BY BOB STRAUSS >FILM CRITIC

I made the mistake of reading "No Country for Old Men" before seeing the movie. I think I robbed myself of a good scary time.

Of course, this wasn't an entirely bad decision. Knowing the tone and language, the ruggedly elegant descriptions and philosophical concerns of Cormac McCarthy's dark, distressing 1980-set novel certainly made me appreciate what a faithful adaptation writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen have made.

The film's casting could not be better: Tommy Lee Jones as the taciturn Sheriff Bell, whose shield of dry sarcasm collapses into sleep-haunting pessimism as drug-trafficking mayhem overruns his West Texas district; Josh Brolin, capping a pretty good roll this year ("Grindhouse," "American Gangster"), as trailer-living Vietnam War veteran Llewelyn Moss, resourcefully on the run from all kinds of malevolent forces with a bag of money he found at a desert dope deal massacre; and as the most frightening of Moss' pursuers, Anton Chigurh, Javier Bardem with the scariest haircut in modern cinema, lugging a weird oxygen tank weapon and evincing a near supernatural ability to kill with ease, recover from the worst wounds and suppress whatever human empathy he might once have had.

More, the harshly beautiful Texas border country looks exactly as a reader pictured it (regular Coen cinematographer Roger Deakins avoids the arty flourishes displayed in his other current visit to the outlaw West, "The Assassination of Jesse James"). And there's not a trace of the buffoonery we associate with even the Coens' strongest thrillers ("Fargo," "Blood Simple") to be found.

So this is as immaculate an interpretation as anybody could want, and it's a true pleasure to be able to appreciate that.

I just wish the movie would have excited me more.

Of course, my response will not likely be yours. I suspect that, if you don't know what's going to happen in every scene, the suspense here is deliciously unbearable. And even if you do know the story and are among the many who consider the amply awarded McCarthy one of our greatest living writers, seeing his well-wrought characters brought to grievous and implacable life may be all the reward you need.

But I also think that some things intrinsic to the book makes the movie less than gripping. I didn't dislike reading it, but I did find it a bit theoretical about the nature of violence and times changing, inexorably, for the worse.

There's a lot of tough-guy posturing - even the key female role, Llewelyn's feisty, brave and ever-lovin' young wife, Carla Jean (played in perfect Texan by a Scot, Kelly Macdonald), can come off like a cowboy's dream walking - and the hand-wringing longing for mythical more civilized times past sometimes spikes the hooey meter.

On the other hand, I admired the no-nonsense way McCarthy subverts genre expectations, which hasn't exactly sat well with some readers and early screening audiences.

There's only one real confrontation between two of the three main characters, for example, and that ends indecisively. Additionally, nothing like closure accompanies the fates of many people whom we've invested in - nor, for that matter, is much catharsis to be found by the story's soul-sick roundup. Bravo to the Coens for not wimping out on any of these risky gambits.

But on a more immediate level, some scenes in "No Country" reminded me that they felt too obvious and dramatically undernourished when I read them. McCarthy may well be a genius; he has a grant that says so, and doesn't think punctuational niceties like quotation marks apply to him.

But I don't know; Jim Thompson was tearing up this part of Texas - state and mind - just as effectively decades ago with less-pretentious novels such as "The Killer Inside Me." Boy, would I love to see the Coens correctly adapt that.

But go to the movie version of "No Country for Old Men" before you read the book. It's grim, unforgiving and probably unforgettable - in some ways you'll want to remember, and in others you may wish you couldn't.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

>R: violence, language.
>Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald.
>Director: Joel and Ethan Coen.
>Running time: 2 hr. 2 min.
>Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; The Grove, Farmers Market; Century 15, Century City; Monica, Santa Monica.
>In a nutshell: Faithful, superbly produced adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel - sometimes profoundly, sometimes chillingly - but in ways some will find frustrating and pretentious.