The Coens crowning achievement? It may well be. I’ll leave that for others better critically equipped than I to decide. But as critics argue how great it is and over which of the Coens previous efforts it borrows most heavily from and how making these films led the Coens to this point I can’t help but be amazed how different No Country For Old Men is from all of them. Yes there is more than a passing resemblance to Fargo and Blood Simple, and it’s even tempting to compare No Countrys use of landscape to Oh Brother Where Out Thou and it’s homespun characters to Raising Arizona.

But this film offers a mindscape set solidly outside the Coen ourve much less mere genre film even as its visual cues are drawn from genre. Sad sack sherrifs, psychopathic hit men and hard luck heroes roam a landscape dotted with small towns trailer parks and sleazy motels running into exactly the sorts of conflict you’d expect from a movie with these sorts of characters and settings. But despite the flipped coins, dead dogs, quick quips and gun battles the movie moves us emotionally and mentally into the sort of lonely space usually reserved for a Church pew, or a bar stool inviting you to search your soul and ask if you’ve been a good person, or an honest person, or at least the kind of person you can live with when everyone else has paired off, prayed off and gone home. The longing for some earthly reward reaches out from all sorts of faces here, the innocent, the world weary and the just plain dumb. In short this is a country of suffering that draws a bead on everyone equally offering a judgment we can’t escape be we widow or hitman. Have the Coen’s ever entered this territory before. Absolutely and with great distinction. But this is a stripped down film like no other Coen project before it hearkening back to masterpiece work like In Cold Blood. It’s stark and human and real and couldn’t really care less if you’ve seen any of the Coens other movies.

Josh Brolin plays an everyman cowboy type who stumbles across some money leftover from a drug deal gone very, very bad. After making a clean getaway he, in true Coen Brothers fashion, makes a decision a mere criminal wouldn’t make and it’s this that gets him into the thick of it. Enter decidedly psychotic but not sociopathic hitman portrayed by a dead eyed Javier Bardem. Blessed with the tracking abilities of a hound and a warped if urgent sense of work ethic Marquez relentlessly dogs Brolins trail as a tired eyed sheriff played to perfection by Tommy Lee Jones tracks them both and surveys the human wreckage along the way. A showdown isn’t the point of the film and I won’t spoil the final moments for you. In fact any further exposition of the plot would hamper the beautifully constructed story from achieving the effect the Coens have in store. Suffice to say getting there is more than half the fun here.

If the film offered blank absurdism it would be almost intolerable perhaps even immoral. But, and perhaps No Country for Old men is most like the Coens other films in this way, however loony, psychopathic, or naïve characters in No Country are they are also haunted by the idea of goodness and universal order. Good guys make bad choices and bad guys live by a harsh code that seems paradoxically honorable even as it drives them towards the despicable. The innocent get caught in between the cracks in the world the Coens bring to life but hope still seems worth the trouble for those inhabiting it, unlike asking for a cigarette before the firing squad takes aim these creatures might bow their heads for a moment and do a little soul searching.

The Coens do make an odd choice in leaving the film with no score. But what kind of music even exists in a world like this? It would be too much like putting a soundtrack to real life and this is a film that needs to be seen more than it needs to be heard like the silences between lines ina hymn that forgets to offer salvation. Secular sainthood if there is such a thing wouldn't be far off the mark for these two filmmakers but don't you have to be dead before they declare you a saint? In any case I'm suggesting you see this film now although I have no doubt No Country For Old Men will still be around long after the Coen brothers the current audience and maybe even the studio that produced it are long gone.