No Country for Old Men

It is a pure pleasure to sit and contemplate the highly efficient manner in which the Coens have assembled their latest film. Taut, spare and ruthless: there is not an extra pound of flesh on this movie. They have taken Cormac McCarthy’s similarly resourceful and well organized novel about a crime gone terribly wrong and spun it into a rollercoaster ride of greed, revenge, violence—and unrelenting evil. The trip is heady and intoxicating. Humor sits next to horror, lyricism rubs up against gore, and it is evident that the filmmakers relish squeezing every ounce of potential out of the original source material.

Set in 1980, the film is built around a botched drug deal that a brash and not-so-smart hunter stumbles across in the desert. As everyone is left dead, Moss reaps the rewards: a suitcase stuffed full of cash. But he is fully aware that someone will come looking for the money. That someone arrives very quickly: an inexorable beast of a man who shows no emotion, fear or remorse. Brilliantly played by Javier Bardem, Anton Chigurh is a relentless bulldozer who simply removes anything and anyone that stands in his way. The law, dozily and affectionately incorporated into the person of local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell—a role powerfully embodied by Tommy Lee Jones—is only one of the obstacles in Chigurh’s path. His bigger problem is Moss (wonderfully depicted by Josh Brolin), who quickly comes to understand that to stay one step in front of his pursuer will mean summoning all his reserves of guile and imagination. What ensues is a cat-and-mouse chase that escalates into a fight to the death between a cougar and a grizzly—one trying to recover his ill-gotten gains and the other to protect it.

The beautiful, empty spaces of the desert provide the landscape against which this search for riches and retribution plays out. Terse, clipped dialogue is interspersed with rapid, suspenseful and often violent action tinged with a rich vein of deeply ironic humor. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a high-octane machine that takes no prisoners as it contemplates an American West full of rapacious greed and vengeance with two individuals struggling to survive and outwit the other.

—Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival

View the trailer at apple.com.

---

*Passes are required. Click here to download and print your pass. Adobe Acrobat is required to open and print the pass.

Please arrive early. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and is NOT guaranteed. Theatre is not responsible for seating over capacity.