Not what I was expecting

Rating: 10/10 (10 December 2007)

Every once in a while I see a movie that is really hard to explain. A movie that kind of stays with me hours, even days after I see it as I try to absorb what I just saw. No Country for Old Men is one of those movies.
Explaining the plot would be almost pointless because the movies is so much more than the plot, there were so many levels to the movie that I'm sure I missed most of them. On the surface, the movie is about a man, (Llewelyn) who, while hunting, comes across a drug deal gone bad. While investigating he finds a case filled with money, about 2 million dollars. He takes it for himself and tries his best to keep it from the people who it belongs too.
Hot on is trail is Chigurh (pronounced Sugar, or shugar) a man who, according to one character, has no sense of humor. That's almost like saying Tiger Woods can sort of play golf. Most of the movie focuses Llewelyn trying to keep one step ahead of Chigurh, but that's really not what the movie is about, that's just what you see on the surface.
Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, is one of the most evil characters I've ever seen. Every time he was on the screen with another character I wondered if that character was going to survive. The movie opens with Chigurh killing a deputy in a very ugly way, by strangling him, the look on Chigurh's face as he did it was one of pure evil. Chigurh isn't just a man, he was sometimes an unstoppable force of nature.
In one of he more intense scenes I've ever seen you have Llewelyn waiting in a darkened hotel room, he knows Chigurh's nearby looking for him and he just waits. I don't think I breathed until the scene finished playing out, the tension was just to thick and so well set up and executed I was totally drawn in.
Tommy Lee Jones plays an aging cop trying to put the pieces together and he sparkled in every scene he was in. I think this is his best performance since The Fugitive and I thought he was fantastic in that movie. If he's not nominated for best actor I'll be shocked. What I really enjoyed was how totally out of his league he really was. This wasn't a cop who was hell bent on finding or stopping a killer, he was an old cop who thought he's seen it all but, once he realizes he's up against someone as evil as Chigurh, he gets afraid. He wants to do the right thing but he just can't fathom this kind of man, this kind of evil. Of course, it's not all played out that black and white, (levels, remember, levels) it's just something I thought while watching it. You might think something else.
It's hard to talk about this movie without saying something about the end. I won't go into details because I want everyone to see it untainted like I did. For me, I was confused, then angry, then confused again, then finally I accepted what had happened and moved on. I love that the Cohen Brothers did something different, something you'd never, ever see in a Hollywood movie.
My prediction, this movie will be nominated for Best Picture, Javier Bardem will be nominated for the best actor, Tommy Lee Jones for Best Actor, Cohen's for best adapted screen play, and probably best director.
So yeah, I'd highly recommend this movie, just leave your preconceived notions of what a movie should be at the door.