No Country For Old Men: Coens return to philosophical form with a bare-bones tale of substance

The Coen brothers were the toast of Cannes in 1991 when they scooped the Golden Palm, Best Actor and Best Director for Barton Fink, a hat-trick unprecedented in the festival's history. Since then, though, the shine has worn off the golden boys.

The Coens' brilliant film-making craft remained unarguable, and yet they seemed to have run out of things to say: to have retreated for good behind a carapace of glib irony and their talent to amuse. Even so, a new film from the partnership still guaranteed a mob in front of the Palais, where No Country For Old Men was unveiled to the press in Cannes last night. But many of them will have been mightily surprised by what they saw.

Set in 1980, it begins as a Vietnam vet, played by Josh Brolin, stumbles over the detritus of a botched drug deal somewhere deep in the godforsaken, bleakly magnificent badlands of the Tex-Mex border. He makes off with a suitcase full of cash. Soon, however, one of the criminals is hard on his heels, as is the local sheriff.

Based on the 2003 novel by Cormac McCarthy, this sounds in outline like a quintessential Coen brothers story, as seen in their debut, Blood Simple. The familiar elements are in place: murder, retribution and that mix of hard, bloody violence and absurd comedy. There is the odd character with a colourful quirk, like Javier Bardem's psychopathic villain, a chap with a Buster Keaton haircut and deadpan demeanour who decides his victims' fates on the spin of a coin.

And there are the hoped-for moments of film-making brilliance, in particular those revolving around the cat-and-mouse game between Bardem and Brolin, and a game of hide-and-seek in a roadside motel.

Yet the tone is entirely unexpected. The film contains no music at all, for example, aside from the sudden, incongruous arrival of a mariachi band, and some subtle effects in the sound design. It's a muted, unflashy piece, with bare-bones plotting.

What you remember is the tender bantering between the sheriff and his wife or between the vet and his young bride (the Glaswegian actress Kelly Macdonald, passing immaculately for a west Texan). The deadpan humour springs as often as not from the dialogue, not from clever sight-gags.

The sheriff, played with authority and a good deal of quiet emotion by Tommy Lee Jones, emerges belatedly as the central character and moral focus. A courtly, philosophical type, he's one of the "old men" of the title who still remembers a time when law-enforcers didn't carry guns and who finds himself now perplexed and dismayed by the new, cynical face of crime: the film ends on a bittersweet, dream-like, philosophical note.

This is the Coens' first feature in three years and, while bearing many of their signature touches, it invests them - thanks, most likely, to McCarthy - with a fresh and welcome maturity. It's not calculated to appeal to their fan-boy following but with it they have finally made another film of real substance.