NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
No Country for Old Men is an Academy Award-winning 2007 film written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, and Javier Bardem. Faithfully adapted from the well-received Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, No Country for Old Men draws heavily on McCarthy's themes of chance and fate; it tells the story of a drug deal gone wrong and the ensuing cat-and-mouse drama as three men crisscross each other's paths in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas.
The film has been highly praised by critics. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "as good a film as the Coen brothers…have ever made." A Guardian journalist said the film proved "that the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based Western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors."
Over wide shots of desolate, expansive West Texas country in June 1980, local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) recalls of the changing times amidst an increase in the region's violent crime. As he concludes his tale, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is arrested by a sheriff's deputy, who has time to describe Chigurh's unique captive bolt pistol to the sheriff over the phone before Chigurh strangles him with his cuffs and escapes.
Meanwhile, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) hunts pronghorn antelope near the Rio Grande when he stumbles upon a collection of corpses and a lone dying man, the aftermath of a drug deal gone awry. In addition to a shipment of heroin, he finds two million dollars in a satchel, which he keeps, leaving the lone survivor to die. Later that night in bed with his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), Moss's conscience convinces him to return to the site with water for the dying man, in the process setting off a cat-and-mouse game in which the hunter and hunted frequently switch roles, as a gang of Mexicans, Moss, Chigurh, and Bell chase each other and the money across the Texas and Mexico landscapes.
Chigurh, a professional hitman, is hired to retrieve the satchel of money by using a radio receiver which corresponds to a small transponder hidden in the satchel. Chigurh does not hesitate to kill those in his way, including those closely associated with the drug deal, the drivers of cars he steals for transport, and people he encounters by chance. Moss, unaware of the transponder's existence, sends his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) out of town and moves from motel to motel as he attempts to elude both the Mexicans and Chigurh. In the meantime, Bell avoids the federal authorities’ investigation of the original drug-related massacre and focuses his attention on trying to locate and protect Moss. Chigurh, with his tracking device, inexorably closes in on Moss while acting as an agent of fate and chance to the people he meets along the way.