Outstanding work from the Coen Brothers

Rating: 9/10 (16 February 2008)

No Country For Old Men's opening prologue, spoken carefully and wistfully by Tommy Lee Jones' weary sheriff, tells the story of him having to put a 14-year-old killer in the electric chair. He killed his girlfriend, not because he had a motive, but to see what it would feel like. This opening speech sets up No Country For Old Men, the new release from Coen Brothers - Joel and Ethan, which then goes on to explore that baseless type of evil in the form of Javier Bardem's ruthless, mop-topped killer. He plays Anton Chigurh (how you pronounce his last name is dependant on who says it), a stone-faced killer trying to track down a missing bag of drug money, after a deal goes horribly wrong in the Texan desert. Josh Brolin's local simpleton Llewellyn Moss is the man who took the money after stumbling across the aftermath of the deal-gone-wrong. Everything seems to go remarkably well for Moss until he makes one fatal mistake, leading Chigurh onto his tail. Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff Ed Tom Bell attempts to find Moss before Chigurh does.
Apart from being an amazingly tense, and brilliantly shot straightforward genre movie, No Country For Old Men is also a faithfully adapted story that encompasses all the philosophical debates present in Cormack McCarthy's novel. Ed Tom Bell, the beleaguered sheriff weary with the modern world is wondering where the hell society is leading itself. He is convinced, at his mature age, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and morality is being sapped from society. But is that really the case, or has the world always been an evil and dark place? The Coens, like McCarthy, clearly think so, despite themselves being at an age when conservative nostalgia evokes a form of pride when you could remember the "good old days" of yesteryear. Days when, in your own interpretation, people were nicer and less evil to each other. Anton Chigurh embodies the new kind of evil that people like Bell are forced to face. And Moss is simply the small time player who thinks he can play along with the big guns.
The performances are roundly fantastic, but no one draws the audiences' attention quite like Javier Bardem. The Spanish superstar dares the camera to look at him with his almost lifeless eyes, and the cattle gun he uses to mercilessly kill his targets. Undoubtedly, however, the real star of the movie are the Coens themselves. Along with famed cinematographer Roger Deakins, Joel and Ethan have made their best movie in years. After dabbling in fairly flimsy-but-throwaway material like The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, this sees them back on the form of edgier films like Fargo and Blood Simple. Even though many found themselves at sea with the head-scratching ending, there is no denying that as a piece of genre cinema, this is top quality stuff. As a poetic meditation on the new evils of the world, it is even better.