Film Reviews

No Country For Old Men

• Rating:
• Director: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
• Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson
• Details: USA / 122mins (15A)

After the slip-ups of The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, the Coen brothers return to their crime thriller roots with this contemporary western. Based on Cormac McCarthy's novel, the plot sees hunter Llewelyn Moss (Brolin) happen across a massacre in the desert near his Mexican border town: a drug deal has gone down and gone down badly - pick up trucks and bodies litter a pocket of wasteland, along with heroin and two million dollars. Moss takes the money and, knowing that someone will be looking for him, hightails it out of there. That someone is Anton Chigurh (Bardem), a ruthless assassin who will not stop until the money is 'laid at this feet'. Keeping tabs on the two is aging sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Jones). For a gritty thriller with a high body count, No Country For Old Men is as quiet a film as they come, the silence interrupted only intermittingly by the crack of gunfire. When bullets aren't flying, mood, tension - and, since it's the Coens - black humour rule the roost. Harking back to a favourite genre is not the only thing that the Coens revisit here: they treat the expansive desert the same way they treated the snow in Fargo; the beautiful landscape (shot as wide as possible) is destroyed by the greedy humans trampling across it. Those greedy humans are on top form, too: Brolin confidently moves into leading man territory, Bardem is as lethal as he is spooky and Jones, as always, is Jones. Although Harrelson and Kelly McDonald, playing Brolin's naive wife, are limited to smaller roles, they make each their own. This is a film that needs a second viewing - not only is it worth seeing again, all is clear first time around as 'who did that? How did they know that he'd be there? Where did he get that?' questions arise but knowing the Coens, there's a reason for everything and everything will reveal itself in time.

Review by Gavin Burke