An excruciatingly brilliant movie

Rating: 9/10 (20 November 2007)

No Country for Old Men is a movie that will most likely flop in theaters. It is not the kind of flick you will hear people raving about (unless you have a lot of movie-addicts as friends) and flocking to the production in large numbers. It is not the kind of movie that most people will want to see over and over again. But this is also perhaps the precise reason why it is such a thrilling, fantastic film that will garner ridiculous adoration from a subset of viewers who don't like their action movies spoon fed to them by Hollywood with Will Smith delivering witty one-liners throughout. No Country for Old Men stands on its own as one of the finest action movies ever produced, though to call it simply an "action" movie drastically understates the ambitious reach of author Cormac McCarthy and producers Joel and Ethan Coen.
Set in the Southwestern United States, No Country is a story about Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a hunter who finds $2 million in cash in a drug deal in the middle of the desert, with no one around to guard it except several decaying bodies. Being a poor man clutching to existence in a remote part of the country, he decides to keep the money and hope for the best. When Anton Chigurh, played unsettlingly by Javier Bardem, comes looking for the money, the entire plot becomes "a mess," as Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) succinctly puts it. This movie is the opposite of a B-rate slaughterhouse of gore and torture. It chooses to seethe, to ooze tension and leave our imaginations to do the worst. Rather than club you over the head with grisly pictures, the machinations of the Coen brothers are carefully sculpted to extract the maximum amount of impact from each confrontation while keeping the gore to an essential minimum.
Part of what makes No Country so brilliant is how focused each scene appears to us, how they delight in the subtle nuances of character, portraying them as common individuals who are mostly clueless to deal with the changing forces around them. The austere humor of each individual echoes this, as they deliver their own guileless assessments of life and love, delivered in a Southwestern slang that many will mistake for a lack of wisdom. Yet each role here is superbly designed to beg for reflection, to ponder the choices they made, and to examine their own flaws and virtues. In short, every character means something to the plot, and the ramifications of what happens to them are always noticed and felt by the viewer. When one dies, it releases a torrent of emotion that will leave us feeling bereft of something substantial.
And that is perhaps the most significant departure from the typical movie of No Country for Old Men. The action scenes here are visceral, they are gripping, and they are well-designed, the same as many other films appearing this year in theaters. What is different here is intuition of the directors, who realize that silence in a gunfight can provide much more tension than a constant rain of bullets. The most unbearable moments in No Country are the seconds before the trigger is pulled, where life and death are temporarily suspended. After each confrontation, an audible gasp is almost necessary. This film is equally as unnerving because the next battle is always around the corner  if not with guns, then with words, and if not with words, with the idea of how to deal with death, life, and our past.
It is in these somber ruminations that No Country is saved from being a nihilistic retelling of fate. Without the distantly observant comments made by Tommy Lee Jones' character (Bell), the earnest method by which Moss (Brolin) moves through the scenes with an uneasy balance between fear and arrogance, or the chilling ideology of Chigurh (Bardem), this movie would have been another two hours of mindless bloodletting, as desolate as the landscape. Instead, No Country is full of choices, consequences, and the motives that drive us, a film that stands tall in a sea of much poorer clones. Even the ending, which may leave some scratching their head, and others angered, is as devastatingly stark and unapologetic as the rest of the production, offering no "feel better" pill, only the vague ideas of a desperate situation, and a person who has simply had enough. It is potentially the most unnerving quality in the entire film: The ending is simply too realistic for its own good, departing from underneath our conscience with only a few words to see us home. What is not spoken aloud is what makes No Country for Old Men a classic. Hard to watch, and easy to enjoy.