No Country for Old Men
Director: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen

Cormack McCarthy is the kind of ill-fated Mellville-esque author whose minimalist, nihilistic prose sold about ten books per novel for a solid decade before audiences finally caught on to his brilliance. He writes cowboy novels (of a kind), allegorical and postmodern, books about the sparse desperation of the American Southwest with terse, punctuation-free prose to match. It comes as no surprise that the writer/director duo of the Coen Brothers would gravitate towards such material to adapt into film, so in sync with the cold noir-tinged of earlier films like Blood Simple and Fargo. No doubt the Brothers were particularly interested in this return to form, after recent disappointing offerings like The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty hemorrhaged money and negative reviews at the box office, but that is another snarky observation altogether best saved for another time.

Fortunately for all involved, No Country for Old Men does not disappoint in the slightest. Tense, brooding and darkly comical, this is the film that fans of the Coens have been wishing the brothers would make again after Fargo. Both films personify the rural eccentricities and disparate locations of America's hidden frontiers, as well as telling a darned good crime thriller in the process. But while the waters of North Dakota run only so deep, the waters of the deepest corners of Texas run darker and deeper than anything in recent memory from the Coens. As cinematic experiences go, No Country for Old Men is satisfying, gripping and just the slightest bit unsettling; a perfect blend of satisfaction and introspection that sticks with you like indigestion after the lights come up.

Off hunting in the desert, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon a strange scene: a convoy of off-road vehicles, a pile of bullets and dead bodies, and a large cache of heroin. Upon further examination of the scene, he also finds a black briefcase stuffed to the brim with hundred dollar bills. At that moment, his life flashes before his eyes, spreading down the rode like a lonely highway. He takes the money and returns home, and quickly sends his young wife into hiding. Llewelyn realizes that nobody is likely to stop looking for a lost satchel full of millions of dollars, and the kinds of people that could leave such a scene of carnage are people he’d prefer to avoid.

Soon after, an enigmatic figure escapes from a local police station and begins murdering people left, right and center on his journey through the desert. His choice of weapon: a stun gun from a cattle slaughterhouse, nothing more than a can of compressed air and a small metal rod that fires outwards, crushing the skull. He is a problem solver, here to clean up a mess of a drug deal gone sour. Arriving at the scene, realizing the money is missing, he sets off on his quest to track down the thief and recover the money. Meanwhile, a local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) surveys the carnage left in his small patch of land in Texas, and wonders to himself what the world is coming to.

No Country for Old Men is a hell of a ride; on the surface a straightforward crime drama with gunfights, long pensive scenes of silence and no dialogue, and a near-limitless brutality and self-destructive bent. Three men become inexorably linked through a sequence of events of violence, greed and fate, and from which a whole bad sequence of events is set to follow. From the first scene, we know exactly how things are going to play out, and any illusion on our part is our own fault entirely. This is a mature film, more in tone than plot or on-screen violence (though there is plenty of this). Rather, this is a film more concerned with the toll of a culture in decline than to its own protagonists; a testimony to the slow, inexorable downward spiral, the irrational fear that every generation gets about the upcoming one—that despite their best efforts, every day, things are getting worse.

A somber reflection on the decline of society and the pains of aging, Sherriff Bell is the soul of the film, despite his limited screen time in comparison to the rest of the protagonists. The film opens and closes with his narration, coming full-circle like the rise and set of the desert son. He is the last line of defense in his small corner of West Texas, and he slowly realizes the poetic truth of the film's title. His anxiety is given fleshly form in the body of Anton Chigurh, a sociopath who murders everyone in his path with the devout fanaticism of a religious zealot, if such a religion existed. He has a mission, and a task to accomplish, and the bodies that pile up are irrelevant. Yet there is a sophisticated complexity to his actions, a stern and unyielding code that cannot be violated by him, guiding his morally reprehensible actions. Unfortunately for his numerous victims, it is a code that borders on madness.

No Country for Old Men captures the austere stark beauty of the Western landscape like a blank canvas of dust, stone and tumbleweeds, a landscape that soon runs red with blood, greed and fatalistic ruminations on life and death. Composed of earthy browns and pale beiges, the cinematography and direction are top-notch. The dry acidity and dark humor of McCarthy's punctuation-stripped prose is fed through the black comedy machine that is the Coens, resulting in plenty of awkwardly hilarious moments. The humor works flawlessly, always sly and subtle, but such a welcome addition to the narrative. A fantastically wry performance from Tommy Lee Jones and an eerily comic Javier Bardem as the bowl-headed Chigurh steal every scene they are in.

Where things get sticky with No Country for Old Men is the final act. Here, the film sticks like glue to the source material, resulting in a final twenty minutes of introspective, cryptic dialogue seemingly disconnected to the film's overall straightforward plot. It isn't, of course, far from it; but the connection is oblique and abstract. The film’s denouement is subtle, quick and off-screen, leaving a film that keeps on rolling and musing past the point of expectations. In mirroring the novel so closely, the enigmatic dialogue McCarthy crafts is perfectly preserved, which may leave many cinema-goers scratching their heads. For such a masculine, violent Western, No Country for Old Men ends not with a bang, but with the faintest whisper of gun barrel smoke.

Brilliantly stylized, tense, violent and powerful, the Coens are back in beautiful grim form. A faithful literary translation of a bleak and nihilistic vision of the American Southwest, lovers of the Coen Brothers will be satisfied by their strongest cinematic offering in half a decade. And you’ll never look at a stun gun the same way again.

Verdict: 90/100