Spooked but absorbed

No Country for Old Men
15, Nationwide

No Country for Old Men, adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is not for the squeamish or easily spooked, or at least should not be for the squeamish and easily spooked. I am both — in spades — yet found it almost ecstatically absorbing. This is not to say I liked it. But neither is it to say that I didn’t. It’s not a film that asks to be either liked or disliked. It just is, branding itself on to you like a heated iron.

It is set in Texas, in 1980, on the USA–Mexico border where the men are men (‘Quit yer hollerin’,’ they say to their womenfolk) and the desert landscape is vast and dry and desolate. Into this landscape — this intensely cinematic landscape — comes Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder and Vietnam War veteran who, out hunting, stumbles across the aftermath of a drug-related gun battle which has left almost everyone dead. Moss finds a truck full of heroin and a briefcase containing $2 million in cash. ‘Don’t, don’t take the money,’ you may find yourself urging him, particularly if you have seen the Sam Raimi thriller Simple Plan, in which a bunch of friends find $4 million in the cockpit of a crashed plane and no good comes of it. Moss? He takes the money. There is just no telling some people.

And so begins a cat-and-mouse game in which Moss is pursued across Texas and Mexico, across bleak desert and lonely motel rooms, by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a psychopathic professional hitman with a sculptured, totem face beneath a scary pageboy hair-do, and weary, sardonic Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who despairs at the soullessness all around him and is, one assumes, the old man for whom this is no longer any country, if it is country for anyone.