Movie Review: No Country for Old Men

The only things I knew about No Country for Old Men going into it were:
• The Coen Brothers directed it
• Javier Bardem plays a terrifying killer with a bowl cut
• The movie is chock-full of violence

Those last two bullet points were enough to make me want to skip this movie. I bitched and moaned when my boyfriend planned our Saturday night, but he assured me that we could play our usual game of me covering my eyes and him telling me when the gore had subsided.

I am happy to announce though that the violence, while unrelenting, should not be a deterrent for seeing the movie, even for the pansies like me. There aren’t any David Cronenberg style close-ups of dismembered bodies; in fact the whole thing made me less queasy than one 60-minute episode of CSI. And if you wimp out because of the violence, you’ll miss one of the best movies of the year.

It pains me to admit that, because now Scooby gets to pull the old “told you so” on me, so clearly I really mean it.

The plot is fairly straightforward: Josh Brolin’s character stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong in the middle of a Texas desert. He steals a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills and consequently incurs the wrath of hitman Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem.

Then again, it would be hard to say that Chigurh shows any anger exactly. He’s more of an even-keeled kind of killer, who, at most, shows minor annoyance. Nevertheless, he has a job to do, which is kill the thief and retrieve the cash. If there are bystanders in his way—say, a random person driving down a highway—he will do what he has to. Coincidentally, what he has to is almost always murder said character. He appears to be more machine than human, and the audience begins to wonder if he’s simply the personification of violence, rather than truly a man.

Meanwhile, Tommy Lee Jones plays the sheriff who takes his time piecing together the crime and then half-heartedly ambles after both the thief and the killer. Jones plays one of the old men to which the title refers, and it’s painful (yet almost comical) to watch him sort of give up before he’s even begun. The audience watches as his thought process moves in the right direction and then, from either fear or ignorance, any clue he was about to uncover vanishes.

What’s so refreshing about No Country is that it isn’t dumbed down for the sake of the audience. It operates on a higher plane than most movies because it works both as a straightforward story and as a metaphor for an unfortunate truth: violence existed before we were around and it will certainly outlive us all.

The Coen brothers also take a real risk with the score: there is none. The movie unfolds with the same sounds we would hear if we were living through the whole ordeal. They don’t use the trick of eerie music to sufficiently terrify the audience. And it turns out they don’t have to. If I ever see a bowl cut again, I may very well run screaming in the opposite direction.











Eek!