The sun-bleached landscapes and stunning sunsets of the American West make a heartbreakingly beautiful backdrop for the black-hearted mayhem that punctuates No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers' latest foray into the dark recesses of human nature.
In many ways, it's the writing-directing team's most profoundly disturbing vision, and that includes that leg in the woodchipper in Fargo. While the brothers in the past have been satisfied to let the occasional outrageously violent outburst add power to their films, this time they've utterly reversed the formula: the body-count meter starts ticking from the first frames, relieved only by the occasional, sweetly observed moment of human tenderness.
Following a brutal opening sequence, we meet a hunter (Josh Brolin, looking and sounding more like his dad James every year) who stumbles upon the site of a desert drug deal gone wrong. Real wrong. Dead men lie everywhere, each clutching the automatic weapon he went down firing. There's a ton or so of heroin and $2 million in cash. He takes the cash, and soon he's being relentlessly tracked down by a killer (Javier Bardem) who's as cold-blooded as a desert rattler.
As the killer, Bardem is a dead-eyed bundle of pure evil. A brooding devil in a pageboy haircut, he's chillingly likely to turn even the most casual encounter with a stranger into a spectacle of gushing blood. By film's end, when we find ourselves holding our breath whenever Bardem encounters anyone, even the Coens seem ready to shield their eyes—his last several killings happen out of sight and even out of earshot.
Also part of the chase, but barely so, is Tommy Lee Jones as a West Texas sheriff. Sad-eyed and melancholy, with that fatigued, sigh-inducing manner Jones excels in, the sheriff is overwhelmed by the mounting violence he sees, not only in his blood-soaked town, but in the world at large. He's about to retire, but the world he's escaping to, he fears, is no better than the one he's leaving behind. Evil is everywhere, he complains to his deputies, to his friends, and to his wife. And as the film's villain tracks his prey across the Southwestern desert, dark and dangerous as an approaching thunderstorm, it's hard to argue with him.
By Bill Newcott
Source: http://www.aarpmagazine.org/entertainment/movies/Articles/a2005-01-12-mag-mfg-filmreviews.html#country
Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.
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