No Country for Old Men (2007)

By 2007, Joel and Ethan Coen were hardly strangers to crime fiction with a bitter, darkly comic edge. From their debut feature Blood Simple through to the sun-bleached absurdity of Raising Arizona, the brothers had spent two decades building a body of work that treats violence and moral disorder as facts of life rather than spectacle. No Country for Old Men, then, feels like a kind of culmination of that sensibility: a crime thriller adapted from Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel of the same name, set along the bleak stretches of the Texas-Mexico border in 1980. McCarthy's prose had long been considered unfilmable by many in Hollywood, but the Coens, working with cinematographer Roger Deakins, took the material and shaped it into something that feels true to the source while being unmistakably their own.

Produced through a partnership of Miramax, Paramount Vantage and Scott Rudin Productions, the film follows three men whose paths are set on a collision course after a rancher named Llewelyn Moss stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone catastrophically wrong. The money he finds sets in motion a pursuit involving Anton Chigurh, a killer of almost philosophical menace, and ageing local sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who watches the world around him with the quiet exhaustion of a man who suspects he has already lost whatever it is he is trying to protect. The tone is measured and largely unsparing, with stretches of near silence punctuated by sudden, matter-of-fact brutality. It is the kind of film that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort rather than offering easy resolution.

The casting is, on paper, a fairly remarkable assembly. Josh Brolin plays Moss as a man whose stubbornness reads as both admirable and ruinous. Tommy Lee Jones brings a weathered, almost elegiac quality to Bell, grounding the film's more philosophical passages in something recognisably human. Then there is Javier Bardem as Chigurh, a role that has since become one of the more discussed villain performances in recent American cinema (Bardem's range, for those curious, extends well beyond this sort of register, as you can see in Skyfall). Woody Harrelson and Kelly Macdonald fill out a supporting cast that is, across the board, polished but never showy. The film runs to 122 minutes, moves at its own unhurried pace, and arrived the same year the Coens also released Burn After Reading, demonstrating a prolific creative run that few of their contemporaries could match.

We've literally all fantasised about this scenario. You find an abandoned briefcase full of money by a bunch of dead or dying armed fellas. What do you do? Therein lies the premise of this great Coen Brothers movie. Like other Coen Brothers movies the writing is top tier. The acting by Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem is absolutely flawless. It's only let down is the sudden ending for me. Other than that it's up there with the best.

That ending is the one thing I keep coming back to every time I watch it. There is an argument, of course, that the abruptness is entirely the point, that the film refuses the conventional payoff as a kind of statement about the indifference of violence and time. I can see that reading, and I respect it, but respecting an artistic choice and being satisfied by it are two different things. For me, the craft on display everywhere else is so assured that the closing stretch feels like being handed a brilliant meal and then told the kitchen has shut before dessert. It does not undo what came before, not remotely, but it lingers in a way that is more frustrating than it is haunting. Some films earn their ambiguity. This one almost does.

Rating: ★★★★½  | Year: 2007  | Watched: 2025-04-08

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Joel Coen: Blood Simple (1984) · True Grit (2010) · Raising Arizona (1987) · Burn After Reading (2008)
More with Javier Bardem: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) · Skyfall (2012)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)