Bleak, wrenching, haunting film

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2008)

This is a film that will make you ask some big questions. Questions like 'what creates people with no human feelings?' and 'what can one person do about the existence of true evil? is there anything? should one try?' Tommy Lee Jones' character, honest and decent Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, is a long-time lawman from a long line of lawmen, but the kinds of crime and criminals he faces these days have left him emotionally, mentally and spiritually exhausted and bewildered. (--Like, I dare say, a lot of us.) His helplessness in the face of the grisly handiwork of the superbly played, formal and ice-cold psychopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem--and I will throw things at the screen if he doesn't win Best Supporting Actor for this stunning performance) is for me the emotional bedrock of this movie. I know people are impressed by Josh Brolin in this film, and I agree he's good, but for me his performance had nowhere near the complexity and subtlety of either Jones' or Bardem's: one good man whose moral compass no longer gives him the guidance he needs, and one man so simply relentless that for him good and evil are decided by the toss of a coin. They're not so much adversaries as polar opposites, the forces of law and chaos playing against each other at a distance, and I'm glad the Coens didn't settle for some falsely conclusive confrontation between them. It's a movie that doesn't give answers because there may not be any, a movie with no winner or loser; a movie that sets these painful questions in a gorgeous southwestern landscape and just looks at them, and helps you look at them too.
I love the Coen Brothers' work (well, except for "The Big Lebowski"), and I set this one right up on the shelf with their best. It's one I think no thoughtful person should miss.