A riveting, perfectly constructed crime saga of counterweighted hopelessness and humanity, Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, based on the novel of the same name by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy, is a film that originally seduces you with its cool sheen of menace and nervy, swallowed intensity, and then, in subsequent viewings, wins you over with all the broader questions its desperate scramble for survival raises.
That the back of No Country for Old Men‘s DVD cover synopsis ends by touting the movie’s “heart-stopping final moment” is… I don’t know, ironic? Or maybe just stupid? No Country for Old Men is several things at once — a dusty ensemble elegy for simpler times, a neo-western, and a relentless, stalking psycho-killer picture — but its famously contemplative ending (more on that in a bit) isn’t a conventional capper by any stretch of the imagination. Irrespective of its box office gross (it made $74 million domestically), to try to sell this movie as a “super-charged action thriller” (another lame-brained quote from the DVD cover text) to folks who haven’t yet seen it is to simply set everyone up for confusion and potential disappointment, if only based on expectation. Just sell the many things that it is, and let that be enough.
The winner of four Academy Awards (for Best Picture, Best Directors, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor, for Javier Bardem), No Country for Old Men was also nominated for four more Oscars, and features achingly beautiful cinematography from Roger Deakins as well as a sparsely used score from composer Carter Burwell’s that summons the feelings of a distant roar of thunder — a thin string of vague, atmospheric discomfort until, finally, full-fledged menace suddenly overtakes you. That’s in keeping with the overall tone of the movie, actually — at once the most ambitious and reserved Coen brothers’ picture in some time.
Violence and mayhem erupt in the parched scrubland and panoramic skies of West Texas, a land dominated by beiges and greys. While out hunting one afternoon, cud-chewing Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin, above) stumbles on a suitcase containing $2 million dollars, and the site of drug deal gone very bad. Fleeing with the money and sending his girlfriend Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) off for safety, Moss finds himself stalked relentlessly by Anton Chigurh (Bardem, eerie and mesmerizing), an unstoppable sociopathic killer with a pageboy ‘do and chilling, thousand-yard stare.
A hired gun who takes his task very, very personally, Chigurh, who could well be an even more demented cousin of Bobby Peru, has no qualms at all with violence, and leaves a bloody trail in his wake while searching to recover the cash. As Moss scrambles to hang on to the money and his life, small-town sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a taciturn third-generation lawman, closes in on both men, but wonders what he’s gotten himself into. Meanwhile, fellow bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson — a tall, cool glass of water) tries to find Moss and convince him to turn over the money before Chigurh does away with his family.
The cast here is uniformly excellent, but the revelation of the movie, though, may be Brolin, who had quite a 2007 between American Gangster, In the Valley of Elah and Robert Rodriguez’s vibrant, fun Planet Terror portion of the misguided experiment that was Grindhouse. He’s the emotional heartbeat of this film — the character you’re most sympathetic to, and personally interested and invested in… unless perhaps you’re a retiree.
Jones’ character is hamstrung by the fact that he ducks in and out of the film more than Moss or Chigurh; if they’re the mouse and cat, respectively, he’s the old hound dog sitting on the backyard porch, trying to figure out a way to get down and catch up to both of them. Large swatches of the movie address his dissipating passion for his work, his worn-down weariness at having to confront evil. (“This is a mess, ain’t it, sheriff?” asks his junior deputy at the aforementioned outdoor crime scene, to which Bell replies in deadpan fashion, “If not, it’ll do ’til one arrives.”)
The first go-round, some of these passages might seem to slow the movie down a bit. But they actually give it a corresponding real-world starkness and depth that serves to counterbalance the inexorable march of Chigurh. This is most robustly embodied in the film’s finale, in which Bell recounts some dreams he’s recently had — dreams featuring his father. There’s a specificity of intent there, but Bell’s monologue of recollection is also about hope and the future, about recognizing a world outside of and independent from all the evil, familial acrimony and missed opportunity in the world (“And then I woke up…”), and choosing to live there. While more overt Iraq films have flailed at the theatrical box office (not the least of which Jones’ own In the Valley of Elah, written and directed by Paul Haggis) because Americans by and large don’t like to see on the big screen mirrored reflections of real life and/or what they’ve been seeing on the television news, in certain ways No Country for Old Men is very quietly, shrewdly and profoundly political. It’s a movie whose grace-note ending presages some of the hope attached to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. The arc of Bell’s character represents a typical independent American voter, from 2002 to 2007.
Housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, No Country for Old Men is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional French, English and Spanish subtitles. Along with a gallery of trailers, supplemental extras consist of a trio of featurettes, running around 40 minutes in total, and pieced together from the same interview sessions with cast and crew. The first, a more general making-of overview, charts all the ins and outs of production. Another featurette examines working with the Coens, and includes some amusing anecdotes about their working methods. Finally, “Diary of a Country Sheriff” offers up a more thematic and slightly esoteric view of the film itself, using the character of Bell and the movie’s geography to give it some contextual mooring. Oh, and there’s also a six-minute striptease lesson from Tommy Lee Jones… just kidding. A (Movie) B+ (Disc)