In Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, a film adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, the barren Texas landscape takes on a mythological grandeur. Yet once the movie gets going we realize that this country is no mere backdrop. Instead, it is a character itself, a force to be reckoned with by the film’s superb acting trio of Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin. It looms with the weight of destiny.

Brolin plays an everyman welder who lives in a trailer. When he stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong, he takes off with a suitcase full of dough. However, he acts without considering Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, a professional hired to recover the money and pretty much the most bad-ass psychopath this side of Hannibal Lecter. Not only is his preferred murder weapon a pneumatic device that ranchers use for cattle, he toys with victims by having them flip a coin to determine their fate. Completing the triangle is Jones’ Ed Tom Bell, a taciturn sheriff charged with keeping the peace. As Bell chases both Chigurh and the welder, he becomes increasingly bewildered by the specter of motiveless violence. Don’t be fooled by Chigurh’s weird hairdo, he’s an efficient killing machine. The Coen brothers pace the film through his violence: at times his methods are gruesome and jolting; at others he savors the dance with the victim. In one scene, a man sits in a dark hotel room as the killer walks down the hallway outside. Floorboards creek, shadows cut across the light under the door. When footsteps shuffle along, we believe that the threat is over, a moment of relief that is quickly interrupted by the squeaking of the hallway light bulb being unscrewed. The film conjures a hypnotic spell: you don’t want to know what happens next, but you must.

It’s a powerful formula, bolstered by tight editing (the Coen brothers do their own editing under the name Roderick Jaynes), classically noir-ish cinematography and a spare musical score. It adds up to a rich western frontier, something that 3:10 to Yuma failed to deliver. Like Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, and Blood Simple, No Country is a rumination on the intrusion of violence, particularly how violence can disturb a peaceful community and the lives of people within it.

Recent politically-charged films such as Rendition and Lions for Lambs have attempted to show the dehumanizing effects of war and the convoluted state of America’s international affairs, yet all have failed to make much of an impression. No Country doesn’t have to try so hard because the film’s genetic makeup is precisely what America has already become: Moss sees money as an easy fix; Chigurh asserts power through violence, while Bell cannot, or will not, comprehend the lawlessness around him.

While some directors tackle present-day issues to inspire the younger generation to give a damn about political discourse, the Coen brothers narrate a nihilistic thriller set in the American west to pose a question that plagues us all: what happens when the good stop fighting, or even worse, stop caring? No Country is a richly textured, thrilling piece of entertainment that pulses with the imminence of violence; yet, like all classic films, it reflects a society already in flight and leaves us with a vision of ourselves that we may choose to accept or, more ominously, have no choice but to.

by Gaurav Munjal