No Country for Old Men (2007) Review

Official trailer

No Country for Old Men ranks among the greatest American films of the 21st century. Seen it three times. The 10+ rating is what it earns. Joel and Ethan Coen directing and writing. Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh. Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss.

Woody Harrelson as Carson Wells. Kelly Macdonald as Carla Jean Moss. Roger Deakins cinematography. Based on Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel.

Won four Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor for Bardem. $171 million worldwide on a $25 million budget. The film is both Western, thriller, and meditation on American moral decay during the early period of the drug war.

Few films frighten me the way this one does, and it manages it with a cattle gun, a coin and long stretches of silence. I think it’s the Coens at their most disciplined and the best screen version of Cormac McCarthy anyone has managed. The 10+ comes easily. My one small complaint is Kelly Macdonald, who gets the film’s most heartbreaking scene and too little screen time around it. I’d happily have traded a few minutes of the chase for more of Carla Jean.

The Setup

West Texas. 1980. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is hunting antelope in the desert when he encounters the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. Multiple vehicles. Multiple bodies. Heroin. And $2.4 million in cash that one survivor was carrying when he died from his wounds. Moss takes the money. He knows the consequences. He takes it anyway.

Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is hired to retrieve the money.

He uses a captive bolt pistol designed for slaughtering cattle as his primary weapon. He kills people methodically and without apparent emotion. He decides some victims through coin tosses, allowing chance to determine whether they live or die. He ranks among the most disturbing antagonists in modern American cinema because the film refuses to provide any conventional explanation for his behavior.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) investigates the violence Chigurh leaves across the Texas-Mexico border region. Bell has been a sheriff for decades.

He’s been watching the work change. The violence he’s encountering now is different from what his department was designed to handle. The film documents Moss’s flight, Chigurh’s pursuit, and Bell’s reflections on what the new violence means for the country he’s spent his career trying to protect.

The Coen Brothers Direction

Joel and Ethan Coen directed No Country for Old Men after a serious career that included Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), and other productions. I’d put the brothers’ filmography up against anyone’s in modern American cinema for consistency. No Country for Old Men is their most disciplined production and their strongest individual film.

The direction strips away the verbal stylization that characterizes much of their earlier work.

The film takes the dialogue directly from McCarthy’s novel where possible. The visual approach is patient and minimalist. The score is almost entirely absent (Carter Burwell’s contribution is approximately fifteen minutes across the entire 122-minute runtime). The film is constructed from silence, landscape, and specific small actions. The discipline required to maintain this approach for two hours is considerable.

The Coen brothers won the Academy Award for Best Director as a pair. They also won Best Picture as producers and Best Adapted Screenplay as writers. The sweep was major. The recognition was earned. The film’s reputation has aged into one of the strongest American films of the 21st century. Later productions including True Grit (2010), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), and Hail, Caesar! (2016) have continued the directorial career. No Country for Old Men remains their peak achievement.

The Javier Bardem Performance

Javier Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, and I think it’s the most frightening villain performance in any American film I know.

It won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and it’s been studied and imitated ever since. His calm is what disturbs me. Bardem never raises his voice and never hurries, and I find that far worse than any amount of snarling. The character has become cultural shorthand for violence nobody can explain or bargain with.

The performance refuses conventional villain tones. Chigurh doesn’t enjoy his work. Chigurh doesn’t hate his victims. Chigurh isn’t motivated by money in any apparent sense. He’s doing the work because the work has been given to him. He works by principles he never explains. He uses the coin toss to delegate certain decisions to chance. The audience can’t read his motivations because the film provides no information about his motivations. The opacity is the character.

Bardem reportedly hated the haircut he was required to wear for the role. The haircut is one of the character’s defining visual elements. The producers insisted on the unusual style because the character should appear visually disturbing in ways that exceed conventional menacing-villain appearance.

The choice was correct. Chigurh’s haircut is one of the elements that makes him unforgettable. The visual choice supports the performance’s broader argument.

