Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2007, No Country for Old Men is a brilliant treatise on the role of violence in society. Much of the plot centers on the hunt for $2 million in drug money that has gone missing after a shoot-out on the isolated prairie of the western part of Texas. The story follows Llewelyn Moss, the hunter who stumbles upon the dead bodies at the shoot-out and the money that remains unclaimed, and his nemesis, a killer named Anton Chigurh who uses a rather unusual tool for killing. The other primary plot strand involves Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his deputy as they try to solve the mystery of what happened to those men in the desert and what has become of Moss and his wife.
Much attention has been given to Javier Bardem's performance of Chigurh, and it's worth all of the praise that it has received. He's stunning in the part. In one of the early scenes, while handcuffed, Chigurh manages to strangle a police officer to death and free himself. The look on his face as he chokes the bleeding man to the last breath is almost orgasmic. Truly frightening to watch that scene, but it sets a tone for almost every encounter that the viewer has with this character. He leaves behind him a trail of blood and bodies. It seems he has only one purpose in life: to kill. He has apparently been given orders to retrieve the money, and anyone who stands in his way is likely to die. It's the single-mindedness of his vision that is most chilling. He seems to be an embodiment of the mentality that violence, death, destruction, etc. are effective ways to attain our goals, that whatever we must do is justifiable so long as it helps us to achieve what we set out to do. Scary stuff indeed.
Josh Brolin is great here. He's very understated as the welder who gets in a bit over his head when he starts collecting guns and money from the bodies of dead drug dealers. What I liked about his character, though, is just how much strength he has. It's a quiet strength, certainly, but he's willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done as well (although he is less prone to killing unless it is in self-defense). He's very resourceful and quite matter-of-fact; his response to his wife's question of where he got a pistol and a satchel of money ("at the getting place") perfectly sums up the ways that some Texas men tend to respond. What also struck me about his character is the depth of his conscience. Twice, he awakens in the middle of the night because he is still puzzling over some dilemma, a moral one or perhaps a logical one. Both times lead to some dangerous outcomes.
The best performance, in my mind, is by Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell. He's just everything you'd want in a sheriff: funny, smart, persistent, diligent, laconic, all while being a model of integrity. His voice-over at the film's start sets the tone for the kind of man he is, and he remains remarkably consistent throughout the movie. His moments of humor stand out, of course, such as when asks his deputy how they're going to put out a bulletin for a man who has recently drunk milk. Yet it's scenes such as the one with Moss's wife in the restaurant that show you the range that Jones is capable of. He tells her a story of how one man's attempts to kill a cow for slaughter went awry and, in doing so, pretty directly tells her the exact danger that her husband is in. I could watch his character again and again and still be transfixed.
I don't think this film is too graphic, a charge that has been leveled by some. It does not seem to revel in the deaths that Chigurh and others cause. The joy that he feels, for example, when strangling the deputy is really quite horrifying to the audience. Normal people would not feel any sense of exhilaration at watching the senseless deaths of innocent people (like those who lose their cars to Chigurh). If anything, this film actually shows just how brutal and ugly such killings are. The film is set in 1980, but its emphasis on the consequences of violence are just as relevant now as they would have been then. I realize that No Country for Old Men might not have played well to the older, more conservative members of the academy, but great movies about violence have won before: The Godfather, Unforgiven, The Silence of the Lambs, etc. Such films have reasons to include violence, and thematically, these violent films teach us a great deal about who we are as a people.
The last part of the movie has been criticized for its ambiguity, and I have to say, without revealing the ending, that I have no idea why. Everything that happens at the end has been set up throughout the rest of the film. Listen to what the characters say about the future, and you'll know what I mean. Watch how Chigurh behaves after he's killed someone, and you'll understand. And listen carefully to the story that ends the film; it's the key that pulls everything together in as clear a fashion as any movie can that is about the insanity that violence represents.
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