The three are locked in a swerving, round-robin chase that takes them through the empty ranges and lonely motels of the West Texas border country in 1980. The three men occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined.
Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, a world-weary third-generation sheriff whose stoicism can barely mask his dismay at the tide of evil seeping into the world. Whether Chigurh is a magnetic force moving that tide or just a particularly nasty specimen carried in on it is one of the questions the film occasionally poses. The man who knows him best, a dandyish bounty hunter played by Woody Harrelson, describes Chigurh as lacking a sense of humor. But the smile that rides up one side of Chigurh's mouth as he speaks suggests a diabolical kind of mirth - just as the haircut suggests a lost Beatle from hell - and his conversation has a teasing, riddling quality. The punch line comes when he blows a hole in your head with the pneumatic device he prefers to a conventional firearm.
And the butt of his longest joke is Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), a welder who lives in a trailer with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) and is dumb enough to think he's smart enough to get away with taking the US$2 million he finds at the scene of a drug deal gone bad. Chigurh is charged with recovering the cash (by whom is neither clear nor especially relevant), and poor Sheriff Bell trails behind, surveying scenes of mayhem and trying to figure out where the next one will be.
Taken together, these three hombres are not quite the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but each man does carry some allegorical baggage. Jones' craggy, vinegary warmth is well suited to the kind of righteous, decent lawman he has lately taken to portraying. Ed Tom Bell is almost continuous with the retired MP Jones played in Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah. It is hard to do wisdom without pomposity, or probity without preening, but Jones manages with an aplomb that is downright thrilling.
Still, if No Country for Old Men were a simple face-off between the sheriff's goodness and Chigurh's undiluted evil, it would be a far stiffer, less entertaining picture. Llewelyn is the wild card - a good old boy who lives on the borderline between good luck and bad, between outlaw and solid citizen - and Brolin is the human center of the movie, the guy you root for and identify with even as the odds against him grow steeper by the minute.
And the minutes fly by, leaving behind some unsettling notions about the bloody, absurd intransigence of fate and the noble futility of human efforts to master it. Mostly, though, No Country for Old Men leaves behind the jangled, stunned sensation of having witnessed a ruthless application of craft.
RSS