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The winner of four Oscars (including Best Picture), the Coen brothers’ adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel is a stark, grippingly unpredictable existential chase movie. Its antagonists are three men who have lost their bearings in the world and have to follow each other across harsh, unsparing Tex-Mex landscapes. Leading the way is blue-collared Llewelyn Moss, clutching the millions of dollars he stumbled upon at the scene of a botched drug deal; ingenious sadist Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is on his tail and wants the money back. Trailing the pair is a lawman, days away from retiring, albeit from a job he no longer knows what to make of.

After a run of broad comedies, the Coens have remembered – for perhaps the first time since Blood Simple – that suspense is all in the detail: the bleeps of a tracking device, the shadows of feet under a door, the distended ring of a telephone in an otherwise deathly silent room. On a technical level alone, the film is extraordinary. For 100 of its 120 minutes, No Country for Old Men is constructed as one set-piece after the next, a dynamic pursuit from one corner of the screen to another.

Putting flesh on these pared-down plot mechanics are an interesting, left-of-centre cast. Josh Brolin nails precisely the right mix of sympathetic working-man desperation and pig-headed alpha male stupidity as Moss, while Bardem, the Supporting Actor Oscar winner, summons up pure evil without ever seeming cartoonish.

Heated debate rages over the ruminative final frames, true as they are to both McCarthy’s original vision and the Coens’ notion of a Godless universe. No Country’s magnificently photographed universe forms not only no country for the old, but a place where there can be no justice, divine or otherwise, for any man. This DVD release provides the perfect opportunity for further discussion – and a record of one of the year’s crowning achievements in cinema, by two consistently astonishing filmmakers.

 

Mike McCahill on 6th May 2008
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