Coen brothers a perfect match for McCarthy's No Country for Old Men

Rating: 9/10 (11 September 2007)

This is the one movie that I allowed myself to go into with ridiculously high expectations. The reason was, that the source material, Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name, was so perfectly suited to cinematic translation, and more specifically, to a cinematic translation at the hands of the Coen brothers. The novel was packed with a great cast of characters, a deliciously dark sense of humor, and set against the backdrop of the vast desert vistas and small towns of the American south. With stuff like this, I thought there was no way the Coen brothers could possibly go wrong, and I was right. The plot follows Lewellen Moss (Josh Brolin) who, while out hunting, discovers a stash of $2 million dollars in a drug deal gone wrong. Without fully understanding the consequences of taking the money Moss, something of a cross between average blue-collar Joe and resourceful survivalist, is thrust into a world of very dangerous men who will stop at nothing to get the money back. The brutal hunt is played against small town Sheriff Ed Tom Bell's (Tommy Lee Jones)own attempts to find and help Moss before it is too late. Cormac McCarthy, who is the premier chronicler of the loss of the American west, is here telling the story of the loss of small town America through the eyes of the over-matched Sheriff Bell who has a hard time coming to terms with the boldness and brutality of this new generation of outlaws. Figures like Anton Chigurh, who draws his victims into discussions about causality before having them flip a coin to decide their fate.
It's hard to comment on the film, because it's such a direct translation of the book, but I do have some complaints about the casting decisions. Chigurh, who is such a larger-than-life, terrifying, and seductive figure in the book really needed to be played by someone with more presence (I personally think Benicio Del Toro would have been perfect). While Javier Bardem does an okay job, he plays Chigurh too much as a pure psychopath and the biggest thing about his performance is his distracting hair cut (what was up with that?). Tommy Lee Jones also seemed a bit out of place in his role. Too often a leading man, it seemed impossible for him to play a thoroughly beaten old man who knows his limitations to draw the type of sympathy the part demanded.
Quibbles aside, the movie is propelled by its plot, and it's definitely a fun ride. Anyone that knows McCarthy's work knows they aren't going to a get a conventional feel good Hollywood fairytale, because McCarthy understands only too well that the world is a hard and pitiless place, and this ain't no country for old men.