No Country for Old Men Reviewed on Blu-ray

Out on the plains of 1980 Texas, day worker Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), trying to bag a pronghorn, comes across a group of vehicles and dead bodies. He clearly realizes it's a drug deal gone very wrong, and soon locates the money he knows must be around there somewhere. It's a satchel containing two million dollars; he takes it home with him, hides it under the trailer house he shares with his wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald; a Scot doing a perfect regional American accent).

A man dressed in black, with a weird hairdo, has been arrested, but he strangles the deputy, then steals a variety of cars, killing most of those he talks to. This is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a man devoid of humor or any concept of remorse. He seems to think of himself as an agent of fate, but toward the end, someone else refuses to buy into that, telling Chigurh that he's the killer--he and not fate.

Chigurh is one of the most frightening characters in movie history, partly because he seems on the verge of being literally inhuman, a man-shaped thing with unguessable motivations and dangerous abilities. He's been hired to track Moss and bring back the money; he kills almost everyone who crosses his path. He uses guns and a strange device powered by compressed air; it's usually used for killing cattle in slaughterhouses, but works just fine on people, too. Sometimes Chigurh politely asks them to hold still while he presses he stainless steel plunger against their foreheads. His view of himself as Fate personified is demonstrated when he insists a convenience-store proprietor to flip a coin. The shopkeeper soon realizes what's at stake.

"No Country for Old Men" is intensely suspenseful, both overall and in individual scenes. As usual with a plot by McCarthy, it's both familiar--people fighting over drug money--restrained and original. There's never been another character like Chiguhr; he's a Frankenstein Monster of a hit man, intelligent, sometimes fastidious. (We're aware he committed one murder only by how he examines his boots afterward--did he step in blood?) He's not a force of nature; he's not Fate; he's almost not really a villain, because villains act from recognizable motives. Where could such a creature have come from? Where does he go at the end? He's too real, too present, to be a mere ghost. He's all too real.

The main protagonists are Moss, Chiguhr and Bell--and they never meet; only Carla Jean speaks to all of them. A businessman (Stephen Root) involved in the drug deal hires casual, cowboy-styled hit man Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson, folksy and fine) to hunt Chigurh, whom he already knows. He says that Chiguhr has no sense of humor, which is true, and possibly meaningful, but ultimately beside the point; Wells thinks of himself as a slick professional, but he hasn't gone up against anyone or anything like Chigurh before.

The movie is occasionally funny in a very dry and dark way, sometimes from what Bell says; he tells his deputy (Garret Dillahunt) about a couple in California who killed strangers. He admits he has no idea why they did it. "Maybe the television set was broke," he suggests. But even Bell's sturdy sense of humor fades as he learns just what Chigurh is capable of. So will yours.

The movie was written, directed and edited by Joel and Ethan Coen, and it's even better than "Fargo," which was damned near perfect. Each scene is carefully shaped, and yet it all seems to flow out of reality, as if they're just reporting on what they found out there in west Texas. Except in the reactions of Sheriff Bell, a good man who now realizes he may have seen into an abyss he always suspected was there, there's no moralizing at all. We're left to make up our own minds, and we do. This is a very good movie; it may be a great one.

The extras on the disc aren't plentiful; the Coens are notoriously reticent to say much about their movies, but they do appear in at least one of the featurettes, giggling with each other over the plot developments. "Working with the Coens" has some bemused words from the actors and other crew members, but none of it is very illuminating, nor should it be. The Coens are kind of bare-naked filmmakers; they present their stories to us, always telling them in the same flat, uninflected (but brilliantly observant) manner. Their characters are sometimes wildly fanciful ("O Brother Where Art Thou"), sometimes realistic in quirky ways ("Fargo"), but always fascinating. Some critics have rather foolishly concluded that the Coen brothers hate their characters, when it should be obvious to anyone that they love their characters, even Anton Chiguhr.

This looks terrific in high definition; most of the movie was shot on the flat dry plains of the Southwest, largely in New Mexico, though Jones did get them to shoot a little near Marfa, Texas, which is where "Giant" was shot. These broad arid expanses are beautiful in a notably stark way; it's almost a unique look, but I suspect parts of Australia look much like this. The anonymous, similar motel and hotel rooms are undecorated, all in tans and off-whites; the cars are equally anonymous, dusty and rusty and well-worn. You practically can drift your fingers over the screen and feel the grit and grime. This is one of those rare movies in which not only everything works, but everything works to the same end, as part of the same overall design and intent.

Now the Coens are making a new movie based on Charles Portis' novel "True Grit." The older movie, with John Wayne in his Oscar-winning performance, was good, but made as a conventional Western. Whatever the Coens make of it will not be conventional, will be much more like the novel, and very much worth seeing. Everything they've made so far, whether it worked or it didn't ("The Ladykillers"), is worth seeing, but maybe "No Country for Old Men" most of all.
Actors/Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Cormac McCarthy, Javier Bardem, Garret Dillahunt, Woody Harrelson, Kelly MacDonald