No Country for Old Men (2007) 💵🏜️🪙
“Call it.”
Joel & Ethan Cohen stayed very faithful to the source material in their academy award winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel. The story follows three men — the sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Barem), and the veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). Moss stumbles on a briefcase full of money and does everything he can to evade the people determined to get it back, while the sheriff follows the destruction left in their wake. Chigurh’s unrelenting pursuit and Moss’s determination create an unbearable tension that is amplified by the film’s minimalist aesthetic. There is barely any score & long stretches go by with no dialogue. This movie forces you to lean in, to listen, to scrutinise every detail. The explosions of violence are brief but haunting, and provide no relief to the tension.
No Country For Old Men is one of the Cohens’s best movies, and like many of their films, it works against our expectations. There is no hero’s journey in this story, no balance between good and evil. When Moss takes the money, he is trying to ‘cheat’ his way out of his ‘place’ in the world. Chigurh represents the system — he does not care about who is good or bad, who deserves to live or die. He doesn’t even care about the money. He offloads the responsibility of his actions to the flip of a coin because he does not see himself as a person, only the instrument of a bigger system at play.
The title references Bell the sheriff, who fails to understand the violence that unfolds under his watch. His character has led a relatively comfortable life, and the system has always worked for him, more or less. The crimes he encounters now are beyond him because he doesn’t understand how desperate people are, how ruthless the system has become beyond the borders of his county. His purpose in life no longer makes sense, but he has nothing else in which to believe.
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