Review: No Country for Old Men

* * * *

Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Kelly MacDonald, Tess Harper.  Written and Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.  122 minutes. Rated R (strong graphic violence and some language). Paramount Vantage, Miramax Films. 

If film history has seen a villain more terrifying than Anton Chigurh, a messenger of death on an odyssey to recover $2 million in drug money in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, the gripping new screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel of crime and pursuit, I certainly can’t think of one.  Played by the great Javier Bardem, Chigurh is a cipher, phantom and unstoppable grim reaper carting around a contraption of death—oxygen tank, hose and slaughterhouse tool—to dispatch anyone with the misfortune of being in the wrong place and time.  And many are. 

Told with economical efficiency and a fine feeling for a desperate, depressed new West circa 1980, the film opens with a botched heroin deal near the Rio Grande whose participants lay dying when down-on-his luck, Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) inadvertently stumbles on the aftermath, discovering a briefcase loaded with cash.  He quickly makes haste with the sum before his conscience leads him back to the scene to offer water to a dying victim. 

This mistake marks him for the film, and in a stunning scene, Moss plunges into the river to escape bandits, only to be pursued downstream by a fast-swimming attack dog. This scenario repeats itself for most of the film as Chigurh’s pursuit to recover the money from Moss becomes a nightmarish trek through burnt out, seedy hotels, piling up corpses and bullets that travel through walls and bodies with equal ferocity. 

Meanwhile, weary, old-guard Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), investigating the trail of death, reluctantly gets a close-up look at evil, turning introspective about the decline of society and the dark secrets of his own lineage, all while running two steps behind the unstoppable killer. 

The chase also ensnares Moss’ child-like wife Carla Jean (an effective Kelly MacDonald) and hit man Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), hired to intervene and recover the money.  Both MacDonald and Harrelson memorably confront the devil-like killer in fascinating scenes that teeter on the brink of violence and pose provocative questions.  “Do you have any idea how crazy you are?” asks Wells after coming face to face with Chigurh, while Carla Jean’s last act, good versus evil reasoning nearly gives the killer pause.  

Chigurh is indeed crazy, though always in methodical control.  In one frightening scene, his manner, standing still and speaking in a dark riddle of logic, unhinges a hapless convenience store clerk whose life depends on a coin toss.  This is a character that unnerves his homespun, neighborly targets just by staring with cool precision and toying with notions of life and death, able to murder without expression or conscience. 

No Country for Old Men is really a hybrid of the Coen’s best films, Blood Simple and Fargo, containing the ten gallon hats and sweaty, murder for hire milieu of the former and the contemplative, moral cop on the tail of something too dark to comprehend of the latter. 

It is also a film that understands what a bullet can do to a body.  In visceral detail, as both Chigurh and Moss tend to their respective gunshot wounds, the film gazes, close-up and clinically, at tattered flesh and bone, matter-of-fact job hazards for hunter and hunted. 

The suspense in No Country for Old Men is often excruciating, most memorably in a scene that finds Moss sitting alone in a hotel, on a bed, in the dark, while Chigurh approaches quietly down the hall.  The scene is an exercise in light, sound and bullet trajectories, recalling the final sequence of Blood Simple in its depiction of bumps in the night that will kill you unless you finish them first. 

Bardem, the prolific, world-class Spanish actor and international star best known in the U.S. for his revelatory performance in Julian Schnabel’s 2000 biopic Before Night Falls, here coiffed in an absurd, Emo-styled haircut with black pooled eyes and measured insanity, is absolute evil personified, and nearly walks away with the film. 

Brolin takes a gamble effectively underplaying the gruff ex-vet going nowhere and looking for a way out. It is a performance characterized by what is not said, and the kind of quiet, inside job most actors can’t touch.   Ditto Jones, a most expressive listener who finds reserves of disillusionment as a cop determined to save Moss and Carla Jean from what he perceives as a modern, unknowable strain of evil.  The final act finds Jones facing family secrets and delivering a moving monologue in a closing scene of such simplicity it seems daring. 

Dark, violent and stylish, No Country for Old Men is an exercise in crime and consequence and an atmospheric meditation on the nature of evil and its impact on the soul.  It just may be the best Coen Brothers film to date, near the top of the short list of great films this year.

- Lee Shoquist