No Country for Old Men

Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is a very bad man; in the opening minutes alone of No Country for Old Men he dispatches two men with chilling nonchalance. He kills offhandedly, almost without thought, but it nevertheless means something to him, although just what that is, is never made clear. As he strangles a deputy in the film’s opening minutes, the camera is fixed on his face–a disturbing mixture of tension, strain and perverse pleasure.

Cut to Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who’s hunting antelope—none too successfully—when he stumbles across a dog limping through the creosote. Following its blood trail, he finds a drug deal gone bad; following another trail, he finds a dead drug dealer and a briefcase full of cash. Of course he takes it, and of course, it’s not that simple. Somebody else is after the money and we already know who he is, we’ve already seen what he can do, and we can’t see that anything good can come of it.

Enter Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played in iconic style by Tommy Lee Jones. Bell is the philosophic center of No Country, who both expresses and embodies the film’s major themes: the loss of the old ways and the brutalization of the West. In one scene, he insists that he and his deputy ride horses to the crime scene; his quiet, old-fashioned ways are contrasted potently by the roaring, floodlight-bedecked trucks of the drug-runners.

After the lackluster Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004), No Country for Old Men represents Joel and Ethan Coen at the top of their considerable form. Their eye for detail grounds the plot in a particular time and space. A peanut wrapper slowly relaxes on a gas-station countertop. Scuff-marks from the murdered deputy’s boots stain a linoleum floor. Shot after shot is composed with meticulous precision, from desert expanse to glass-fronted office to closed-in motel. The editing (by the brothers under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) is spare and lean, and builds suspense expertly and mercilessly. The acting is first rate—Jones inhabits Ed Tom Bell as if he were a second skin. He has the best lines and delivers them with impeccable timing. Bardem, with his goofy hairdo and dead eyes, conveys an inner life without resorting to cheap, surface gimmicks such as grimaces or ticks. But as good as Jones and Bardem are, the heart of the picture is Brolin’s Moss. He is the pitch-perfect embodiment of a working-class Texan; he captures both the crazy arrogance and heartbreaking vulnerability of someone who has finally caught a break, and is holding onto it with all his strength.

I’ve spent time in West Texas, and I can tell you that the Coens and their cinematographer Roger Deakins captures the region well. From the play of cloud-shadow across the high-desert floor to the bluish willow-green in the breaks, it is just right. In small towns that would be dusty if they weren’t all poured concrete, Deakins’ over-exposed shots capture perfectly how the heat leeches the life out of you, how the sun cooks your eyes and mind and heart. Although much has been written about the desert spaces in the film, what ring the most true to me are those little towns, and the people who reside in them.

In one hilariously over-the-top sequence, Chigurh explodes a car to distract attention from his burglary of a pharmacy. We watch in meticulous close-up as he dips a rag into the truck’s gas tank, stuffs it into the filler hole, and sets it on fire. The camera follows him into the pharmacy and we look back out through the front windows as a cowboy-hatted local saunters obliviously by the burning car seconds before it explodes. It is a classic Coen moment—at once surreal and yet grounded in the laconic Texas zeitgeist. May there be many more.