When you watch a movie that is as magnetic and taut, yet darkly unsettling, as βNo Country for Old Menβ, you have to revise reality just a little to see the landscape created for the markedly unhinged and the altogether frantic characters that populate it.
This is surely another milestone for the Coenβs, who have taken their Americana stock movie type in βFargoβ, and steeped it in a much blacker, and altogether more disturbing reality. Calling it a gritty thriller with a sideline in novelty killing techniques would be fairly accurate distillation if taken at a glance, but it is the way it looks, feels and hangs together, together with the character determination that makes it stand out as more than the whole it first appears.
Starting with Tommy Lee Jones, and continuing with Josh Brolin as the initial target of investigation, we meet the world weary Sheriff, and the smart but not too savvy hunter, who finds a big stash of cash amongst the site of a drugs sale that has clearly turned bloodbath. But here the story twists as we come up hard against the psychotic and memorable Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) a bad man with a killing method even more outlandish than his hair.
The screenplay is tight, the dialogue sharp, and the movie has an edgy powerful suspense played right through it, whilst the story is told with a vein of the darkest humour; yet if you look under the immediate surface, you can see a reflection of the society we live in, and that is probably more disturbing than anything on screen β well almost!
9/10 - For those who like it raw, gritty and a little askance from the norm, this is filmmaking in the master class. If it is not up there with the best movies of the year and in the Oscar nominations, I will be very surprised indeed.