exciting, thought-provoking Coen Brothers' film

Rating: 8/10 (19 May 2009)

A riveting and intense movie, 'No Country for Old Men' can apparently be seen on a couple of levels. I'm afraid I only saw it on one, that of a conventional chase/thriller done with style and intelligence, with some unexpected twists and turns. It's also quite gory and violent; it would be hard to argue though that the violence here does not add to the film's characters and its story. Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh ranks right up there with Robert Mitchum's Max Cady ('Cape Fear') and Dennis Hopper's Frank ('Blue Velvet') as one of the creepiest, most malevolent bad guys ever to stalk across the silver screen. Like those classically evil characters, he is relentless and ubiquitous, seemingly impossible to kill and without a shred of conscience. Chigurh exists for one reason: to kill in cold blood again and again. Virtually none of the people he kills pose any sort of threat to him personally; he could find out what he wants and be on his way, but it appears that if someone has seen him and spoken to him, a code of sorts within him demands the person be killed. Yet occasionally, the person isn't, for reasons never made clear. A couple of times in the movie, he lets a coin toss decide a person's fate. Chigurh's prey in 'No Country for Old Men' is Llewelyn Moss, played with taciturn toughness by Josh Brolin. I think the main thing that makes this story work is the fact that Moss is almost a match for Chigurh. While many of the rest of the people we meet in the film are simply mowed down by Chigurh, Moss proves to be a cunning and resourceful foe, at one point even turning the tables on the seemingly invincible executioner and shooting HIM. The third main character is Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. As always, Jones is fascinating to watch and gives a fine performance, but I found myself wondering how many times he's played the same role. 'The Fugitive,' 'U.S. Marshals,' 'The Client,' even 'Men In Black'... they're all essentially the same character, a cranky but endearing authority figure with a droll sense of humor. It's a character that wears well though, and nobody does it better than Jones. Here he is investigating the murders and Moss' disappearance though he stands apart from the action, wryly commenting on the case and life in general while never actually encountering Chigurh. The plot concerns Moss chancing upon a satchel with two million dollars in it at the scene of an apparent shootout between two rival Mexican drug gangs, at a remote spot in West Texas. All the gang members are dead save one who is badly wounded. Moss makes off with the money but quickly discovers others are after him to recover it. Chigurh works for one of the gangs as their prime hit-man and thus begins his pitiless and unrelenting cross-state pursuit of Moss and the stolen loot. Moss ingeniously escapes time and again, and Chigurh just as ingeniously tracks him down to his next hiding place. (Pity the poor motel clerks wherever Moss chooses to hole up; they almost always fall victim to Chigurh.) The ending is 'unconventional,' as they say, but hey, it's a Coen Brothers' film... what do you expect? I'll leave the existential explanations of 'what it all means' to someone else and say, to me, the lesson of 'No Country for Old Men' is that nobody just forgets about two million dollars.