In a small town in Texas, a sheriff’s deputy sits in the office on the phone, his back to an unidentified man in handcuffs. The man makes a couple of discreet effortless moves and in a trice, is up on his feet and has the deputy around the neck, choking the life out of him. The man takes the deputy’s cruiser and gets on the highway, pulling a man over, killing him and taking his car.

Llewelyn Moss is out hunting antelope in the desert when he stumbles upon a scene of carnage. It’s obviously been a drug deal gone bad with member of both parties having shot each other to death. Moss sees this and looks further, assuming that there had to be a ‘last man standing’. He finds the man who had managed to get away from this, only to expire of his wounds not far away. Next to him lies a case containing two million dollars in wrapped stacks of hundreds. He looks quickly around and does what probably most of us would do and lights out with the money. He goes back to his trailer home and tries to fend off the obvious questions from his concerned wife.

He lies awake worrying over this and recalls the sole survivor in the shoot-out - a dying man hoarsely calling for ‘agua’. Feeling some sort of compassionate but foolish impulse, he gets up, fills a jug full of water and against all reason drives back to the scene of the crime. The man is dead when he gets back and he sees evidence of someone else having been there in the meantime. Spooked, he starts to hightail it out of there just as some unidentified people pull up on a nearby ridge and start shooting at him. He gets hit and barely escapes but the stakes have now become higher. Realizing that he’s on the radar of possibly several concerned parties, he makes it back home (again) and packs up his wife, sending her to stay with her mother until he can square things in whatever form that takes.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is the local lawman here and presides over the wildly escalating events connected to the original crime scene. He’s an older man, used to doing things a certain way and doesn’t shrink from most situations but gradually feels that he’s in over his head with this new heightened level of violence and finds himself struggling with how to get a handle on it.

What Moss doesn’t know, but is soon to find out, is that Anton Chigurh, ex-special ops, a freelance mercenary and the man who has killed the deputy and others, is after him at the behest of one of the burned parties in the drug deal fiasco. The thing that sets Chigurh apart from the average hitman and enforcer is not just his seeming invincibility but a quirky adherence to his own code of behavior that holds a person accountable for his actions. He believes truly, that one’s actions set in motion other, sometimes bigger events that have to be resolved or addressed and that includes Moss’s action in nicking the money. One way or another, Moss and possibly those close to him, will have to answer for what he’s done.

Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, one of the greatest living American writers in my opinion, Joel and Ethan Coen have made a damn near perfect film adaptation. Kindred spirits, they were faithful to the novel and treated McCarthy’s text with the utmost respect, something practically unheard of when filmmakers adapt novels to the screen. The Coen brothers have an extremely droll sense of humour that can be found in every film that they’ve done. McCarthy’s writing is known for its dark humor as well so this was a match made in heaven.

The casting and acting, as in most Coen brothers films, is stellar. Tommy Lee Jones, as the folksy down home Sheriff Bell, who has a hard time reconciling himself to the modern ways, Josh Brolin as the hapless Llewelyn Moss, determined to do the right thing even for the wrong reasons, in the face of frightening opposition and Javier Bardem in an unbelievable and chilling performance as the psychotic Chigurh – so calm and rational seeming that his killing is the most logical behavior in the world.

The cinematography by Roger Deakins is sweeping and beautiful, giving a sense of big Texas space and the wildness at the edge of civilization. His excellent work also featured strongly in another recent western, ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’.

Joel and Ethan Coen made one other brilliant decision. No music soundtrack whatsoever. When we watch a film, the music subtly queues us as to how to feel – scared, nervous, exhilarated, whatever. In ‘No Country for Old Men’ we are moved by what is happening strictly onscreen and allowed to react unprompted to events as they unfold. There are sounds but natural ones – car engines, gunshots, shouts, wind across the desert.

This is an exceptional film that beside its thriller component, examines (as most of McCarthy’s writing does) the consequences of acts committed, no matter what they are, with no judgment. And his humor is terrific and subtle – one example that the Coens left in from the novel – an exchange between Moss and his wife, Carla Jean, as he’s getting ready to go back to the crime scene to bring water to the Mexican:

‘Where are you goin, baby?’

‘Somethin I forgot to do. I’ll be back’

‘What are you goin to do?’

‘I’m fixin to go do something dumbern hell but I’m goin anyways. If I don’t come back tell Mother I love her’.

‘Your mother’s dead, Llewelyn.’

‘Well I’ll tell her myself then.’

Marc Goldin currently lives in Chicago, with three cats, each one more long-haired than the last. Interests have ranged from medieval monasticism to discontinued stations on the London Underground – literary likes too diverse (some would say schizo) to list here although the last several years have been witness to an intimacy with Scottish and Irish literature. American Southern and Beat era lit also account for some of the ‘missing years’. Music tastes run the gamut from Cuban Danzon to Ska (all three waves but having a specific attachment to the second, two-tone period) to the Tuvan throat singers. Has written book reviews for a now defunct Irish literature site and has several short stories in various stages of development. Mad for black and white photography and aspires to someday have a complete collection of photos documenting every close in the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh. Works in the IT dept. of a French company in the current political climate. In football, supports Chelsea, Hibs, and for the sake of employment security, Marseille. For more articles and reviews by Marc on The New Review, click here or to read Marc's story, 'Plastic Paddy' on the Showcase, click here.

© 2008 Laura Hird All rights reserved.