Movie Review: No Country for Old Men

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No Country for Old Men (2007)–****

I’m writing this review about 20 minutes after watching No Country for Old Men because it’s a film that deserves to be written about when I still don’t have my bearings. I don’t know when I’ll get them back, but I don’t think it will be soon. No Country for Old Men has that severe an effect on the audience.

The characters in this film face something so incomprehensible that the immediate reaction is to call it insane. They are unable to process the horror and its the collateral damage. We the audience are lucky enough to have Ethan and Joel Coen co-direct No Country for Old Men, because these filmmakers, today worthy of being called veterans and masters, don’t make it easy for us to process either.

What are we trying to process? It’s the story of a Texas welder Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. He’s not a man you would expect to do anything exceptional, but he would most likely do the right thing. When he finds a case with $2 million in cash close to the shootout, he does something stupid. He tries to keep the cash.

Being a man who does what’s right and what’s stupid, Llewelyn returns to the scene that night to give water to a wounded Mexican man, a man who begged him for agua when Llewelyn first stumbled upon the bloodbath. But somebody else was already there looking for the money and they stuck around to wait for Llewelyn. If only drug dealers looking for the cash were the least of his problems. He gets away from them. The money belongs to someone who wants it back and that someone hires Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) to get it for him.

Anton Chigurh isn’t just a killer. He isn’t just a ghost, as Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) describes him. Chigurh is something so cold, so calculated, so confident in principles that he appears to exist on a different plane, even when he is bloodied and broken. He’s so indifferent to killing (using a cattle gun to murder humans) that it terrifies the characters around him. For us, the audience, watching those characters try to understand how they exist in the same world is just as unsettling.

It’s easy to keep an audience off-kilter with the idea of Chigurh alone. The Coens, who here produce their best film since the immortal Fargo, don’t settle just on ideas. With a Hitchockian sense of story and suspense, Coens manage to invert the notion of what an audience can expect from each individual scene, something they’ve been able to do in their best efforts. With No Country For Old Men, it creates an atmosphere of unease, making Chigurh and the other characters exponentially more effective.

After two complete catastrophes and a lukewarm film like The Man Who Wasn’t There, the Coen’s certainly have their mojo back. Shockingly, they do it without the supporting cast we expect to see in a Coen Brothers film. No Steve Buscemi. No John Goodman. No Frances McDormand. Still, with the pitch-perfect Jones and the virile Brolin, the Coens construct two of their staple characters (a small town police chief and an working class schmuck) with nuances they’ve never explored.

For the Coens, No Country for Old Men is all about the unexplored. And for the audience it’s about being shocked and surprised by their deep, unexpected venture into new territory.

No Country for Old Men, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, opens wide Nov. 21.