Bad times are coming. Or maybe they’re already here.
For most of “No Country for Old Men,” the new movie by the Coen Brothers based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, things don’t look like they can get much worse, yet everyone is convinced America’s slide into perdition is just beginning. After a shootout at an airport hotel, one aging sheriff remarks: “I never thought I’d see the day when children had green hair in our Texas towns. What is this world coming to?”
“No Country for Old Men” centers on Anton Chigurh, a massive, slow-speaking psychopath compared by those who know him to the bubonic plague. He walks through the movie with a pressurized air gun used for slaughtering cattle, willing to kill for as little as a pack of peanuts.
On the other end lie Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and Llewellyn Moss. Sheriff Bell cannot understand the world around him, and for the most part, he’s stopped trying. He’s responsible for carrying most of the moral weight in “No Country for Old Men,” which amounts to a couple of scenes where he talks about how much things have changed.
Moss is the classic westerner. He’s a fiercely independent Vietnam vet turned hunter in 1970s Texas. One day, he stumbles on an injured dog and follows it back to the scene of a drug deal gone bad where he finds a briefcase containing about $2 million.
From here on, the movie is a three-way chase: Chigurh chases Moss and the money, and Bell chases both of them, although he’s much more interested in Chigurh. The three are pitch-perfect in their roles. Chigurh is never hurried, and he is never out of control. Each time he kills, there seems to be some sort of twisted logic at work, even if it’s just Chigurh’s way of saying, “I’m done with you.” Moss and Bell are two sides of the same idea. They try to follow an idea of Western justice and more importantly, Western masculinity, that has little place in the modern world.
The movie also features a brief but very well done appearance by Woody Harrelson as a New York day trader turned bounty hunter.
The Coens pull a real sense of beauty out of both the seedy, backwater towns in South Texas and the stoic masculinity of the main characters. “No Country for Old Men” is the best Western I have seen in a long time and might just be one of the best movies of the year.
