Be forewarned—mainstream movies don’t come much darker than No Country for Old Men.
In a return to the bleak physical setting and hair-trigger brutality of 1984’s Blood Simple, the brothers Coen pull out of their multi-film slump and then some with this violent, pitch-black adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 chase thriller. That their version captures not just the tone and language of that best-selling yet poorly understood novel, but—a seeming impossibility—its ambitiously cosmic scope and shadowy morality as well, marks both the comeback of the year and one of its best, most challenging films.
Ostensibly occurring some time in the early ’80s, No Country chronicles a ruinous three-man run-in at the seeming outset of a unprecedentedly remorseless era. While hunting in the West Texas mountains, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a hard-luck but humane Vietnam War vet, stumbles across a botched heavyweight drug deal and impulsively makes off with a $2 million cache of very dirty money. When a delayed bout of guilt inadvertently tips off his identity to the thugs involved, Moss becomes the quarry of ultraefficient psychopathic hit man Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and kind-hearted but demoralized small-town sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The pursuit also ropes in a fixer acquaintance of Chigurh’s (Woody Harrelson) hired by the shady businessman (Stephen Root) whose drug money Moss has nicked, as well Moss’ young, scrappy wife (Kelly Macdonald, in a whiny performance that’s the movie’s only real misfire) and her kin. Widespread carnage ensues.
It’s fitting that the Coens would take on this particular project for their return to form, as it served much the same purpose for McCarthy after his so-called Border Trilogy fizzled with Cities of the Plain. Their sensibilities mesh to near perfection; the author’s spare approach to narrative tempers the brothers’ midcareer penchant for overweening burlesque just as their strategic doses of warmth and humor bring McCarthy’s stricken philosophizing earthward. Which is hardly to say that the movie is watered down: Its several chases and running gun battles have a visceral, exhausting intensity, while its characterizations—even of the averagely decent bystanders in walk-on roles, who prove thematically pivotal—are fully fleshed out and convincingly regional.
The film’s most intriguing figure, as the marketing geniuses at Paramount and Miramax have sussed out, is Chigurh. But the Coens and Bardem rightly render McCarthy’s “true and living prophet of destruction” as a teary-eyed flake who’s little more than a vacuous, albeit lethal, accountant. As indistinct as an old nightmare and as irrefutable as the plague, Chigurh is the antithesis of the urbane, self-assured cinematic serial killers we’ve become infatuated with over the past two decades or so; there’s nothing remotely romantic about this terrifying void wrapped in a Eurotrash haircut, pancake makeup and natty Frankenstein’s-monster get-up, and his determination to complete the job at hand—with a series of disturbingly hyperphallic weapons—is less dogged persistence than a crippling lack of imagination with a high body count.
Then again the same could be said of Moss, and possibly even of Bell, and in that sense the trio’s murky, quasi-Manichean clash amounts to a fractured fairy tale for our fundamentalist times—and that’s not even taking into account the younger pair’s habit of shooting up sleepy hamlets. The Coens’ No Country for Old Men wears its post-9/11 heartsickness on its sleeve as fearlessly as McCarthy’s book, then, just as it doesn’t shy away from some of the author’s more hair-raisingly reactionary propositions (though it occasionally relocates them from Bell’s internal musings to various tertiary characters).
They also respond to the near-confessional quality of the story indicated by its title, which can be taken at least three different ways that I can think of. To that end, the penultimate scene features Bell’s visit to a reclusive uncle (Barry Corbin) who sets him straight about the preceding events. The old man’s harsh but clear-eyed stance, that Chigurh and his cohorts aren’t so much what we’ve become as who we’ve been all along, triggers the sheriff’s resigned recollection of a prophetic dream that brings the film to its shockingly equivocal close. And though this wistful final monologue offers a very subjective shred of hope, which the Coens film as a direct address to the camera, it offers nothing in the way of guidance for telling good guys from bad ones in a world that no longer takes much solace—or interest—in the distinction.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
No Country for Old Men
****
Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald
Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Rated R
Opens Friday