‘No Country for Old Men’
The 2007 Academy Award winner for Best Picture saw the Coen brothers return to the American west yet again, but this time for a collaboration with Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed novel about morality on a life-or-death scale when a working man tries to profit off of stumbling across a drug bust gone bad and ends up pursued by a psychopathic hitman. While the Coens had experienced critical acclaim before, with everything from Raising Arizona to Fargo to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, none of those movies had a hook quite like Anton Chigurh, the Jason Voorhees of western lawlessness, played by Javier Bardem in his Oscar-winning role. Recently added to the Netflix library, No Country is a movie that can challenge the viewer with its violence and its soliloquizing (Tommy Lee Jones can spin a morality question on its end for long minutes), but it also deeply rewards repeat viewing. It’s the rare movie that satisfies the right brain and the left brain.