No country for happily ever after, but a great suspenseful movie, great performances.

Rating: Null/10 (23 July 2011)

I loved this movie. But this is not a movie for everyone, I want to be very clear about that. It is violent, it is scary, and it doesn't end with the bad guys losing and the good guys heading off to a "happily ever after." If you're looking for a harmless popcorn movie with comic-book violence that's so exaggerated it's unreal and a feel-good ending, be warned: "No Country for Old Men" is not what you're looking for.
There's also no romance here, so forget it as a "date movie;" and while there's a certain amount of irony to it, there really isn't any humor.
Which leaves: a suspenseful plot in the chase/hunt genre, some really superb acting, and everything put together in a movie that just won't quit.
Plot basics: Llewelyn "Lew" Moss (played by Josh Brolin), a hapless regular good ol' boy in the desert southwest country, lucks into $1,000,000 in cash when he stumbles on a drug deal gone bad. He doesn't know that the guys the money belongs to tucked away a transponder in the middle of one of the bundles of cash, and that he can be located by someone who has the receiver tuned to the proper frequency who knows roughly where he may have gone.
Lew and his wife Carla Jean abandon their trailer home; Carla Jean heads off to her mother's, and Lew heads off to try to figure out how to hide the loot.
It's Lew's bad luck that one of the parties to the drug deal has hired Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), an executioner that's as relentless as Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Terminator" android and is pure sociopathic killer.
Chigurh (pronounced like "sugar") has to join the movie bad guy Hall of Fame. He simply doesn't care who he has to kill to get a job done, and when he decides he has to kill someone, he isn't going to change his mind. (This figures very prominently in the way the end of the movie plays out.) Once he knows that Lew is who he is hunting, the chase is on.
Chigurh isn't just the hunter in this film; he's hunted by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the lawman in whose jurisdiction the drug deal gone bad went down. Bell quickly realizes what's going on, and unlike Lew and Carla Jean, he realizes how deadly serious the situation is. Lew knows he's being hunted, but he doesn't know how deadly the guy hunting him is; he also has a cocky belief that he's smart enough to shake off the pursuit and hang onto the cash.
Bell tries to communicate with Lew through Carla Jean; he tries to get across to Carla Jean that Lew's life is in danger. Carla Jean is rattled, but she can't convince herself that shopping her husband to the law is the lesser of the evils.
The hunt is on. And that's basically what the rest of the movie consists of: Lew trying to escape with the money, Chigurh (and ultimately several other parties to the drug deal) trying to hunt Lew down, and Sheriff Bell trying to get to Lew in time to save him.
There's a lot of collateral damage in this hunt, and it's the way Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Bell is affected by the carnage that raises this movie above the level of your average hunter-and-hunted movie. Bell realizes that what he's dealing with in Chigurh, and to some extent the people who employ Chigurh, is something so far beyond the average kind of criminal he's used to dealing with that he literally cannot win. Chigurh is without any compunction: if the way to get to Lew involves killing people who are totally innocent, but whose deaths make it easier for him to get to Lew, then those people are going to die. And unlike the sheriff, who wastes time and effort in feeling something for the victims (even those who aren't completely innocent), Chigurh just mentally closes the books and moves on, the dead forgotten.
Sheriff Bell realizes that however good he is at what he does, however well he does his job, he can't stop someone like Chigurh, he can't win the fight. Maybe nobody can, but for sure he can't and so it's time to step down and let someone else try.
This is an excellent movie, but it doesn't spare anyone and it doesn't finish in a way that leaves you feeling good. It's unrelenting in following the story through to the bitter end. Literally the bitter end.
Bardem and Jones are unforgettable; Woody Harrelson does a fine turn; Kelly Macdonald is sympathetic and completely believable as the wife who is content to let her husband make the choices for both of them...until it's too late.
"No Country for Old Men" is an excellent choice for an intense, powerful, suspenseful movie with some top-rate performances in it. But definitely not for light entertainment or easy viewing, or for people who want a happy ending.