No Country for Old Men

In honor of it’s eight Academy Award nominations, Reptastic reprises it’s review of our pick for best film of 2007

The barren, scorched earth of 1980s West Texas is unforgiving, unrelenting; the same could be said for Anton Chigurh, a man who’s chillingly violent pursuit of $2 million cash is the epicenter of Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest film No Country for Old Men.The Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel find them at the peak of their talents, beautifully conveying the jagged and jaded Texas terrain familiar to McCarthy’s many western novels, expertly building tension in the cat and mouse game that drives their plot and conveying a wariness that comes with watching helplessly as the world changes before you.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Sherriff Ed Tom Bell and it’s hard to imagine anyone else capturing the sardonic, ill-at-ease, old lawman who doesn’t recognize or at least doesn’t want to face the world which surrounds him. Bell is a third-generation officer who longs for the days when his father and grandfather before him weren’t even required to carry guns to perform their duties. He shudders at the ebbing morality in society and the rising tide of violence and drugs which now plague the only place he and his family has ever really called home. The violence he will encounter on his pursuit of the various men mixed up in a failed drug deal will offer him no respite from his world-weary state.

Llewellyn Moss is a poor welder, living in a mobile home with his young wife when while he is out hunting happens upon the failed drug deal which will offer him an opportunity of a lifetime. There amongst the carnage he finds one man clinging to life and begging for water; more importantly, he finds $2 million cash. What he does next forever alters the trajectory of his life—he decides to make off with the money. Although his chances of making a clean break with the cash are slim to begin with, his guilt over leaving the parched man at the scene leads him back to where he must begin to run for his life, leaving behind his truck which through its VIN betrays his identity.

Llewellyn knows people will be coming for the money, however there is no way he could anticipate a man as psychotic and adept at killing as Anton Chigurh would be the one on his tail.Javier Bardem’s portrayal of the film’s unnerving executioner is unbelievably effective. Chigurh moves across the landscape like an unstoppable force. The inevitability of his killing is striking. When he kills there is almost a catharsis to it for him, as we see early in the film when he murders a young Sherriff’s Deputy with his handcuffs. At other times, whether it involves him calmly killing a man with a pneumatic cattle gun or flipping a coin to decide the fate of another, he seems as coldly detached from his violent acts as a banker making a simple transaction.With the money in Moss’ hands there is only one acceptable transaction for Chigurh, he must claim the cash and as Woody Harrelson’s character explains to Llewellyn, “kill you just for inconveniencing him.” With the three central characters established, the chase is on, but this movie is about so much more than these three men’s pursuit. Sherriff Bell represents an old order and he attempts to prevent the coming violence by trying to find either Chigurh or Moss before they find each other. Anton embodies a cold, impersonal, opportunistic violence that knows nothing but to destroy the lives it infiltrates, just as capitalism tears asunder the traditions of the worlds it inhabits. Residing in the middle we have Llewellyn, a man who is neither good nor bad, more a product of his environment than anything else. He is us. He works, he has a wife and he lives by modest means, however given the opportunity to profit from the very forces which Bell believe are eroding society, he barely hesitates. With the decision to ignore the values of the past, Llewellyn stands to gain everything, but can also lose everything as well.

Josh Brolin as Moss turns in a remarkable performance. You can’t but help root for Llewellyn as he runs for his life, using a mixture of cunning and daring to try to stay one step ahead of Chigurh; this owes largely to Brolin’s infusion of charm, wit and depth into Moss. The same can be said for Tommy Lee Jones, who truly appears pained as he reads the paper to find people everywhere are killing each other. He suffers over the violence; he has no desire to return to the carnage of the failed drug deal when the Feds arrive. For him, he has already seen too much, the decay cuts him too personally.

For the Coen Brothers, this may be their greatest triumph as filmmakers. Their ability to build the onscreen tension to edge-of-your-seat crescendos and their creation of the most disturbing killer I’ve seen on the big screen in the past 15 years is a testament to their skills. And although the violence of No Country for Old Men is disturbing and frequent, unlike Michael Bay’s beloved excessive CGI effects, the violence in No Country has purpose and meaning. It’s meant to disgust you, chill you to the bone–make you fear for the inevitability of the dark force in pursuit of Llewellyn. It also represents a change in the world which Sherriff Bell sees as a dark force, an inescapable destroyer of the world he once knew and longs for. A force which makes the place he has always lived no country for an old man such as he.