"I got here the same way the coin did"

Rating: 9/10 (7 December 2007)

Bardem's Law states that Javier Bardem will be the most exciting part of any film in which he appears. This isn't such a feat in COLLATERAL, but to be the best thing in a Tommy Lee Jones movie and a Coen Brothers movie at the same time may be the neatest trick he's pulled yet.
What's your motivation to act in a world predicated on chance? NO COUNTRY explores the choices of a few very motivated people, and answers all of its questions with a flip of the coin. Yes, it's an easy out to take, but it's not easy to take it this far. The protagonist is doomed by his one selfless act: after he's already got away clean, he goes back to aid a dying stranger and gets hellhounds on his trail. This is the only gesture the story makes to a moral lesson, as the engine of God is a narcissistic psychopath who might kill you, and might just try to scare you to death. Lately, Cormac McCarthy likes to pepper his villains' philosophy with nihilism, and so have the Coens often done. There is no hope in religion, in law, in justice. The land is toxic and sterile, the towns deserted, the roads an endless stretch of good places to get shot.
But the story does not discourage hope. Like all good fairy tales, it reminds you that you might get lucky. You might just make it. If you don't try, you get less than zero anyway. So if you try, try hard. You could win everything. As Yeats tells us, it's no country for old men because in a world this dynamic, "Caught in that sensual music all neglect/Monuments of unageing intellect." You must change with the times; act like the quick or be counted among the dead.
Josh Brolin is as credible a young cowboy as I have seen since Steve McQueen; Woody Harrelson is perfectly glib; they both find out that being clever may not matter at all. And Tommy Lee Jones gets to say, "Even in a contest between man and steer, the issue is not certain."