While hunting antelope on the unforgiving plains where West Texas meets Mexico, welder and Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) happens on A Deal Gone Wrong. It’s 1980 and the drug-dealing entrepreneurs along the Tex-Mex border are getting serious. There are bodies everywhere. Hell, they even shot the dog. A sole survivor, not long for this world, calls out for “agua”. But Llewelyn is more interested in the suitcase containing $2million he finds on a nearby corpse.
Foolish Llewelyn. For he is a character in a film by the Coen brothers and the first rule for survival in such an environment is to never, ever touch the bag of swag. Once you do, even your nobler actions will only make things worse. Here, our hero suffers an attack of conscience and returns to the scene with water for the dying man. And that, of course, is just enough to alert the bad guys to his existence and put sociopath-for-hire Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) on his tail.
And what a sociopath! Maybe it’s the bizarre Ken doll haircut. Maybe it’s the supernatural talent for killing or the penchant for slaughterhouse tools. But it’s impossible to behold Chigurh without thinking that he’s wandered up from hell or the unconscious or some feverish nightmare. One part Freddy Krueger for every five jiggers of Felix Unger, his place in movie villain history seems assured for like all the Coens’ utterly humourless characters, he’s plum hilarious.
His deadpan, however, is no match for Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). (“Supposedly, a coyote won’t eat a Mexican,” he tells his partner at a gruesome murder scene.) As the lawman on the case, he’s praying to catch up with Llewelyn before more murderous parties do. Filled with something like Shakespearean rue, he regards this unprecedented wave of killings as further evidence that the world has gone to hell in a hand-basket. “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners,” he laments. “Anytime you quit hearin’ ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ the end is pretty much in sight.”
As these three principals chase each other around Texas, the Coen brothers work their magic unseen. They’ve always been too secure in their talents to bother with showboating and here their deft touch – the whipsmart edits, the breathtaking composition – has never seemed surer. The sound design in particular is a thing of beauty. In a film devoid of extra-diegetic noise, No Country... finds music in every crisply recorded footstep and creak.
It helps the Coens’ cause that Cormac McCarthy’s source novel echoes so many of their own preoccupations. But it takes a team to make a modern classic. Here, we find not only the usual suspects – Roger Deakins’ cinematography is masterful – but a freaky alchemy between the name actors. Mr. Jones delivers pith and vinegar with aplomb. Mr. Brolin wears the nervy aspect of one constantly wavering between fight and flight. One suspects, however, that this will be remembered as That Javier Bardem Movie. His gigantic performance, a turn that cries out for an IMAX screen or amphitheatre to contain it, ensures that he will live on, like all celluloid immortals, as an edgy t-shirt or kickass Hallowe’en costume.