Never has this talent been more purely and potently displayed than in Men With Guns, a multi-layered fable that ranks among the master's greatest achievements. The story is deceptively straightforward and entertaining, told almost entirely in Spanish from the point of view of an eminent urban doctor in an unnamed Central American country. Dr. Fuentes becomes concerned about the fate of several young doctors he once trained and sent to minister to Indians deep in the jungle. Journeying from village to village, he discovers an alien land where army soldiers and rebel guerrillas indiscriminately murder, rape, and pillage the population. His hopeless pilgrimage reveals his inability to help those to whom he has dedicated his life.

If Men With Guns were only about the doctor's self-discovery, it would be merely conventional. But Sayles has a dozen other rich thematic lodes to mine, embodied in characters whose uneasy coexistence has the tension of a thriller. A hungry young boy from one village acts as the doctor's guide, explaining in offhand remarks his absurd reality, in which a graveyard is the setting for a commencement exercise and low coffee prices mean starvation. A deserter from the military threatens his way toward freedom, unable to let go of hope even though he can no longer believe in human goodness. And in the film's central sequence, a former priest tells how he became a ghost by deserting morality, democracy, and faith in one act of self-preservation.

Men With Guns, like all Sayles' films, is in no hurry to divulge its secrets. While Hollywood hacks see montages and transitions as disposable luxuries, Sayles regards them as essential to the tapestry he is weaving around the audience. Simple shots of the doctor driving, the sound of salt being poured, the sight of a woman's shoes sinking in mud, these are all building blocks of Sayles' mythic themes as much as dialogue or plot. Moments of sheer terror, like the casual waving of a loaded gun, are approached with a self-evident naturalism that renders them all the more revelatory.

Sayles leads us into a world without trust and without relationships, where civilization and chaos are indistinguishable from each other and human beings are tools for intimidation. He drops us, with the doctor, in the middle of a conflict whose origins and justifications are long lost. Those who find themselves caught in the inexplicable struggle are reduced to making up their own morality from scratch. The details Sayles leaves out--what country this is, what regime, what ideology--couldn't matter less to the bones scattered in the schoolyard, or the refugees encamped behind barbed wire. All that matters is who has the guns, and how to avoid them.

Dr. Fuentes dismisses tales of atrocities when he first hears about them from sensation-seeking American tourists; such things happen in other countries, or are brought in from outside by invaders. But Sayles knows that "the common people's love for drama," often cited by authorities minimizing horrific stories, doesn't refer to exaggeration but to an intrinsically human effort to bring order and meaning to life. When people find themselves in a meaningless world, they construct stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, lessons and resolutions. They manufacture meaning from whatever materials are at hand and cling to their stories for dear life.

Quite apart from its social commentary, Men With Guns also describes the function of art. All storytellers try to make sense out of the messy business of reality by putting facts and people in a certain order. The urgency of this task is put into sharp relief, in Sayles' narrative, by the extremity of the story-hungry characters' situation. The shared meanings passed down by centuries of culture have evaporated in a cloud of bullets, and everyone quests for a new structure, somewhere further on. Sayles offers no permanent set of answers--just the temporary framework of a movie's story.