'No Country for Old Men': The Coen Brothers strike gold in west Texas

Let's get this out of the way. Go see "No Country for Old Men." It's an Oscar caliber film. It's made by two of the best filmmakers America has to offer, and it's perfectly constructed.

It's a nationally released action and literary film -- which is a rare opportunity for a mass audience and not often allowed through the gates of Hollywood.

I'll bet good money it gets nominations for best film, adapted screenplay, actors (Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem), cinematography, production design and probably a few more.

Now then, back in the late summer of 2005 the Coen brothers announced they were going to film Cormac McCarthy's darkly imagined novel "No Country for Old Men." I literally did a double take. I had read McCarthy's novel and found it a brilliant and vivid comment on an approaching dark and hopeless society. It was at turns thrilling, bleak, humorless and forbidding, if not full of foreboding.

I was positive this type of story was not up the Coens' alley, and I was sure they had made a major mistake. Yes, they have made dark films before, but their dark films are, if you will, stylized. "Fargo" can easily be called a dark comedy. And "Miller's Crossing" can be called a homage to gangster films -- if not a comic strip brought to life. In fact, you have to go back to their first film, "Blood Simple," to find the closest comparison to the grinding and worrisome "this ain't going to end up too good" storyline of "No Country for Old Men."

Well, the Coens don't seem to be confined by any alley of any size.

"No Country for Old Men" has proved -- if there were previous doubts -- that Joel and Ethan Coen are two of America's greatest filmmakers and they can do anything they want. They might have equals, but they are inferior to none.

"No Country for Old Men" begins with Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), an ordinary working man out hunting deer on the barren plains of west Texas, stumbling upon the deadly aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. He also stumbles upon a briefcase containing a few million dollars. As you would imagine, drug dealers aren't going to just let their money walk off, and with his fateful decision to take the money, Moss brings a curse upon himself and his family not seen since the Old Testament days.

Enter Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Whether other characters call him a sociopath or a psychopath, Chigurh leaves a steady path of bloody death and destruction as he doggedly follows Moss' trail. A ghost, a whisper or maybe the devil himself, Bardem and the Coens (and McCarthy) have created one of the meanest and most purposeful villains in film. The ugly reality that Chigurh is not some unreal celluloid fantasy but maybe just the man in front of you at the gas station is the brilliance of the horrific creation. Bardem's intense performance is one for the history books.

Following these two, though not as doggedly as he might, but steady all the same, is the nearly retired Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the film's protagonist and sometime narrator. In a career performance, Jones tries to read truth from the blood trails, tries to understand this new level of violence and tries to decide if there is really anything he can do about it if given the chance.

For Sheriff Bell, it's a country of drugs and violence and despair, and it's just about become unrecognizable. It's surely no country for old men.