The Coen brothers' Best Picture winner. A thriller that refuses every convention of the thriller.
Texas, 1980. Llewelyn Moss, a welder and Vietnam veteran, comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong in the desert — bodies, heroin, and a satchel containing $2.4 million. He takes the satchel. The next day, a man named Anton Chigurh begins to track him with a captive-bolt pistol normally used on cattle.
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, three steps behind, follows the trail of bodies. The film cross-cuts between hunter, hunted, and lawman across a week in West Texas. The film's resolutions are deliberately off-screen — major characters die between cuts. The film's argument is that the violence has always been there and the country has always been like this; the lawman is the last person to notice.
No Country for Old Men sets up the architecture of a chase thriller — a man with money, a killer pursuing him, a lawman trying to intervene — and then refuses every payoff the genre promises. The film's biggest set piece, the protagonist's death, happens off-camera. The villain escapes. The sheriff never catches anyone.
Audiences and critics divided on the ending in 2007. The film closes with Sheriff Bell telling his wife a dream about his father riding ahead in the snow. There is no resolution, no judgment, no thematic statement. Many viewers felt cheated. Many others found it the most morally serious ending an American studio film had attempted in years. The Academy agreed with the second group; the film won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor (Bardem).
Chigurh is one of cinema's most-imitated villains. The pageboy haircut, the captive-bolt pistol, the calm cadence — the character has been quoted in everything from The Counsellor to the Sicario films to The Killer. What makes the original work is Bardem's commitment to the character's philosophical seriousness. Chigurh doesn't kill for money. He kills because he believes a principle is being enacted through him.
The gas-station coin-toss scene — Chigurh asking an elderly gas-station attendant to call heads or tails for his life — is the film's clearest articulation of its worldview. The attendant has no idea what's happening. Chigurh tells him the coin has been travelling twenty-two years to arrive in this moment. He wins the toss; he survives. The film does not let the audience feel relief, because the next stranger will not.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins shot the West Texas landscape in a way no Coen film had before — patient, hot, depopulated. The film's compositions are often locked-down wide shots that hold for longer than the action requires. The hotel-room sequences are claustrophobic by contrast.
Notably, the film has almost no score. Carter Burwell, the Coens' longtime composer, contributed only a few minutes of music across the 122-minute runtime. The film's sound design — wind, footsteps, the air conditioner hum, the breath of a man hiding under a hotel bed — does the work that score would normally do.