Coen Bros. Country

No Country for Old Men Written & Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

“It’s just all out war. I can’t figure it out,” remarks a deputy sheriff on instances of violence—carnage—that disrupt the Texas setting of the Coen Brothers’ new film, No Country for Old Men. This is the Coens’ first crime movie since they began to master the medium, and the way No Country morphs from noir into contemporary-western moral struggle makes it deeper, funnier and even stranger than Fargo, their 1996 hit.

You know what national cataclysm happened since then, so it should be no surprise that the Coens have made a crime movie that seems quietly aghast at the likelihood of death and menace occurring on American soil. Unlike American Gangster’s sensationalized crap, this is a crime movie/western exercise that contemporizes the miasma of a world at war.

Following the novel by Cormac McCarthy, a mysterious psychopath named Chigurh (Javier Bardem) collects underworld lucre and destroys souls at random. A Texas war vet, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), trades good luck for bad when he stumbles upon a cash-pile leftover from a disastrous drug deal and becomes Chigurh’s particular target. The drug deal and Moss and Chigurh’s fates are tracked by worn-down local lawman Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The entire movie becomes a stakeout, but with parts of the story deliberately dropped-out—acknowledging what is unpredictable and unknowable in life. The Coens test audience perception through entertaining details of local color and concentrated sequences that tease tension (Moss hiding the loot while being stalked by Chigurh).

These characterizations are pungent and vivid: Brolin’s Moss has a square, half-Mexican chin like a Rolando Merida drawing, Bardem’s Chigurh wears Richard III bangs and a sallow disposition and Jones’ Sheriff is timelessly world-weary. It would be pathetic to reduce/praise No Country as a thriller. The Coens’ technique goes far beyond that. Moss, Chirgurh and Bell’s appointments with mortality lift the film from plot mechanisms to a confrontation with fate.

Like The Man Who Wasn’t There—the Coens’ finest film so far—this movie stretches genre sophistication in order to contend with real-life complexity. Critics disregard the Coens’ political smarts (their brilliant The Ladykillers wasn’t only a superior remake, its final Bob Jones University joke was the best political gibe of the past decade) but to see No Country as a mere thriller misconstrues the Coens’ sensibility. They chart the spiritual mood that ensnares us but that most recent movies—with the rare exception of Neil Jordan’s The Brave One—merely vulgarize.

Coen artistry heightens our level of perception. They reveal the first murder with an astonishing image of shoe sole scuff marks on a jail floor that looks as avant-garde as a Jackson Pollack painting—a harbinger of modern chaos that puts post-9/11 terror in artistic focus. But not sentimentally. When Sheriff Bell expresses existential fatigue, the sorrow he vouchsafes to his father is actually spoken to himself (thus to us in the audience). And still, the Coens contextualize: Bell is brought to reality when his father tells him, “What you got ain’t new. Can’t stop what’s coming. Ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.” The Coens make that wisdom mythical and all encompassing—from Vietnam to 9/11 to Iraq and to the Texas homeland.