Coen country is tricky terrain

"You know how this is gonna turn out, don't you?"

"No."

"I think you do."

So goes an exchange, almost an hour and a half into "No Country for Old Men," between murderous tracker Anton Chigurh and affable Llewelyn Moss, his prey. They're the two main characters -- at least until the film's final half-hour.

What goes on in that last quarter makes the picture -- which is well on its way to becoming the top-grossing film from moviemaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen -- one of the most controversial thrillers to hit movie theaters in some time. Not, perhaps, since the "what-is-that-astronaut-doing-in-a-Louis-XIV-bedroom" finale of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" has a movie's ending so provoked and polarized viewers.

Still, "No Country" continues to gain in box-office sales (it's grossed roughly $45 million) and awards (it would appear to be a shoo-in for a score of Oscar nominations). However, one potential hurdle in that respect is convincing whichever skeptical parties still out there that the ending is a plus, not a minus.

To address what makes the ending "challenging" will involve getting into it a bit, so readers who haven't seen the film yet might want to set the paper down. The picture was adapted scrupulously -- although the Coens do some compressing and add one particularly provocative bit of cinematic sleight-of-hand -- from the 2005 Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name.

The story's villain, Chigurh (indelibly portrayed by Javier Bardem), is a mysterious, merciless killer tracking down a couple of million dollars in drug-deal money. He's a wraith with an odd haircut, an odd way of killing (it involves a variant of a cattle gun) and an odd way of determining his victims (it frequently requires a coin toss).

Moss (an extremely appealing Josh Brolin) is a likable latter-day cowboy who stumbles upon the satchel containing that money and ill-advisedly engages the formidable Chigurh in a game of cat-and-mouse. The rules of genre moviemaking would seem to dictate that this story end with a showdown between the assassin and the good-guy underdog.

But the Coens' film, like the novel from which the film's adapted, follows the rules only so far; the showdown never happens. Instead, the story's emphasis shifts, concentrating on Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, in a magisterial turn), who's been trailing Moss and Chigurh from a distance. It's Bell's voice that is first heard at the movie's opening, talking about a crime he can't begin to "reckon."