After a decade in the doldrums, the Coen brothers returned to peak form with No Country for Old Men. Here was an instant classic, a bag-of-loot thriller adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy that rode hell-for-leather across a Tex-Mex landscape of fleapit motels and trailer parks. Josh Brolin turns in a superbly resilient, unshowy performance as the everyday Joe who makes a bad decision and winds up fleeing for his life.
Hot on his trail is the demonic Anton Chigurh (Oscar-winning Javier Bardem), a serene psychopath who carries a cattle gun and selects his victims on the flip of a coin. Dawdling some distance behind, Tommy Lee Jones’s good-hearted sheriff can only shake his head at what the world has come to.
Could it also be the brothers’ finest film to date? If it lacks Fargo’s rum humanity and The Big Lebowski’s freewheeling abandon, it compensates with sheer no-frills momentum. There is scarcely an ounce of fat on its bones and none of the wacky postmodern japery the Coens sometimes use to put a distance between a story and its audience. Here there is no escape. We are in it for the long haul, running alongside its imperilled hero and skirting on the rim of absolute evil.No Country for Old Men went on to win best picture at the Academy Awards (where it was surely the most deserving recipient since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1976). For once, it seems, the Guardian and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were in perfect agreement.
