No Country for Old Men

The movie opens with the even, confiding voice of Tommy Lee Jones. He describes a teenage murder he once sentenced to the chair. They boy had killed his 14-year-old girlfriend. The papers described it as a crime of passion, “but he tolt me there weren’t nothin’ passionate about it. Said he’d been fixin’ to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he’d kill somebody again. Said he was goin’ to Satan’s home. Reckoned he’d be there in about 15 minutes.”

Roger Ebert said in his review, “These words sounded verbatim to me from No Country for Old Men, the novel by Cormac McCarthy, but I find they are not quite. And their impact has been improved upon in the delivery. When I get the DVD of this film, I will listen to that stretch of narration several times; Jones delivers it with a vocal precision and contained emotion that is extraordinary, and it sets up the entire film, which regards a completely evil man with wonderment, as if astonished that that such a merciless creature could exist.”

The man is named Anton Chigurh. Ebert said, “No, I don't know how his last name is pronounced. Like many of the words McCarthy uses, particularly in his masterpiece Suttree, I think it is employed like an architectural detail: The point is not how it sounds or what it means, but the brushstroke it adds to the sentence.” Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, is a tall, slumping man with thin, black hair and a scary smile, who walks through Texas carrying a tank of compressed air and murdering everyone with a cattle stungun. It forces a cylinder into their heads and brings it back again.

Chigurh is one thread in the sadistic plot. Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff played by Jones, is another. The third person is Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, a poor man who lives with his wife in a house trailer, and one day, whole hunting, comes across a drug deal getting worse in the desert. Cars drive in a circle like an old wagon train. Almost everyone present gets killed. They even shot the dog. In the back of one pickup are piled bags of drugs. Llewelyn sees one thing is missing: the money. He finds it in a briefcase next to a man who made it up to a shade tree before dying.

The story is about Moss trying to make this $2 million his own, Chigurh trying to take it away from him and Sheriff Bell trying to stop Chigurh’s evil murder path. We also meet Moss’ young wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald), an overconfident bounty hunter named Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), the businessman (Stephen Root) who hires Carson to find the money after investing in the drug deal, and so many hotel and store clerks who are sad to meet Chigurh.

Ebert credited, “"No Country for Old Men" is as good a film as the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have ever made, and they made "Fargo."” It has elements of the thriller and the chase but is mainly a character study, seeing how its people meet and deal with a man so evil, heartless and cold that there is just no understanding him. Chigurh is so evil, he is sometimes almost funny. “He has his principles,” says the bounty hunter, who knows nothing about him.

Look at another part where the dialogue is as good as any from 2007, the year “No Country for Old Men” was released. Chigurh enters a shabby gas station in the middle of nowhere and starts a word game with the old man, played by Gene Jones, behind the cash register, who becomes really scared. It looks like they are talking about whether Chigurh will kill him. Chigurh undeniably has decided on what he’s going to do. Without explaining why, he asks the man to call the flip on his coin. Listen to what they say, how they say it, how they involve the chances. Listen to their timing. Ebert said, “You want to applaud the writing, which comes from the Coen brothers, out of McCarthy.”

The $2 million is actually easier to get than to keep. Moss tries hiding in vague hotels. Scenes are carefully made where each man knows the other is near. Moss can run but he can’t hide. Chigurh always finds him. He shadows him like his fate, never rushing, always moving as the same leisure pace, like a chaser in a nightmare.

Ebert credited, “This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate. It is also, in the photography by Roger Deakins, the editing by the Coens and the music by Carter Burwell, startlingly beautiful, stark and lonely. As McCarthy does with the Judge, the hairless exterminator in his "Blood Meridian" (Ridley Scott's next film), and as in his "Suttree," especially in the scene where the riverbank caves in, the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice.” The movie also loves some of its character, and feels bad for them, and always looks at the dialogue never as spoken but as thought.

Many of the scenes in “No Country for Old Men” are so perfectly made that you want them to just go one, and yet they make an emotional moment carrying you to the next scene. Ebert admitted, “Another movie that made me feel that way was "Fargo."” To make amazing film is a miracle, and this is the one.

As with the other Coen Brothers movies that I have reviewed this month, this is another one that should not be skipped. I loved the mystery that this one sucks you into as to what is going to happen. If I am not mistaken, I think this movie leaves off on a vague ending that makes you decide how you think the movie will end off. Just see it for yourself and decide. Like I said before, this one is not to be missed, so do check this one out, it’s a must. 

I know that I am posting this review late, but I lost track of time of when I was supposed to post this, so I apologize.

Stay tuned next week for the finale of “Coen Brothers Month,” where I end off with a great film.