No Coun­try for Old Men

“It’s a mess, ain’t it sher­iff?” says Deputy Wen­dell (Gar­ret Dil­lahunt), star­ing at the five bul­let-rid­den corpses, four trashed pick-up trucks and one dead dog that are strewn across the patch of desert scrub. The Sher­iff, Ed Bell (Tom­my Lee Jones), looks off cam­era and sighs, ​“Well, if it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here.”

It’s this sort of exchange, ear­ly in the first act of the west­ern noir No Coun­try for Old Men that reminds you why the Coen broth­ers – the film’s writ­ers, direc­tors, pro­duc­ers and edi­tors – are among the smartest and most skil­ful film­mak­ers of their generation.

For in a few terse throw­away lines, the scene man­ages to set up char­ac­ter (Wen­dell is fear­ful, Bell is lacon­ic), pro­vide light relief from the pre­vi­ous high ten­sion chase sequence, dis­play an effort­less­ly authen­tic grasp of west­ern ver­nac­u­lar, and dra­mat­i­cal­ly pre­fig­ure the gen­uine ​‘mess’ that is only moments away from engulf­ing every­one involved.

In this, the Coens’ first movie since their 2004 com­e­dy flop The Ladykillers, and thus a piquant return to form, the mess usu­al­ly comes in the shape of Javier Bardem’s psy­cho­path­ic assas­sin Anton Chig­urh (he is, as one char­ac­ter hints, only slight­ly less dan­ger­ous than bubon­ic plague).

Top of Chigurh’s hit list is Llewe­lyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a tac­i­turn army vet­er­an who has stum­bled, in typ­i­cal movie fash­ion, across the afore­men­tioned scene of bul­let-rid­den car­nage, and is now in pos­ses­sion of $2 mil­lion worth of high­ly cov­et­ed mob money.

Thus the rest of the film, an adap­ta­tion of Cor­mac McCarthy’s best­selling nov­el, is a break­neck chase of sorts as Chig­urh, armed to the teeth with shot­guns, rifles and even a slaugh­ter­house bolt gun, pur­sues the resilient Moss across the East Texas land­scape (actu­al loca­tion: New Mexico).

And yet, even here, just as the movie is begin­ning to con­form to genre expec­ta­tions (like The Trea­sure of the Sier­ra Madre meets Far­go), the Coens have the guts, and indeed the smarts, to pull it in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. Thus a key char­ac­ter is mur­dered off cam­era, the pace slows nice­ly, and with the aid of some impec­ca­ble turns from Jones and even Kel­ly Mac­don­ald (as Moss’ wife, giv­ing her most unself­con­scious per­for­mance since Trainspot­ting), the movie becomes a bit­ter­sweet lament for a time when the old men of the title weren’t out-gunned and, as Bell says, ​“out-matched” by the atavis­tic killers of today’s crim­i­nal class.

It ends sud­den­ly, per­haps too soon for some. But then, as the Coens clear­ly know, you can have too much of a good thing.