The Coen Brothers’ most recent film, “No Country for Old Men,” begins with painfully beautiful scenes of dawn over the desert in west Texas. There is a starkness to the tumbleweed and cactus landscape as the sun hits high in the sky, and we see towering mesas and slowly turning windmills in the distance.
In cinematography alone the film excels, and it is evident why it was nominated for the Academy Award. The writing is a beautiful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s simple, clipped prose, and the screenplay doesn’t shy away from the occasional moment of humor. And boy, are those moments of humor needed to get through the gruesome, grisly murders strewn through the film. Despite “only” killing 11 people, the character of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) appears to kill many more. We are introduced to him as he is arrested, only to proceed to kill the lone officer who manages the coup, then take his car, pull over a local under the pretense of being a cop, and blast his brains away with a pressurized air gun. Progressively, we see that Chigurh — an assassin, drug runner, and sociopath — is after an errant $2 million left from a drug run, thus crossing his path with that of Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a trailer trash nobody who gets to the loot first and claims it for himself. Interspersed between the scenes of Moss going on the run and sending his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) to stay with her mother, are scenes with Tommy Lee Jones as the sheriff of the county, always two steps behind Chigurh, whom he is half-heartedly attempting to catch.
Jones, playing himself as usual, just happens to be perfect for the role of the disheartened, aging sheriff no longer in touch with the realities of patrolling a border county. His ironic comments and half-jokes addressed to his green-behind-the-ears deputy are some of the only moments of comic relief in the film.
Otherwise, the movie is dank and depressing, with Chigurh functioning as the embodiment of corruption, greed, and evil. He has no logic except purpose, no prerogative except to get recover the money. Woody Harrelson makes a cameo as a good old boy who promises his drug boss to stop Chigurh and get back the money. (We all know how that will end.)
Some of the most harrowing scenes, however, involve no violence at all. They become about the exchange of goods and services-criminal capitalism, so to speak. Taxi drivers and children alike are bought off with hundred dollar bills. No one is immune to the smell of cold hard cash. The only person who cannot be bought off is Chigurh.
Half way through the film, we no longer see him killing his victims. It is enough to see him leaving the scene of the crime, checking the bottoms of his cowboy boots for blood. With dead-looking eyes, a raspy voice, and chilling indifference, Bardem excels as the messenger from Hell.
For a film filled with violence, it is well-made and well put together. Does it go beyond its allegorical foundation and comments on the roots of our collective greed or even questions our love of violence and easy money? Not really. Instead, it stands as merely a photograph — a snapshot of destruction, a Miltonian stare into the dark recesses of the human soul.
