"Even in the contest between man and steer, the issue is not certain."

Rating: 8/10 (4 January 2008)

There are very few filmmakers working today who can match up against Joel and Ethan Coen. Since their neo-noirish debut with 'Blood Simple. (1984),' the brother directors have dominated modern cinema with their unique brand of writing and storytelling, evoking the atmosphere of classic films while always maintaining a distinct sense of originality. 'No Country for Old Men (2007)' comes after a somewhat disappointing five-year stretch, during which they produced the second-tier remake, 'The Ladykillers (2003),' and the fun but inconsequential 'Intolerable Cruelty (2004).' Adapting the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, the Coens have created one of the most harrowingly-intense cinema experiences you'll have all year, a cat-and-mouse game of drugs, violence, money and murder that will leave you gasping for air, and clawing at your armrest in search of some comfort. While this film is not the pair's most respectable outing  there's a certain roughness to the film that I couldn't quite connect with  they've certainly never delivered anything so chillingly gruesome and suspenseful.
The year is 1980. When local hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) happens upon the site of a massacre in the middle of the parched, Texan desert, the apparent aftermath of drug deal gone wrong, his discovery of the $2 million payment, bunched neatly in a leather suitcase, prompts him to make a few decisions he'll come to regret later on. A psychopathic hit-man, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a grotesque killer with no scruples, arrives at the scene to recover the money, only to find the loot missing and the remains of Llewelyn's abandoned vehicle. While the two men play a deadly game of hide-and-seek across the Texan countryside  Anton killing fellow conspirators, law enforcers and innocent victims at every turn  soon-to-be-retired sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) reluctantly follows, disillusioned by the overwhelming amount of evil present in the current world. The exploits of these three main characters, though they rarely share the screen, seem to blend feverishly among one another, and the eventual outcome of the story is one that you're unlikely to see coming.
Anton Chigurh is certainly one of the more formidable villains to come our way in recent years. Though lacking the complexity of somebody like Hannibal Lecter, Chigurh is most terrifying because he is the complete opposite: silent, methodical, ruthless His actions are almost mechanical in their simplicity and practicality; he will do whatever is needed to get the job done, with little thought for human life {it would not be unreasonable to liken Chigurh to the Terminator (1984)}. His opening scene is the cinematic equivalent of a violent kick in the gut, a sequence as shockingly violent as I've seen in the first five minutes of any movie in recent memory {though, admittedly, I do tend to stay away from any film that promises a lot of bloodshed}. After this, the Coens show no signs of letting up, and, time after time, we are treated to one graphic death after another. The presence of a few off-screen murders does show that the two filmmakers' awareness that a cut-away is often more appropriate, but I think perhaps their penchant for blood takes the film a bit too far. I'm generally all right with violence if it contributes to the story, but at what point does it simply become gratuitous?
Sprinkled amongst all the tattered bodies in Anton Chigurh's wake is a Coen Brothers script that delivers the black humour and witty dialogue of most of their previous films. The screenplay cleverly interweaves the extreme violence of the story with an amusing combination of droll banter and uneasy conversation, most noticeable in the scene in which Chigurh challenges a nervous service station owner to a coin toss ("what's the most you ever lost on a coin toss?"). Though I chuckled quite regularly, I also feel the need to denounce the film-goer in the row ahead of me, who, rather distractingly, laughed at every single line as though it was the greatest thing since Charles Chaplin got himself caught on the conveyor belt. 'No Country for Old Men' is most stylistically similar to the Coens' debut effort, 'Blood Simple. (1984),' and, thematically, it deals with the same issues explored in both this and 'Fargo (1996);' namely, the corrupting power of money.
The ending for the film, which was greeted by a hushed moment of universal confusion in the cinema, remains true to the source material. Though it was undoubtedly interesting to hear Sheriff Ed Tom Bell recounting his confused and insightful dreams, the tension in the final twenty minutes drops off so dramatically that "anti-climax" is the only word that comes to mind. The Sheriff's vision of his long-deceased father "riding on past" and "fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold" is an obvious allusion to death and the possible afterlife. As near as I can tell, and I have a history of missing the point on such thing, the dream seems to be summarising the film by declaring that there is evil in the world, there always has been evil in the world, and there always will be. Perhaps the only way you can escape this evil is in death, where the Sheriff's father is waiting for him by a roaring fire in the depths of the cold, dark night.