Plot Texas, 1980. Hunting in the desert, Llewellyn Moss (Brolin) comes across the wreckage of a drug deal gone wrong and takes the cash — without counting on the man sent after him, an implacable killer (Bardem) intent on recovering the loot at any cost.
Review
Depending on your take, the Coens have been off their game, under par, or basically crap of late. Of course, the devotee (easy to spot: goateed, bespectacled, Little Lebowski Urban Achievers T-shirt) might posit some notion where they were deliberately sabotaging their own reputation in some advanced form of self-mockery. Who knows? It remains tough to argue that Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers are of the same calibre as the preceding nine straight wacko-treasures (yes, including Hudsucker) that sealed their glowing rep as the hippest geeks around.
Well, this fresh in: whatever mosquito was buzzing in their ears is now a small red stain on the flock wallpaper. The Coens have rediscovered their mojo, with, dare we say it, a new maturity. There is also something back-to-basics about No Country For Old Men, adapted from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s violent neo-Western. It’s got Blood Simple’s dark moves, that clammy sense of death lurking in the barren Texan landscape. And being a knotted tale of crime innately wrapped up in an imposing location, it shares DNA with Fargo and Miller’s Crossing.
What surprises is how the film remains both recognisably McCarthy’s terse and sorrowful parable, and a Coens enterprise bathed in oil-black humour. Despite the fact that the brothers lift much of the dialogue verbatim from the page, in the mouths of their cast the lines sound like choice Coenisms: all jazzy syncopations or deadpan comebacks. “If I don’t come back, tell my mother I love her,” Josh Brolin’s sort-of hero Llewellyn Moss tells his wary but perceptive wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) before he heads into the mouth of trouble. “Your mother’s dead,” she retorts. “Then I’ll tell her myself,” he sighs.
The plot is triple-headed, with the narrative shifting focus whenever one of the leads seems to be taking centre stage. We start eyeing the tremulous determination of Moss, a local hunter who happens upon the remains of a drug deal gone badly wrong. Cadavers cook in the desert sun, even a dead dog, and a trail of blood, splattered like ink along the parched ground, leads Moss to a case containing two million dollars. He elects, as all noir folk are supposed to, to take the money and run. Bad move considering the clean-up guy is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a killer with the implacable dedication of a Terminator and the domed haircut of a psychopathic Monkee. What proceeds is a startling chase movie scattering through the border towns, grimy motels, and dry gulches of West Texas. Always two steps behind is the old man of the tale, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a lawman longing for retirement, facing an evil that he can no longer decipher. This is a new crew for the brothers to play with. Jones is a perfect fit for the weatherworn Bell: he is Texan to his core, and looks as if he is entirely the product of McCarthy’s Biblical prose. Age has granted him stillness as a performer, and he gives the movie a grace above its lashing violence. Brolin, battered from pillar to post, is the strong, doomed heart of the story. But Bardem’s is the role with flamboyant possibilities — a stone-cold killer obsessed with chance, holding lives to the random toss of a quarter. He is the embodiment of evil as blank force made breathtakingly plausible. With his Spanish accent flattened, his voice seems to come from a place not wholly human.
Those who find the Coens’ smarty-pants routines insufferable will find relief in the naturalism on show. This is not a world fastened beneath the hermetic seal of their whirligig genre-bending, but one that lives and breathes and bleeds. There is something resonant in Bell’s soulful philosophy, something tender in Moss’ love of his wife.
And we still get all the off-centre mannerisms that made the brothers so much fun to begin with. Although, silence is a tool we’ve not encountered before. Sure, Billy Bob Thornton barely uttered a syllable in The Man Who Wasn’t There, but we had his interior drawl. Here, between the bursts of visceral action, the film hangs on a terrifying soundlessness and the striking atonal power of sharp noises against nothingness: a bulb being unscrewed, a footfall on a wooden floor, the soft breath of wind over hardscrabble terrain. Even Carter Burwell’s score is defined by its imperceptibility — made up only of low groans and eerie whistles.
If the final act strikes out against formula to downplay rather than crescendo, it is true to the book. The simple satisfaction of traditional showdowns is evaded for a lyrical note that strikes both as deeply pessimistic and strangely pure. There is something of Miller’s Crossing’s noble farewell about it. Those brothers from another planet have returned to Earth.
Verdict Violent, poetic, gripping, thrilling and blackly funny: that’ll be the Coens doing what they do best then. Now with added humanity.
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Average user rating for No Country For Old Men
Best of 2007
A flawless film about good vs evil and one old man in the middle trying to make sense of the horror. The suspense is superior to that of any Hitchcock films and the lack of a soundtrack only strengthens the tension throughout the almost two hour running time. The cinematography is astounding though it lost the Oscar in that category to There Will Be Blood (respectively). The cinematographer really captured the unforgiving and barren look of the desert plains, even the county town areas feel dese... Read More
This film is kinda like sex with someone who premature ejaculates. You really get into it at the start and actually enjoy it with high expectation of a climatic finale. But then in a messy ending you are left feeling thoroughly disappointed and cheated. Coen brothers, where is my orgasm???
I admit that the film has it's very high points. It's spectacular use of tension and spectacular desert scenery keeps the viewers attention for most of the film, and Bardem's portrayal of a psycho is comple... Read More
This is a typical Coens movie (just about everybody gets killedin it) and it may be their best. Chigurh is a classic movie villain and creation. He is as relentless as a Terminator, as chilling as Hannibal Lecter and his haircut spookily matches the shape of Darth Vader's helmet (plus he also acts like Darth Vader, just to mention). That's three of cinema's greatest villains in one creation, and nobody could have portrayed that better than Bardem, whose lifless eyes lifts hairs on everybody's ne... Read More
An exhilirating neo-noir that exceeded my expectations. The Coens' have nailed adapting material that wasn't originally theirs and the finished product is their best work since Fargo. Javier Bardem brings to the screen a villain to rival Hannibal Lecter. Could this be the film of the 2000s? ... Read More
An exhilirating neo-noir that exceeded my expectations. The Coens' have nailed adapting material that wasn't originally theirs and the finished product is their best work since Fargo. Javier Bardem brings to the screen a villain to rival Hannibal Lecter. Could this be the film of the 2000s? ... Read More
An amazing achievement. For their first time adapting a screenplay, the Coens nailed it. Javier Bardem's acting was awesome. Fargo may be their masterpiece in my eyes, but No Country will be a film they're remembered by. Great cinematography. ... Read More
this film was fantastic. i loved the silent opening and the ending which everybody else didnt get. i thought it was brilliantly written and directed by the coen brothers had superb performances and was gripping the whole way through ... Read More
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