Mesmerizing - an instant classic!

Rating: 10/10 (25 February 2008)

Since 1984, the Coen brothers have been seducing, entrancing and surprising film-lovers all over the world with their wildly imaginative body of work, or at least they did until 2003. Then came Intolerable Cruelty, followed by The Ladykillers: not bad movies per se, but clearly not the best of efforts on their behalf. Thankfully, No Country for Old Men is everything one could expect from them. In fact, it's their best film since Fargo, a fact acknowledged by the three Oscars they won (Best Picture, Directing and Adapted Screenplay).
Hang on. Adapted? Yes. Surprisingly enough, the brothers' return to form is not a product of their remarkable imagination. Instead, it is based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, albeit one that seems to be tailor-made for the Coens: Texas (where their debut Blood Simple was set), colorful characters, impeccable dialogue and occasional outbursts of violence - it's all there, complete with a sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones' Ed Tom Bell) whose reactions to the ensuing madness are modeled on Fargo's Marge Gunderson.
It is Bell that constitutes the film's soul: his words open and close the story, and his candid reflections on mankind are the center of No Country's analysis of absurd bloodshed. The latter is prominently caused by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a passionless killer who is hired to find Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a hunter who has come across a suitcase containing two million dollars after discovering a drug affair gone horribly bad and decides to keep running despite the warnings of a more suave hit-man (Woody Harrelson): Chigurh will stop at nothing, and proof of that is evident in the trail of corpses he has left behind with a cattle gun. Bell always arrives too late to where either of the two men has been, and can only hope the violence will stop some day. Yes, it really is no country for old men.
This film marks a return to the Coens' typically humorous and noirish settings, while also adding an elegiac beauty, captured by Roger Deakins' seductive cinematography, which reminds of Sam Peckinpah's Westerns: the Texan landscapes provide a sense of timelessness that makes the brutality reflect human history altogether, rather than a specific period (although the movie takes place in 1980). The environment is also used to set the film's tone, especially in terms of sound: Carter Burwell's magnificent music is heard only four or five times in the whole picture, leaving room for the wind that blows swiftly across the desert and announces awful things to come.
Along with the formal beauty, the Coens, as always, offer excellent performances: Jones provides a soulful variation of a part he could play in his sleep by now, his Sheriff being the only real "good guy" around; Brolin, for whom 2007 was a breakthrough year (Grindhouse, In the Valley of Elah, American Gangster), is laconic and instantly charismatic as he moves the action forward and says some of the fantastic screenplay's best lines ("If I don't come back, tell mother I love her". "Your mother is dead" his wife remarks. "Well, then I'll tell her myself" he replies); and Bardem, who won the film's fourth Oscar (Best Actor in a Supporting Role), is nothing short of a revelation, trading his natural likability for a frightening coldness (and a ridiculous hairdo) that marks Chigurh as the most iconic hit-man in cinema history - like Ben Kingsley, who shocked everyone with his raw turn in Sexy Beast, the Spanish actor has undergone a transformation so scary some viewers won't believe it's the same person who made the world cry in Before Night Falls and The Sea Inside.
Bottom line: No Country for Old Men is quintessential Coen: funny, poetic, violent and tragic. In other words, a masterpiece.