DVD Pick: No Country for Old Men

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, No Country for Old Men (2007) also won three additional Oscars: Best Director (Ethan and Joel Coen), Best Adapted Screenplay (the Coen brothers again) and Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem). The film is a faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's best-selling novel. McCarthy took the title from the beginning of the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats.

In the movie, Javier Bardem portrays one of cinema's most memorable villains, an implacable, relentless psychopath who uses a slaughterhouse cattle-gun to blow people's brains out. But Tommy Lee Jones is equally brilliant as a decent country sheriff who has grown old in the job. Yet, as good as Bardem and Jones are in their roles, their performances are matched by that of Josh Brolin as a working-class man who decides to keep $2 million in drug dealers' money he happens to find.

The Coen brothers wrote, directed and edited (under a pseudonym) No Country for Old Men, and they are geniuses at varying mood, tone and rhythm. The film defies genre classification, artfully mixing violence and suspense with dark humor and contemplativeness. For most of its two-hour runtime, it plays like a thriller, but the final 20 minutes are more about the feelings of a man around retirement age.

No Country for Old Men is set in West Texas in 1980, and at the center of the story is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder who lives in a double wide in a trailer park with his wife (well-played by Kelly Macdonald). Moss goes out hunting in the backcountry one day and happens upon the aftermath of a heroin deal gone wrong. Along with five pickup trucks and several dead people, he finds a satchel containing $2 million. He unwisely decides to keep the money and goes on the run from his home in Sanderson to Del Rio, then to Eagle Pass, across the Mexican border to Piedras Negras, and eventually he ends up in El Paso.

The drug dealers send Anton Chigurh in pursuit of Moss, and most of the movie is an elaborate (and riveting) chase with Chigurh brutally slaughtering a number of people along the way. Javier Bardem plays the enigmatic psychopathic killer with the odd hairstyle as if he were in a horror movie. One thing that makes Chigurh so scary is that there's a certain amount of randomness in the deaths of his victims: in fact, he occasionally determines whether or not to kill someone by flipping a coin.

Working on the crime spree that surrounds the drug deal gone bad is Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the righteous sheriff of sparsely populated Terrell County. He knows Llewelyn Moss and his wife personally, and Bell's sense of well-being is tied to providing them with protection. He thinks back to when he was a young lawman in the 1950s and how corrupt the world seems to him to be in 1980, and he despairs, giving the film a bleak, noirish quality.

For most of the film, the narrative is propelled forward by an exciting protracted chase. But when the chase is over, the pace slows, and the final scene shows characters talking quietly with the last lines of dialogue taken directly from McCarthy's novel. For many viewers weaned on tidy Hollywood movies, the ending will be unsatisfying. But the Coens give us something more than just diversion — they leave us with things to think about. In No Country for Old Men, they show us an unknowable and chaotic world where good does not necessarily triumph over evil. There are insights to be gained from observing Sheriff Bell, a good man who is struggling to come to terms with living in such a world.

The No Country for Old Men DVD comes with 39 minutes of supplementary materials, the best of which is a 24-minute making-of documentary. In it the Coen brothers and all the principal actors discuss the film. You can hear Kelly Macdonald speak with her normal Scottish accent, and Tommy Lee Jones, a native of San Saba, Texas, compliments her on getting her character's accent right in the movie. The crew talks about how various scenes were done, including the one where Chigurh uses handcuffs to strangle a deputy sheriff. There is also some discussion of filming West Texas landscape shots around Marfa. But the documentary glosses over the fact that most of the movie was shot in New Mexico, mainly in the town of Las Vegas.

Also on the DVD are two mildly interesting featurettes. One is the eight-minute "Working With the Coens," in which key cast and crew members praise the brothers for being organized, open to collaboration and enthusiastic, all while managing to keep things low-keyed on the set. The other is the seven-minute "Diary of a Country Sheriff," a discussion of the character Ed Tom Bell. The title of the second featurette is meant to bring to mind Diary of a Country Priest, a 1951 Robert Bresson film that has some similarities to No Country for Old Men.

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