I realize I’m arriving late to the party, but there’s no other way to say it: No Country for Old Men is an amazing and powerful film. In fact, I’d be willing to rank it as one of the very best films I’ve ever seen. It’s terrifically acted, beautifully filmed, briskly edited, wonderfully scripted, and skillfully directed. It deftly plays against expectations in a way that defies convention, and yet embraces reality. It’s a brutal film, yes, but one that is worthwhile both in terms of its quality and in its message.
Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s celebrated novel sets a play of greed, heartless cruelty, and cowardice against the vast and imposing expanse of the West Texas plain and the dusty settlements that cling to it like tenacious desert flowers. The year is 1980, and the traditional and kindly Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is feeling overwhelmed by society’s decaying moral standards and outmatched by the ever-growing boldness of modern criminals and the scale of the international drug trade.
Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran and an ordinary man who can’t resist taking a case full of cash when he stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. Sheriff Bell comes upon the massacre sometime later, and sets out to in search of Moss, but he’s unfortunately a few steps behind Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem in his Oscar-winning performance), a cold-blooded psychopath on a relentless mission to retrieve the stolen funds.
I’m certainly not the first person to lament Hollywood’s lack of original material - as I’ve said before, any story worth telling has likely already been told. No Country for Old Men’s premise and plot aren’t new, but this film tells a familiar story with dark beauty and an unsettlingly sense of realism. It’s an exciting and harrowing cat-and-mouse tale with a foot in the real world and a true sort of poetry running underneath.
The film is, in many ways, a monument to minimalism. The plot is simple and the dialogue is sparse (with just the right amount of the Coen brothers’ patented absurdity thrown in the mix). The Coens seem to have taken the barren landscapes of the American West to heart and infused every shot with a wonderful and strangely powerful economy.
The scenes of action and suspense, while not elaborate, are detailed, well-executed, and utterly convincing. The movie’s two action set pieces don’t unfold on top of skyscrapers or inside secret military bases, but in rundown motels and on the abandoned streets of a small town. The orchestral score is so understated as to be nearly invisible, but the film’s quiet moments only serve to heighten its almost documentary style.
It feels a bit ridiculous to comment on Javier Bardem’s portrayal of Anton Chigurh now, after he has garnered so much critical acclaim from every corner. All I can really say is that everything you heard is true – he’s a revelation in the role. Bardem is frightening – chilling even - and you can’t take your eyes off him. Every scene he occupies is absolutely electric.
Actually every performance, down to the smallest part, is riveting. Josh Brolin is relatable, and yet complex, as an everyman who’s moral center is a bit south of proper. Kelly Macdonald turns in a haunting performance as his young, good natured wife. Woody Harrelson is absolutely fantastic in a very small role. For my money, though, Tommy Lee Jones holds the whole production together in a tight orbit around his realistic and heartbreaking take on a good man who finds himself stunned and disheartened by the evil around him.
No Country for Old Men expects a lot from an audience. You’re never told more than you need to know, and the film doesn’t spell everything out for you. There are a number of uninterrupted takes that enhance the suspense, but many movie goers raised on Michael Bay-style hyper-edits and our cultural penchant for image saturation, may find the change of pace a bit jarring. Initially, I thought a bit of asymmetrical storytelling toward the end of the film was a little disorienting, but upon further reflection, I’ve decided that it’s all in service to a script that falls less in line with the neat and satisfying conventions of cinema and is more in tune with the seemingly random and frustrating realities of life.
As great as it is, No Country for Old Men, is not for children, and parents should exercise extreme caution before screening. While the language is largely restrained and there is no sex (only a brief bit of frank dialogue), the film is saturated in brutal, often quite graphic violence. The aftermath of the botched drug deal is pretty grim, and Moss and Chigurh spend a good deal of screen time patching up their bloody wounds.
Chigurh himself is a virtual portent of doom, tearing through the film like the Grim Reaper’s personal tornado. He fond of a monstrous silenced shotgun, but Chigurh also dispatches his many victims with a submachine gun, a pair of handcuffs, and – most notably – a “captive bolt” cattle gun. Yes, that’s as gruesome as it sounds. At least I can say that most of his victims (save an unlucky sheriff’s deputy and a dirty businessman) expire quickly.
It’s disturbing, but the film is unsettling on a deeper, and certainly more worthwhile, level. This is a striking story of what happens when a good man doesn’t have the stomach to stand up to evil. While Moss is largely motivated by his greed, Chigurh and Sheriff Bell are both men of principle, but only Chigurh is willing to live by his dark and twisted sense of honor.
Sheriff Bell mourns what the world has become and laments the wickedness of his waning days. He longs for the simpler times - times he could understand and control - but he realizes too late that “there is nothing new under the sun” and that evil has been, and always will be with us. Faced with such an eternal enemy, the question of victory lies not in the loss of innocence, but in the determination of the innocent to fight.
Caution Rating: 10
