Well, No Country for Old Men won BAFTA awards for direction, cinematography and best supporting actor (Javier Bardem) so here is my review of the movie. Above all this is a movie about men and how they live and it says something about what makes a man.
Cormac McCarthy’s treatment of men has always engaged me and raised (for me) important questions about life, courage and honour. Also I was intrigued by the idea of the Coen brothers directing NCFOM, I suspected their vision of evil might be bleak enough to do justice to McCarthy’s oddyssey into a modern hell.
Like the book, the movie opens with a voiceover of Texas Sherriff Ed Tom Bell, one of NCFOM’s three main protagonists. The sherriff is not present in the scene, which shows the arrest of the monstrous psychopath Anton Chigurh. From here the movie moves to pick up the third member of this trinity, a tough good ole boy named Llewllyn Moss. Moss is out hunting in the West Texas badlands when he comes across the mother of all drug double-crosses. Shot-out pickup trucks, dead men, dead dogs, lots of guns, blood. Great soaking pools of blood.
Moss is savvy enough to know that there must be one man left standing. He tracks him across the scrub plain, finds him bled-out and dead, clutching a briefcase with 2.4 million dollars in it. In that moment he knows that if he takes the money it comes with a huge amount of trouble.
He takes the money. The scene is set for a brutal and relentless chase across Texas.
Sherriff Ed Tom Bell is the moral heart of the movie, a good man adrift in a world that is increasingly evil. His folksy down-home manner encourages the audience to laugh at him but it soon becomes apparant that he sees more deeply and is smarter than anyone else in the movie. Tommy Lee Jones has played this kind of character before and here he plays it to perfection.
Chigurh as played by Javier Bardem is a piece of concentrated evil. A souless killer, Chigurh is a walking embodiment of violent nihilism, who believes that good and evil are social constructs that only fools obey. This man is the evil that pursues people in their nightmares. He is inescapable.
Types of Men
NCFOM plays out across four types of men. Moral men, like the sherriff, are at a loss as to how to combat mexican hard drugs and the social breakdown they bring with them.
Chigurh forms the second group, a compressed diamond of pure malevolence, who operates almost unchallenged.
Then there are the tough men, like Llewllyn Moss. Moss and Chigurh’s supposed “handler” Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson, underplaying for once) believe that life is about manly virtues, physical toughness and the ability to fight. Josh Brolin’s Moss has just the right amount of leathery toughness to make him believable. Harrelson as Wells has more than enough meanness of spirit. What hampers them is their inability to understand the nature of evil.
The last group is interesting. They are the ordinary folk, connected to the hunt or not, who get caught up in it. One of things that determines whether they live or die is their ability to recognise and acknowledge evil.
The Coens have built an almost perfect integrity between their movie and McCarthy’s novel, translating his vision of violence and desperation into a bleached out 1980’s Texas horror. This is real drama, no contrived shootouts or conventional characters. This movie imprints its images on your brain.
Sherriff Bell looks for salvation. The victory he finds is that good men endure, regardless of the Chigurhs. It does not sound like a lot, but after this movie has dragged us through hell, it feels like that is all there is.
A great movie, powerful and very very brave.
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