The Coin Toss Scene

The gas station coin toss scene is the film’s most studied set piece.

Chigurh stops at a small Texas gas station. The elderly proprietor attempts small talk. Chigurh begins asking questions about the proprietor’s life that escalate from routine to existentially threatening. The proprietor doesn’t understand what’s happening. The audience understands. Chigurh is deciding whether to kill the man.

Chigurh produces a quarter. He’s the proprietor call the toss. The proprietor wins. Chigurh leaves without violence. The proprietor survives without ever understanding what he survived. The scene runs approximately five minutes. The acting is by Bardem and by Gene Jones, who plays the proprietor. Jones had limited acting experience before No Country for Old Men. The casting was intentional. The proprietor needed to feel real instead of performed. Jones delivered.

The scene is the film’s clearest demonstration of Chigurh’s menace, and it’s the reason I’d rate this film above my own scale. The proprietor keeps chatting while his life hangs on a quarter, and I know it, and Chigurh knows it, and the poor man behind the counter has no idea. That gap in awareness makes the scene almost unbearable for me to sit through, and Gene Jones deserves as much credit for it as Bardem does.

The Tommy Lee Jones Performance

Tommy Lee Jones plays Sheriff Bell at real control. The character is the film’s moral center. Bell is investigating the violence Chigurh has caused. Bell is also reflecting on what the new violence means about the country he’s been policing for decades. The performance is mostly internal. Bell doesn’t deliver theatrical speeches. Bell observes, considers, and articulates his observations with the right restraint.

The character’s signature material is the opening voice-over and the closing dream sequence. Both are taken considerably from McCarthy’s novel. Bell describes earlier sheriffs in his family and the kind of crimes he encountered in his early career compared to the crimes he’s encountering now. He also describes what he believes the change indicates about American institutional decay. Jones delivers the material with real professional weight.

Bardem’s Oscar overshadowed the performance, and Jones didn’t get the Best Actor nomination I think he deserved. I’d put this near the top of his career, all of it done with a tired face and a slow voice. The film is an ensemble piece, so I understand why the Academy went for Bardem’s showier turn. Bell is still the character who stays with me after the credits.

The Josh Brolin Performance

Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss with real controlled tone. Moss is a Vietnam veteran who has been struggling with limited economic prospects in 1980 West Texas. He takes the money because the money will change his life. He understands what he’s doing. He understands the consequences. He takes the money anyway. The choice isn’t stupid. The choice is desperate.

Brolin’s career had been considerably developing across the previous years. The Goonies (1985), other supporting work, and then a real breakthrough period in the late 2000s and 2010s.

No Country for Old Men is the film that established him as serious dramatic lead. Later productions including W. (2008), Milk (2008), True Grit (2010), Sicario (2015), and other major films built on the No Country foundation.

The performance works with real physical tone. Moss is being hunted across hundreds of miles. He’s been wounded in earlier confrontations. He’s moving constantly. He’s sleeping rarely. Brolin handles the physical degradation across the film’s progression. The character looks worse at each later appearance. The visual continuity is the performance’s specific contribution. The audience watches Moss deteriorate as the pursuit continues. The deterioration is the dramatic content.

The Roger Deakins Cinematography

Roger Deakins shot No Country for Old Men using the West Texas and New Mexico locations the screenplay required. The cinematography earned the Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography. Deakins didn’t win for No Country (he eventually won for Blade Runner 2049 in 2018). The nomination was serious recognition.

The visual approach is minimalist. The desert landscape provides the visual content. The composition uses considerable negative space. The camera doesn’t move unnecessarily. The shots hold for major durations. The audience receives the landscape as third major character alongside Chigurh, Moss, and Bell. The landscape is the country the film’s title references. The country has become inhospitable to the moral structure Bell had grown up understanding.

The pursuit sequences work with real restraint. The famous El Paso hotel sequence (where Moss has hidden in the air vent and Chigurh is searching for him) was reportedly difficult to light because the production wanted Chigurh’s approach to be visible from the inside while remaining shadowy from the outside. Deakins solved the lighting problem through specific practical choices. The sequence works at the level of cinema’s strongest individual suspense set pieces.

