Film
No Country For Old Men
- Director
- Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 119 mins
There are echoes here of A Simple Plan, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and even the Coens’ earlier Fargo and Blood Simple, but this tense, gripping slice of blood-soaked Texan gothic, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s modern-day western novel, is also a perfect match of bleak and blackly comic sensibilities. Back in 2007, it came as a considerable relief both to fans of the Coens, whose Ladykillers remake marked a career low, and McCarthy, whose work was previously plundered by Billy Bob Thornton for his ultra-dreary screen version of All the Pretty Horses. Coen nay-sayers should also be delighted to find that the brothers’ smarty-pants tendencies are kept in check by their loving fidelity to McCarthy’s plot structure and dialogue, though you should be warned that this also extends to the audience-dividing “What the fuck?” ending.
The story is essentially a three-hander, with little character overlap, plus walk-on parts for Woody Harrelson and Kelly Macdonald. Josh Brolin seizes with both hands the opportunity offered by the meaty lead role of Llewelyn Moss, a trailer-dwelling, ‘nam vet opportunist who stumbles upon the bloody, corpse-strewn aftermath of a drug deal gone bad out on the desolate Tex-Mex border. Fleeing with $2m in cash, this bull-headed if essentially decent good ol’ boy finds himself in over his head with two men on his trail. Tommy Lee Jones wears the role of weary, laconic Sheriff Bell like the crumpled leather hide he is coming to resemble. But Javier Bardem makes the biggest impression as Anton Chigurh: a mysterious, relentless, seemingly unstoppable killing machine, at once comical and terrifying, who combines Schwarzenegger’s Terminator with Peter Tork’s haircut, dispatching folks on a whim and a coin-toss with his impractical if effective compressed air-fuelled cattle-slaughtering bolt gun.
Superbly photographed by long-term Coen collaborator Roger Deakins, who helps to root these characters in the parched West Texas landscape, this is a timeless fable of almost Biblical proportions with Jones’s narrating sheriff at its moral centre. The brilliant set-pieces (watch out for the gas station scene) and mordant wit inform and flow from character rather than providing a platform for knowing nudge-winkery, and it’s a sign of the Coens’ mastery and maturity that the film becomes more chilling as the violence is shifted gradually offscreen.
is needed now More than ever
It’s back on screen in the Everyman’s late night season.
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