Joel and Ethan Coen’s brutally masterful new film, No Country for Old Men, is an unnerving piece of filmmaking as harsh and unforgiving as the parched Texas landscape where the story unfolds.
In a departure for the iconic filmmakers who traditionally write, direct and edit their own films, the brothers have instead adapted an original story by Pulitzer-prize winning author Cormac McCarthy—a tale about a rotten drug deal, a satchel of money and the world of consequences that comes with it—into a contemporary morality tale about our society’s descent into violence and chaos.
Josh Brolin smolders as Llewelyn Moss, a resourceful Vietnam vet who stumbles across a pile of corpses, drugs, guns and two million dollars in cash in the middle of the dry Texas outback. Absconding with the money, he seems ready to make a clean get-away but—in a moment of compassion (the film’s only to be sure)—makes the monumental mistake of returning to the scene of the crime to bring a drink of water to the massacre’s only survivor. His actions, he soon learns, unleash one the most terrifying villains brought to screen in recent memory.
Sent in by forces unknown to recover the cash, Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh is a malevolent force of unhinged evil. A denim-clad hulk with watery eyes, an ash white visage and a peculiar page-boy haircut, Chigurh seems to literally darken the skies each time he appears on screen. He kills his victims—preferably with a pneumatic hammer used in commercial slaughterhouses—with a precision and brutality made only more unsettling by a deranged mental compass that allows a lucky few of his would-be victims to escape a bloody fate based on a simple coin toss. His single-minded pursuit of Moss is so relentless that it brings to mind the titular villain in James Cameron’s original Terminator (“He will not stop until you are dead!”).
On the trail of both men is Tommy Lee Jones’ veteran Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. In lesser hands, such a role could have come across as no more than another hackneyed, soon-to-retire Southern lawman with one final job to do. Jones, however, imbues Bell with a weary heaviness that feels entirely genuine in a world where yesterday’s horrific headlines are dwarfed by the savagery of today’s.
Woody Harrelson makes an appearance as cocksure bounty hunter Carson Wells, who is sent in to reign in Chigurh—whom he dryly describes as a man without a sense of humor—by shifty businessman (and Coen brothers regular) Stephen Root. Professional though he may be, Wells stands little chance against his quarry. He is merely a man, while Bardem’s Chigurh is the Angel of Death in the flesh.
Though we root for Llewelyn, it is his wife Carla Jean who emerges as the story’s only true hero (such as there is one in such a nihilistic film). Played by Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald (probably most familiar as Ewen Macgregor’s jailbait love interest in Danny Boyle’s hallucinogenic Trainspotting), Carla Jean is a fully realized character who wants no more than the love and presence of her husband. She also realizes that he’s in deep trouble and that there’s little she can do to stem the tide. Her great inner strength is best revealed when, cornered by Chigurh (who it seems collects debts on both the living and the dead), she refuses to play the psychopath’s mad game and wager her life on the toss of a coin.
As gorgeously lensed by cinematographer Roger Deakins—who also shot Fargo and The Man Who Wasn’t There—the film has a spare visual poetry: a single shaft of light illuminating the killer’s eye; a dead man’s pointed boots shimmering in the distance; the furious uncrinkling of a plastic bag. Each image has an unmistakable power that escalates each time Carter Burwell’s stark score drops out, leaving nothing but the sound of the dry Texas whipping across the plain.
Bleak and unforgiving, No Country for Old Men stands shoulder to shoulder with the Coen brothers’ best work. Whereas The Dane (another of the brothers’ superb cinematic villains) in Miller’s Crossing’s used violence as a means to an economic end, for Anton Chigurh, violence and torture are not means or tools of any kind: death is the end he seeks.