The Death of Llewelyn Moss

The film’s most structurally daring choice is the off-screen death of Llewelyn Moss approximately twenty minutes before the closing sequence.

The film has been built around Moss’s flight. The audience has invested in Moss’s survival. The film denies the audience the climactic Moss-Chigurh confrontation that the structure has been promising. Mexican criminals kill Moss at a motel before Chigurh arrives. The audience sees the aftermath from Bell’s perspective.

The choice produced heavy audience confusion at the time of release. Some viewers walked out of theaters during the closing sequence because they couldn’t accept the structural inversion. Later critical evaluation has identified the off-screen death as the film’s most achievement. The Coens are arguing that conventional narrative resolution is unavailable when the antagonist works outside conventional narrative structures. Chigurh’s victories are routine. Moss dies routinely off-screen because that’s how Chigurh’s victims die.

The off-screen death stung me, and I think it’s supposed to.

The film spends most of its running time making me want Moss to win, then hands his death to strangers at a motel and shows me only the aftermath through Bell’s eyes. I think it’s the bravest decision in the picture. Denying the catharsis is the film’s argument about the world it depicts, and the more I think about it, the more correct the choice looks.

The Cormac McCarthy Source

Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men as his ninth novel, published in 2005. The novel was originally drafted as a screenplay in the early 1980s.

McCarthy reworked the material into novel form when the screenplay didn’t move into production. The Coen Brothers adaptation returns the material to its original screenplay form while maintaining real fidelity to the novel’s content.

McCarthy’s broader filmography includes Blood Meridian, The Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain), The Road, and other works.

He died in 2023 at age 89. His writing works with real moral seriousness with prose that’s been compared to Old Testament narrative and Faulkner’s regional work. The novels are often considered difficult to adapt to film because the prose tone doesn’t translate easily to screen.

The Coens’ adaptation succeeds where many McCarthy adaptations have struggled. The All the Pretty Horses adaptation (2000) directed by Billy Bob Thornton was less successful.

The Road adaptation (2009) directed by John Hillcoat worked at limited commercial accessibility. The Coens managed the No Country adaptation by stripping the prose tone from the dialogue while preserving McCarthy’s thematic argument through visual storytelling. The choice was correct. The film delivers McCarthy’s content through cinema’s specific capabilities instead of through forced translation of literary techniques.

The Ending

The closing sequence is Bell’s two dreams about his father. He describes them at the breakfast table to his wife Loretta. The dreams are taken considerably from the novel’s closing material. Bell remembers his father riding ahead through the dark to start a fire that will be waiting for Bell when he arrives. The fire is metaphor. The father is metaphor. The country Bell has been describing throughout the film is the country he believes no longer supports the kind of fire his father knew how to build.

The dream sequences are the film’s clearest moral statement.

Bell has been describing institutional decline for the entire runtime. The dreams are his summary. The country no longer offers what it offered. The men who would have known how to handle Chigurh-type violence are gone. Their replacements, including Bell himself, don’t know how to handle what the new violence requires. Bell is retiring. The film closes on him reflecting on what he’s leaving behind.

The ending is consistent with the film’s broader approach.

There’s no catharsis. There’s no triumph. There’s no resolution. There’s only the recognition of what has been lost. The audience leaves the film without the conventional closure that mainstream cinema generally provides. The lack of closure is the message. The film commits to the message across every department for 122 minutes.

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Is No Country for Old Men worth watching?

A 10+, and I don’t hesitate over it. The Coens, Bardem, Jones, Brolin and Deakins are all at the top of their game, and the film has the nerve to kill its hero off-screen and deny me the showdown it spent most of its running time promising. That refusal is why it sits above my ordinary 10. It gets more frightening and sadder on each viewing, and my only gripe, that Carla Jean needed more room, barely registers against a film this controlled.

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