But it does so in a way that is so unbelievably gripping. And it shows us that being a successful criminal is often about having the capacity to be the most savage, inhumane person in the room. Most people aren’t willing to die at all. Instead, it acknowledges that most people, even those we might expect it of, aren’t willing to die for justice. It refuses to give us the ending we want, to tell the story we want it to tell. It refuses to be merciful or sympathetic. It reminds us that terrible actions are generally the domain of terrible people. It asks questions about what happens when ordinary people face unspeakable, extraordinary evil. It’s because of this that No Country For Old Men (just like McCarthy’s bibliography) is horrifying. Only the harshest personalities are suited to it. Both remind us that the outlaw life is not glorious it is lonely, paranoid, perplexing, and cruel. Both films show us that violence and crime are not as glamorous as we might think. This film is deconstructive, and it reminds me of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in many ways.

Without spoiling its last 20 minutes, the ending and overall trajectory of the film are for many immediately unsatisfying, but that gives it so much more gravitas, makes it so much more memorable. It is a braver film, and in many ways a more honest one for it. It is grim, and for those who haven’t seen it before nor read the book, surprisingly bleak for a Hollywood blockbuster.īut this bleakness is what sets No Country For Old Men aside from other pictures. It is beautiful to look at (thanks in no small part to the work of cinematographer Sir Roger Deakins), and faithfully harrowing in the way it adapts its source material. This is because shot for shot, sentence for sentence, this film is technically perfect. It swept the 2008 Oscars, beating There Will Be Blood to Best Picture, collecting eight nominations and four wins on the way. The film is based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, which it stays mostly true to throughout its two-hour runtime.

And Bardem plays contract killer Anton Chigurh in perhaps the single most chilling performance of the 21st century to date. Tommy Lee Jones plays a laconic sheriff suffering from a crisis of faith who is more a commentator than a lawman as far as the film is concerned.

No Country For Old Men is a “neo-Western” crime thriller that stars Brolin as a hunter who happens upon the aftermath of a drug deal turned sour and makes off with an unclaimed briefcase containing two million dollars. But before No Country For Old Men, violence in their pictures has never been quite so brutal or quite so savage. Miller’s Crossing features a sequence of nearly a full minute of uninterrupted machine gun fire. In the last ten minutes of Fargo, there is a rather grisly scene involving the misuse of a woodchipper. The Coens aren’t strangers to violence in their films.

No country for old men book review