By Dave McCoy
MSN Movies

The buzz machine slammed the French Riviera this weekend. Its target was one film: The Coen Brothers' noir-tinged, darkly comical and meditative Western, "No Country for Old Men." Critics and audiences have gone berserk over the film, and the Coens and their cast of Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin are already fielding Oscar questions (Tommy Lee Jones would be as well, but the notoriously testy actor steered clear of Cannes). A colleague wrote me late last night and asked whether the hype was justified, whether the Oscar talk could possibly be true. I can't predict anything about the Oscars, because Miramax won't release the film until November. But I can answer the first question.

Yes, it's that good and, no, it's not overhyped. I'm a rabid Coen Brothers fan, and for me, this is their best, most mature and beautiful work since 1990's "Miller's Crossing" ("The Big Lebowski" is on another level, so I can't even compare the two). But I won't use the M word until I've seen it again — which I almost did this morning (I've never seen a film twice at the same festival) — until I saw the line around the block.

For those unaware, "No Country for Old Men" is the Coens' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2003 novel (if you haven't read it, you should; I think it's better than his recent Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Road"). In retrospect, the pair seems perfect. "Country" is McCarthy's most accessible novel, a genre blur loaded with the type of colorful, local characters (West Texas, in this case) and the sharp, pitch-black funny dialogue that the Coens have written for more than two decades. It starts when ex-'Nam vet Llewlyn Moss (Brolin, in the type of rugged performance for which the word "breakthrough" was created) blindly stumbles upon a horrific desert scene while hunting: dead bodies and shot-up pickup trucks littering the sand. Inside one of the trucks, Moss finds enough heroin to keep a city on the nod for years and a case full of $2 million. When he decides to grab the money, he sets off a chain reaction of cataclysmic events for everyone involved. And there are a lot of everyones in "Country." There is Moss's wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), whose unquestioning trust of her husband drives his insane ambition; there's Sheriff Bell (Jones, born to play this role), who knows Moss is in over his head and tries to chase him down; there's bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), who's simply tracking Moss and the money as another paid gig; and most importantly, there is Chigurh (Bardem ... sure, start the Oscar talk), a Mexican assassin with a page-boy haircut, a ghost-white face, pink eyes and a coin he likes to flip for human lives. Chigurh is death and violence embodied; rarely has there been a badass like this on the big screen, one who kills for pure pleasure, without conscience and just because, well, as Nick Cave once sang, "All God's creatures, they all gotta die."

The plot is labyrinthine and ambiguous, but the Coens handle it with ease. It's bloody and messy, but also laugh-out-loud funny ("I laugh to myself sometimes," says Bell. "It's all you can do") and startlingly creepy. Good chunks of the film are shot in silence, with little, if no music, and only the Texas wind on the soundtrack. It's the sound of a country withering and dying, where money is worth any sacrifice, where violence has escalated to the point of inane hysteria and a simple, aging sheriff like Bell muses about "dismal tides" that he can no longer contain. And this is, at its core, what "No Country for Old Men" is about: an America now without logic, reason or conscience.

We're only halfway through the festival, but it looks like a two-horse race between "No Country" and "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" for the Palme d'Or. And win or not, prepare yourself for "No Country": It'll floor you.

Lunch With the "Men"

How much did "No Country" floor me? So much so that I agreed to join the Coens, Brolin, Bardem and a small horde of quote-hungry journalists at a roundtable lunch on Sunday afternoon. I never do these. My reason for attending this time was simple: I just wanted to meet the Coen Brothers (though I must say that Bardem is one of the more thoughtful, intelligent actors I've met, and Brolin's enthusiasm for actually being in a good movie was endearing). And I did ... and I gushed to Ethan Coen like a silly fan ... but I had to suffer through some brutal personalities and ridiculous questions to do so. Honestly, I don't understand how people do roundtable discussions for a living. It was brutal. I was eating lunch and nearly spit out my food half a dozen times. I only had one question, actually: Did the duo show the movie to McCarthy and, if so, what was his reaction? "Yes, we did," said Joel Coen. And? "He sat through the whole thing. We heard him laugh a few times." So, will you be doing "The Road"? While laughing, Ethan and Joel simultaneously answered a resounding "No!" That was it for me. I got up and headed to another movie.

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