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It has been a while since I saw a good chase story. Having read a lot about No Country For Old Men, I decided to watch it last night.
At its heart, No Country For Old Men is a story of choices and their consequences. It is also a man-hunt story where the roles of the hunter and the hunted keep changing frequently.
It is the story of three men, a local sheriff Ed Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones), a war veteran Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) and a sociopath Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bradem). Moss finds some money out in the desert, a result of a drug deal gone bad, and keeps it. Chigurh is hired to retrieve the money and Bell, aware of Chigurh’s brutalism, wants to protect Moss. The game is played out as others join in and drop out.
Tommy Lee Jones as a wearied local sheriff finds it hard to keep the peace and wants to retire as he cannot keep up with the times. His time-worn voice opening the movie hints to us this is not going to a high-speed action chase unlike his role in The Fugitive. Javier Bardem is the mainstay of the entire movie. As Anton Chigurh, he brings to life a wonderful villainous character to fruition. I would say the Anton ranks along Antony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian. Josh Brolin, as war veteran Llewelyn Moss, tries his best to outwit the bad guys but as a tagline for the movie says, You can’t stop what’s coming.
If it was the wide open southern grasslands in O Brother, Where Art Thou? or the frozen grounds of North Dakota in Fargo, the Coen brothers have always used landscapes as canvases to set their stories. The opening scene depicts a peaceful West Texas desert which soon wil be overrun in blood. Having won an Oscar for the above two, I would be surprised if this movie doesn’t win one having been nominated in eight categories for this year.
