Review: No Country for Old Men

If you like movies that are different because they contain antagonists of biblical wrath, then you will like this movie. If you like movies that are different because they are closer to the brutal and gray tones and tempo of life, then you will like this movie.

I'm not even sure I need to go into a brief overview of this movie, its been so well talked about. But I will anyways for the benefit of ordering it in my head again. A man is hunting in rural Texas and happens on an illicit deal gone bad. He leaves a truck full of drugs, and takes $2 million in cash. This is where he gets swept up into the destructive path of a killer. The rest of the movie is what happens while the first man tries to evade destruction at the hands of the second man, and gangs of drug thugs from south of the border.

This is a nasty and brutal tale, though elegant in its simplicity. Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) is a determined man, who finds himself in something and can't make himself let it go. As it turns out he is also a very smart man when it comes to matters of evading a stalking death, or at least he is smarter than just about everyone else Anton Chigurh has set his deadly sights on. He manages to last most of the movie and even be the only one to wound Chigurh.

This of course leads me to my very favorite character in the movie, Anton Chigurh. Played masterfully by Javier Bardem. This man will be the embodiment of a completely committed killer for the rest of my days. I feel that if he felt it stood between him and the money or someone who had the money, he would very calmly and without hesitation toss a large fire bomb into an orphanage full of babies. He kills for a living and he is cold and methodical about it. Yet he also has a very strict code he seems to hold himself to, all be it a simple code. He takes his boots off before walking from his motel room to another motel room, where he is going to have to kill people. Then after he brutally and efficiently kills three men, he takes his socks off because they have blood on them, and cleanly walks back to his motel room. This is just one of many instances where Anton Chigurh is demonstrated to be the smoothest and most dangerous killer I've ever seen in film to date. I now want this guy to be a bond bad guy in one of the newer films, I think this guy is the best villain I've ver seen (and I've seen a lot).

These are our two main characters. Everyone else in the movie is fantastic as well, though many only will spend 5-10 minutes on screen. Tommy Lee Jones is as always, fantastic in every way. But the stand out of the supporting cast, for me anyways, is Kelly MacDonald. She was born in Glasgow, Scotland. Yet in this film she plays a little Texas woman, who seems very natural in a trailer park. She had not one lick of an accent, except for the Texas drawl her character has, and she has a very revealing final conversation with Chigurh before he fulfills his word. I was shocked when I found out that not only was this woman not from Texas (as she played it so well) but was not even from the USA. So for me, her's is a performance that stands out above a cast of stellar actors and characters, simply because I would have sworn she was from Texasafter having seen this film.

I want to say a little about the style and pacing of this narrative before I close it up. I love every aspect of this film, and I love it because its very real and simple. People die a lot in this film, and they die brutally and they die quickly. This is how life happens, brutally and quickly. Good guys die, and bad guys walk away. Of course even better is how the lines between good guy and bad guy are blurred here. Llewelyn is guilty of being stubborn, perhaps to a fault some would say, and it probably gets other people hurt. Anton Chigurh is a man who sticks to his principles, even when it presents him with a difficult path (which he walks and overcomes all obstacles), and I can't really hate a character for that.

This is a story of real people, that seems to begin and end in the middle of something. And this fact is o.k. with me, because I feel the reality of that. Many will say, "this movie is bloody and strange", and they will push it aside as just some weird art house movie. But some, I count myself one, will look at this and say, "This is genuine, this is life, and this is a great film". And thats fine with me.

Jesse "Baron Ironfury" Stevens

Trailer