Starring: Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly MacDonald
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen
Category: IIB
It may be Javier Bardem's gun-toting killing machine that has captured the imagination of viewers (and awards juries) around the world, and it's true the film is a pitch-perfect thriller with great storytelling and extraordinary built-in tension broken by sudden spasms of inexplicable violence, but No Country for Old Men is much more than that.
Filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, set in the Texan hinterland in 1980, is also a grim look at the debasement of western society by insidious individualism.
It's telling that No Country for Old Men begins and ends not with the arrival of hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) amid the dead bodies and debris of a gunfight, and his departure with US$2 million in cash, or the appearance of Anton Chigurh (Bardem, above), the seedy hitman who stops at nothing to retrieve the money. True to its title, the film is bookended by the melancholic musings of Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the soon-to-be-retired sheriff charged with investigating the murderous mayhem Chigurh leaves in his wake - and his memories of the past.
