The premise of the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men is simple: man (Lewellyn Moss, a cowboy played with industrious quietude by Josh Brolin) stumbles upon a drug deal-cum-grisly shootout ex post facto, recovering a case containing $2 million; parties to whom we are meant to believe the case rightfully (or wrongfully) belongs set out after him. Chief among these pursuers is Anton Chigurh, a psychotic obelisk equipped with a cattle stun gun and played by a haircut posing as as Javier Bardem. Not since The Terminator have filmgoers been presented with a killer so singular of purpose, so intractable, as to seem more an Act of God than a three dimensional human being. Figuring as the final leg in this triathlon of pursuit is Tommy Lee Jones as a third generation sheriff on his last legs, outpaced by the sheer volume of blood spilt before him.
For its first two acts, the film slots nicely into the kind of quirkified noir that the Coens have perfected in Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, and Fargo (and on the lighter side of things, some might say, The Big Lebowski). It's their first adaptation, based upon the novel of the same title by Cormac McCarthy (who's having a big year; his latest work, The Road, won the Pulitzer for fiction). No Country's literary provenance shows through in its final third, after the shooting (or most of it, at least) ends, when the film becomes a philosophical meditation on fate - almost like a blood-soaked Magnolia.
Audiences anticipating an ultraviolent neo-western road movie - which, to be fair, is pretty much what the film's trailer promises - will doubtlessly be disappointed; such was clearly the reaction amongst the crowd I saw the movie with. No Country For Old Men is a movie without a climax, or rather a film with many climaxes which never leads to the satisfactory final showdown we have been conditioned to expect. This seems to be the point: that violence is the apogee of senselessness even when its purpose is clear, an act bigger than those victimized by it or those who perpetrate it. Twice in the film Chigurh presents his quarry with the option of calling a coin flip heads or tails, with their life the wager - a gesture which at first suggests a sadistic ambivalence, but in a larger sense, is a microcosm of the intricate workings of fate that brought he and his prey together in the first instance. That kind of fate is inexorable: you can't stop it with a heroic bullet to the head, no matter how well deserved. To say that such a nihilistic battleground is no place for old men might be an understatement.
