- I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, 'Okay, I'll be part of this world.'
- That alien "something" that Texas Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) struggles to understand throughout the entirety of No Country for Old Men is best represented by a terrifying presence named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). I could tell you all about Chigurh's dead stare and creepy pageboy haircut, but maybe it's best to let the film's characters do the talking. Llewlyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a rugged welder who would normally be the toughest hombre in the room, wonders if Chigurh is "the ultimate badass" after an extended pursuit that Moss barely survives. The interloping bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) claims that Chigurh "doesn't have a sense of humor," but I'm not sure that claim holds up (even Chigurh's name is a joke if you say it out loud). Wells further posits that Chigurh is "a peculiar man" who "has principles," both true enough, but they certainly aren't the sort of principles you're used to. Sheriff Bell just alternates between imagining Chigurh to be a "ghost" or, at the very least, a man who's "got some hard bark on him."
- So how do all of these different characters happen to run across such a monster? Well, the whole messy business gets underway when Moss' antelope hunting is interrupted by the discovery of a massacre site. Plenty of dead bodies, both human and canine, drugs, and money sitting out in the middle of the parched Texas landscape. Practical man that he is, Moss is initially only interested in the cash, but his conscience would keep him from sleeping if he didn't return that night to bring water to a dying man. Unfortunately, his second visit is interrupted by a gang of unidentified Mexicans who puncture the tires on Moss' truck before attempting to puncture the man himself. Moss makes it home with the money and his life intact, but unfortunately for him it falls to Chigurh to get that money back. Time for Moss to spirit his wife (Kelly Macdonald) out of town while he holes up in wood-paneled motel rooms until the coast is clear.
- Sheriff Bell, on the other hand, enters this tale as the party responsible for trying to interpret the trail of destruction that Chigurh leaves behind. Starting with a strangled police officer and moving on to a dead man with a bulletless entry wound, Bell slowly begins to appreciate that one man may be responsible for all of these seemingly unrelated corpses. Of course, the audience already knows that Chigurh doesn't need much provocation to kill, a point well-illustrated by the film's best scene in which a gas station attendant suddenly finds himself putting up some unexpectedly high stakes on a coin toss. Unfortunately, Bell's hesitant and methodical approach to detective work always leaves him a few steps behind Chigurh, who proceeds to initiate an absolutely riveting and potentially deadly game of cat-and-mouse with Moss. At times, you may well wonder whether anyone will make it out of this film alive.
- As strange as it may seem to say this about a movie in which an inscrutable sociopath goes around killing people with a cattle gun, No Country for Old Men is a surprisingly subtle and beautiful piece of work. How two Minnesotans discovered the amazing sound that wind makes streaming over the Texas badlands or the imposing majesty of backlit mesas, I'll never know. Regardless, the Coen brothers break dramatically from their usual style by allowing the audience to soak in all of the scenery and ambient sound without subjecting us to a constant barrage of ostentatious dialogue. What words are present only reinforce Sheriff Bell's extreme reticence, Wells' braggadocio, Moss' determination, and Chigurh's utter insanity. The rest of the essential details get communicated in wonderfully understated ways, like the diner settings for a murder investigation, the reflections glimpsed through a motel room keyhole, or the inspection of one's shoes after exiting a house. Maybe the Coen brothers arrived at this point in their careers in rather "the same way the coin did," but I hope their future work follows exactly this trajectory.
- Barry Corbin and Stephen Root were also in the film.
- Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
