performers including Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Steven Root and, best of all, Javier Bardem as the ruthlessly principled boogie man, Anton Chigurh.

Sure, the picture has a lived-in authenticity while still delivering the crystalline Coen Bros imagery, by way of DP Roger Deakins. Yes, the level of control is astounding, yet the performances seem fresh and three-dimensional. Yeah, maybe the ending is striving for a certain literary quality that we can debate whether it merits.

What's really at the core of the movie's appeal, and credit McCarthy for laying out all the brutal beats in his own semi-elliptical style in the source material, is the suspense. As one NYC friend and reader wrote me after seeing the movie pre-release, "them Coen boys are badasses."

I can't recall the last time I saw such detailed playing out of extended suspense, essentially one long chase stretching across all three acts. The audience I saw it with was completely rapt, with groans and expletives and inappropriate laughter at all the right moments (okay, maybe that was me with most of the inappropriate laughter). The Coens are so at the top of their game, the lessons of Blood Simple and Fargo echoing throughout their unimpeachable command, that they easily win the heir to Alfred Hitchcock mantle with this one.

It's Hitchcock with shotguns. Sawed-off shotguns. And a cattle puncher.

Beside the cliche infusion of L.A. cinema geeks/unbearable Coen fanipshers (there was a tiny group in the audience, middle left, who applauded when the credits rolled, one member endlessly, that was completely inappropriate to the way the Bros leave us), I realized that the rest of the crowd is there not so much for "quirkiness" or "Art"; we came because this looked like a serious Americana noir, and we know the Coens know how to deliver on that.

So in the middle of this essentially nihilistic movie I remember the quote Fellini made about Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, another masterpiece suspense picture with a dangling, deliberately unsatisfying ending -- he called it, "An apocalyptic tone-poem."

This one as well. Those critics seeing a larger metaphor talk about the apocalyptic undertones to the story, the way Chigurh represents and whole never wave of future violence tearing apart the old world (set in 1980) or maybe our terroristic world of today. What I love about the movie is that it allows that the violence is actually ancient an reoccurring, per Chigurh's lopsided Buster Brown haircut and Jones' visit to an old, disabled lawman towards the end of the picture.

But at some level it's an existential art d'object, a Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) screening, stills of running, bloody, at night, or fishing in air ducts with tentpoles, or standing in by the counter in the filling station, all Warholized on the wall. It's an invitation to look deeper and the possibility that nothing's there, that it's the surface you have to watch, for clues and warnings, and god-bless quick reflexes.

McCarthy himself seems twice inspired by Sam Peckinpah movies, with Blood Meridian like a "Mirror, Mirror" version of The Wild Bunch, and No Country echoing Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. In the Bros hands, it's a brilliant combination. Long stretches of Alfred laced with startling explosions of Sam, then a couple John Ford-class speeches by Jones, who's arguably the protagonist of the piece.

When the lights go up, the movie's still with you. Stop clapping, asshat, because this one's bigger than the self-importance of your self-valorizing opinion.

Ethan Coen turned 50 this year, and the team of he and his older brother, Joel, is here to stay; the biggest professionals on the lot, hitting a peak. What I think they're reaching for here, that maybe they weren't fully feeling before, is a real mortality. Still young men relative to McCarthy, they deliver his darkening vision of aging and passing beautifully. It gives their characters, which appear as seamless additions to the Coen cannon, a weight that hasn't been so certifiable before.

That's right. They may have made more than their share of classics already, but with this one they've grown up.

Ethan & Joel Coen have made their first 100% movie for adults.