NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

After a string of disappointing projects (“The Man Who Wasn’t There” 2001, “Intolerable Cruelty” 2003, and “The Ladykillers” 2004) Joel and Ethan Coen hit cinematic pay dirt with Cormac McCarthy’s 2003 western crime novel “No Country for Old Men.”

Adapted, directed, and edited by the Coens, “No Country” was widely accepted among critics at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as worthy of the Palme d’ Or, even if Cristian Mungiu’s Romanian abortion drama “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” deservedly took home the coveted prize.

Vapors of Hitchcock (“North by Northwest”), Cronenberg (“A History of Violence”) and Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”) permeate a dusky ‘80s era Texas-Mexico borderland where retiring hardscrabble Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) hunts bizzarro serial killer Anton “Chigurh” (Javier Bardem), who is busy chasing married Army vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin).

The three characters form a cross-generational chain of variously disaffected men spiraling down a whirlpool of blood and cash. Painful laughs accompany gut-twisting suspense as McCarthy’s side-winding story swings out of control in increasing arcs of succinct violence. There’s plenty of tension and laughs for the audience to sink their teeth in.

Chigurh, in an unflattering Dutch Boy haircut, is temporarily arrested before he strangles the doomed officer with his handcuffs. More will die. The archetypal human killing machine embodies a black heart of the borderlands’ drug trade that has infected large swaths of Texas and New Mexico.

Javier Bardem thoughtfully creates the most daunting illegal immigrant any U.S. politician ever dreamed about. His haunting portrayal straddles a line between primordial evil and modern insanity. The Coen brothers treat the threat Chigurh poses with deadpan irony. The closest Chigurh comes to exhibiting humor is when he asks a victim to flip a coin to determine whether they will live or die. His intimidating tenacity is the stuff of nightmares. 

While out hunting, Llewelyn Moss (Brolin) has the apparent good fortune of coming upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong in a remote desert area. Amid bloodied bodies, spent rifles, and five shot-up trucks, Llewelyn finds 2.4 million dollars in cash along with a motherlode of heroin. Hiding the suitcase of cash at home momentarily brightens Llewelyn’s dream of providing a good life for his loving wife Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald), but his decision to take water back to a dying man at the scene proves a step too far. No good deed goes unpunished.

Chigurh waits at the scene. Llewelyn becomes a running target for Chigurh to chase, as well as a person of interest for Sheriff Bell. The wizened Sheriff correctly reads the tea leaves of the crime scene the next day.

Josh Brolin’s recent career comeback, with solid performances in “Grindhouse,” “In The Valley of Elah,” and “American Gangster” is more than validated here. Of his recent roles, Llewelyn Moss is the leading man part that allows Brolin to trust his instincts toward creating a conflicted character living on his wits alone. To say that Brolin’s acting comes as a revelation in “No Country” is an understatement. He’s stunningly good.

There’s an impression here that, just as they achieved with “Fargo,” the Coen brothers have perfected a dry-witted version of their self-blended modern noir cocktail. The Coen’s first movie “Blood Simple” was set in Austin, Texas. Their ear for regional dialects and indigenous thought patterns plays strongly in the pacing of a West Texas story where silence means as much as the dialogue, maybe more. Whole stretches of sequences go by with hardly a word spoken or a note of music. Still, the pacing hits you at a breakneck speed. 

The title, “No Country for Old Men,” is an opinion pulled from the philosophical mind of Sheriff Bell, an honest Texan broken-hearted over the drug and border crossing violence that has consumed his home–an area once treated with a code of honor. Bell dreams of spending his remaining days with his patient wife Loretta (played by an exquisitely cast Tess Harper).

But too much has changed in the region. The new American West is fueled by greed and a thirst for retribution, if not preemptive slaughter. It’s not a place that Bell can abide. No man worth his salt could put up with such a soiled place.

The Coen Brothers are masters at condensing metaphors into visually identifiable tools of practical purpose. Chigurh uses a hydraulic tank to blast holes in people’s heads and to knock out door locks. His undisputed reputation as a fiercely effective killer puts him on the elevated status of a paramilitary agent racking up points toward a fat retirement. Even though the story is set in 1980, the tonal pitch reverberates between twinges of the Old West and of contemporary America, consumed with illegal immigration, drugs, and guns. Go figure.

The Rio Grande River, which Llewelyn temporarily escapes across, becomes a barbed wire filter for his cash. Cormac McCarthy’s source material insinuates symbolic ideas about an American society where western life has turned far more violent than the blood-soaked days of the Old West. Justice and honor are foreign words unrelated to modern survival and accumulation of wealth. Suspicion is the coin of trade that must necessarily gravitate toward bitter death. And yet, there is a sense of hope, in the face of such brutal truths, that back-cycles across the movie when its deceptively ethereal ending resolves the motivations of everyone involved.

You can’t always get what you want, and you can’t always keep what you have. The Coen Brothers have gotten their mojo back, with some considerable help from Cormac McCarthy.

Rated R. 122 mins.