Straight to DVD

No Country for Old Men

It used to be that my wife Whitney and I would treat a new Coen brothers film as a must-see, gobbling it up during its first weekend in theaters. Then we had a kid, and the Coens hit what we felt was a rough patch (Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers) at about the same time. As I've mentioned before loyalty does have its limits.

So while it's not like we rush out to the multiplex for much of anything these days, the Coens were no longer guaranteed to be one of those rare exceptions. Then we started hearing about No Country for Old Men. It sounded like something of a departure for them—a faithful adaptation of a well-known Cormac McCarthy novel, not an original screenplay. It had one of our favorite actors, Javier Bardem, playing a psychopath with a weird haircut. People started saying very good things about it. Maybe we should go, and not wait for the DVD?

Yeah, that never happened. And then, of course, No Country marched on to win Best Picture at the Oscars. Keeping expectations low started getting very difficult. Could it live up to them?

While the film hasn't replaced our respective favorites in the Coen canon (Miller's Crossing and The Big Lebowski for me; Raising Arizona and Fargo for Whitney), the Oscar voters weren't wrong, either. No Country tells the story of—well, I was about to say of Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder in 1980s West Texas who stumbles upon a suitcase full of cash in the desert, amid the remains of a drug deal gone very wrong. Moss takes the money, only half realizing what a dangerous a decision he's making. He spends most of the rest of the film running from everyone who's trying to recover the money—including, most ominously, Anton Chigurh (Bardem), a dispassionate killer who carries with him rigid (if twisted) principles and a pistol designed to kill cattle.

But in a way, this isn't really Moss's story. Perhaps it's that of Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the world-weary sheriff who's also pursuing Moss, attempting to find and protect him before Chigurh or the others can reach him. Near retirement, Bell is tired of his work, tired of trying to clean up after violence that seems to get more senseless and incomprehensible every day. The movie takes its overall tone—grim, yet not without a certain acceptance that this is just the way things are—from Jones's masterful, understated performance in the role.

That's important, since as with so much of the Coens' work, tone drives the movie. Here, their direction meshes brilliantly with the stark cinematography by longtime collaborator Roger Deakins and a sound design that includes no music at all (a rare, remarkably effective strategy) to create the bleak, soulless world Bell sees.

As usual, the Coens have a remarkable cast of actors on hand to tackle their smart, intense dialogue. Jones's and Bardem's performances quite rightly got a lot of attention, and deservedly so. But it's Brolin's portrayal of Moss's quiet determination in the face of ever-declining odds that really holds the movie's various pieces together. And the wonderful Kelly Macdonald's turn as Moss's wife, who seems to know from the start how this is all going to turn out, adds some heartbreaking humanity to what is otherwise a pretty cold film.

All that said, this is also a movie with decent Queue Blocker potential: It's dark; it's bleak; it gives a lot of screen time to a scary, batshit-crazy killer. (No endangered children here, though!) And you might not want to settle down in front of it after a particularly rough day. But it's still well worth queuing: It lives up to its hype, even managing to restore our brand loyalty in the Coens. (I'm not quite ready to promise we'll be lining up at the theater for their next outing—but there's a chance.)