The Coen Brothers stir up a Tex-Mex food chain in their latest Tour De Force.

Rating: 10/10 (13 December 2007)

"I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand," says Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) in the first few minutes of the film as he describes the stupor he feels towards the crimes newer generations have invented for themselves. His narration drifts across shots of rural desolation, a familiar setting for directors Joel and Ethan Coen. In No Country for Old Men the Coens work with author Cormac McCarthy to adapt his novel of the same title for the big screen.
The setting is 1980 in Texas, somewhere north of El Paso. The story centers on Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder for Roberto's Mechanic Shop, who stumbles upon early retirement in the form of a drug deal-turned O.K. corral while hunting antelope in the Texas desert.
Here the brothers Coen retrace their steps a decade back; quietly sneaking by career flops like Intolerable Cruelty and The Lady Killers, to arrive at their 1996 magnum opus Fargo. In that "homespun murder story," they showed us what happens when would-be-criminals get in way over their heads. Here again in No Country they create a world where evil men have laid down a set of terrible circumstances, and an average Joe is willing to tip the first domino over.
"Where's the last guy? Ultimo hombre. Last man standing, there must've been one," Moss asks a dying man at the scene of the gunfight. With no help from him, Moss presses on, knowing that if the 'ultimo hombre' did stop, it would be in the shade. Surely enough, under a lone tree nearby Moss finds a dead thug clutching a satchel, which just happens to be loaded with more money than he's ever seen. The only thing that could ruin this bizarre fairy tale for Moss is a man named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem).
Anton is man so intimidating that you would forget your own first name if he came up and asked you for it. He is a cold hit man for his glutton of a boss (although his actions make him seem more self-employed). As Sheriff Bell says, "He has some hard bark on him." Moss ships his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) off to stay with her mother while he lays low for a while. Sheriff Bell, having discovered the crime scene in the desert, goes to warn Moss about the people that he's up against. But it's too late, Moss is long gone and Anton is hot on his trail.
Everyone involved gives the performance of his or her career. Javier Bardem drains all trace of humanity from Anton, leaving behind an organism whose only function is to calculate his own best interest. Tommy Lee Jones puts on the face of someone trudging through an arctic wind, just trying to stay alive. And the character of Moss fits perfectly on Josh Brolin who dishes out recycled tough guy responses with amazing control so that we can see his trembling beneath.
The people that inhabit No Country are men of few words. Which is appropriate because the real genius of the film is in its subtleties. Amidst the action sequences lies the theme of tension between generations of men, and the Coen brothers employ many motifs to drag humility out of all the violence. When Moss is in a Mexican hospital he is visited by Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), another bounty hunter sent for him. Carson tries to connect with Moss, telling him that he was also in Vietnam, to which Moss asks, "So what does that make me? Your buddy?" With that Moss shows us a generation with no sense of camaraderie, only contempt. This is contrasted with Moss' attempt to re-enter the US after his recovery, where his veteran status persuades the old man at the border to sympathize with his plight. The old man and fellow veteran gets Moss a taxi back home. Apparently camaraderie has skipped a generation.
This sentiment is coupled with Sheriff Bells' inability to keep up with Anton and Moss. "I feel over-matched," he says to his Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin, in his first noteworthy role since the demise of Northern Exposure). Bell spends the majority of the film applying conventional wisdom to cold trails. Uncle Ellis, further along in his old age, sadly tells Bell that, "You can't stop what's coming. Ain't all waiting on youthat's vanity." The film cuts out after a brief monologue from Sheriff Bell, in which he recounts a dream from the night before. In the dream he and his Father are riding through a snowstorm on horseback when his Father charges ahead carrying fire. When the credits rolled, everyone in the theater under the age of twenty five collectively went, "What! You call that an ending?" Maybe in doing so they proved the film's hypothesis, that there is a communication barrier between men of different times. Obviously they were sad to let the old cowboy have the last word, but if you pay close attention to his speech you'll see that the movie is anything but a cliffhanger.
There is a lot that washes over the viewer throughout the film's two-hour runtime. Some may latch onto the movie's engrossing action sequences and miss the real themes being studied, which are just as powerful as any ridiculously big firearm that Anton uses to open the door when he's feeling lazy. If you're just looking for a powerhouse of an action flick, you'll certainly find it here. But if you watch closely, you'll also see the Coen brothers create a world of generations pushing against each other slowly like two shifting continents. No Country tops any previous effort from the Coens, and any fan of Fargo will have no trouble calling this the best film of 07.