Quite a serious return to the serious for the Coens

Rating: 10/10 (26 November 2007)

I must express very intimately that No Country For Old Men is a masterpiece. Easily the most suspenseful movie I've seen since Se7en, and that was twelve years ago. The best of all worlds here: acting, dialogue, editing and camera-work, sound, and music (or in this case, total lack thereof). This film made me genuinely afraid to walk around corners last night in fear of coming face to face with Javier Bardem and his cattle-killer. Bardem's portrayal of Chigurh is the scariest villain ever committed to film. His eyes...his eyes.
The Coen bros continue to make the most interesting and entertaining movies of anyone making movies in America. It's like they're directing and writing with their left hands and simultaneously holding their right hands up towards the west in a very indifferent flick off to Hollywood - but somehow they do it with the most professional of middle fingers. Sitting in the theater taking this film in made me feel sad and ashamed. Of what? I do not know. The subconscious jabs that this film's themes took at our generation were felt by this film-goer's tubby belly. I was mesmerized; I was appalled. Is there a more volatile combination for the mind to try and wrap itself around? Bloody though the message may be, it's still visible in spite of and because of it. A violent film to be sure, but these are violent times.
I once thought that the original Texas Chainsaw was a bleak film; perhaps the bleakest I'd seen. No Country, humorously enough set in the same region of the US, achieves that bleakness without the outlandish band of murder happy psychopaths and minus the "the whole world's going to hell in a handbasket" feeling. The Leatherface family would fear Chigurh and as far as No Country is concerned, Hell is already here...friendo.