Josh Brolin overlooked; also the sly echo of the ending of "Raising Arizona"

Rating: 9/10 (23 April 2008)

"No time for sheriffs" in world done gone to hell. Chalk up another one for the Coen brothers, in the vein of their great crime dramas "Miller's Crossing" and "Fargo." Taking nothing away from the latter, "No Country for Old Men" is also a masterpiece, but of a different sort. Based not on real events, like "Fargo," butcloselyon a novel by Cormac McCarthy, "No Country" lacks the other film's undercurrent of grim, black humor. Like last year's allegorical Western "Seraphim Falls," this film is structured as an almost breathless chase, a cat-and-mouse in which men of seemingly supernatural resourcefulness track and evade each other over the spoils of a drug deal gone bad.
Esquire magazine among others cites Javier Bardem's performance as creepily implacable killer Anton Chigurh as Oscar-worthy, but it seems to us it is the character that is so prepossessing, not that its portrayal is so stupendous. More demanding, it seems to us, is the role of his quarry, Llewelyn Moss, played by a perhaps under-appreciated Josh Brolin. Woody Harrelson provides a sliver of quasi comic relief, with his overconfident swagger. Kelly MacDonald surprises in her skilled, convincing "Texas trailer trash" (Carla Jean Moss) after notable stints as Peter Pan in "Finding Neverland" and as Evangeline in "Nanny McPhee." But it is Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Ed Tom Bell who provides the moral and narrative axis or at least center of the film. The weariness in his old lined face and the woeful humor in his voice offer a near-complete character study, and the dreams he relates before the sudden soundtrack-less appearance of the closing credits are perhaps less meaningful in their content than as the film's final framinga bookend paired with his opening soliloquy about the seeming incomprehensibility of modern brutal criminality, the worst in human nature having taken some kind of quantum leap to much worse still.
Cinematically, Jones' visage seems organically part of the bleak, parched Texas landscapebut so do the mortality, blood, maimings that we see on the screen. There's nothing here like "Fargo's" garishly unreal, burgundy-colored blood spattering the pristine snow as Steve Buscemi is disposed of via wood-chipper. Bardem's character seems to represent, not a sinister force of nature, or the cosmos, in his bizarre sense of the fatalistic source of his actions, so much as a force of evilwhere a corrupting, dominating malevolence has contorted the very landscape into grotesque barrenness (like in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy). In this world, he's a pestilence quite other than the chthonic (and thus still inherently Gaian, or Manichaean) evil represented by the motorcycle dude and the Snoats brothers in the Coen brothers' "cult" classic, "Raising Arizona." (Likewise, Jones' recounting of his dreams in "No Country" echoes the Nick Cage's final speech as the hapless H.I. McDunnough in "Arizona"though kind of inversely: i.e., instead of "Maybe it was Utah ..." ... "Maybe it was Shëol ...") (For more film-osophy of this ilk, as well as "Fake News," humor, satire, news and opinion, visit the online version of our print publication, or google it and click on the link for its blog.)