No Country For Old Men (2007) – Nostalgia Central

“What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?”

Set in Texas in 1980, the extraordinary first hour of No Country for Old Men unfurls three plot strands that will inevitably entwine . . .

Arrestee Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) escapes his police escort and kills an innocent passerby with a cattle stungun; Trailer trash cowboy Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) happens upon a pile of corpses, a stash of heroin and $2 million in cash in the desert; and craggy, scrupulous sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) arrives too late to both crime scenes.

Ostensibly a chase movie that sees Moss fleeing the indestructible, damn-near-inhuman Chigurh (contract killer, ghost or angel of vengeance?) as Bell lags behind, dejectedly trawling from one messy cadaver to the next,

The film also finds time to meditate on the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of man. It’s a moving, melancholic picture, and it miraculously juggles high entertainment value — graveyard humour, searing action, choking suspense — with a plaintive tone as it chews on themes of sin and redemption, love and violence, fate and free will.

It’s in these quieter scenes that the movie finds time to breathe. Roger Deakins’ exemplary cinematography captures the might and majesty of the burnished desertscapes, while Carter Burwell’s stark, haunting music is used so sparingly that the real soundtrack is the wind whipping across the plains.

The first half of the film, especially, is stripped down and scrubbed clean of static, its potent images dedicated to the silent spaces between words and actions. Audiences can smell the dust and feel the sting of windswept sand.

Then the action swerves into a twilight world of rundown gas stations and sticky motel rooms, the stench of sweat wafting from spotted sheets as Moss dresses wounds, saws down shotguns and twitches curtains.

Given few words to play with (but each of them worth rolling around the tongue), Brolin is a revelation, compounding his good work in American Gangster to announce himself as an actor of real heft.

Jones, as the titular old-timer, brings a serrated edge to McCarthy’s mournful words, and Bardem is the best of the lot, his pale, slouching, psycho cracking lopsided grins under gleaming eyes.

No Country for Old Men was an instant classic.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell
Tommy Lee Jones
Anton Chigurh
Javier Bardem
Llewelyn Moss
Josh Brolin
Carson Wells
Woody Harrelson
Carla Jean Moss
Kelly Macdonald
Wendell
Garret Dillahunt
Loretta Bell
Tess Harper
Ellis
Barry Corbin
Man Who Hires Wells
Stephen Root
El Paso Sheriff
Rodger Boyce
Carla Jean’s Mother
Beth Grant
Sheriff Bell’s Secretary
Kit Gwin

Director
Ethan Coen
Joel Coen