Film

There’s nothing extraordinary about No Country for Old Men—except, of course, the spectacle of two great directors in total command of their craft. Keeping their ironic instincts in surprising reserve, the Coens return to the kind of bare-bones, money-murder-payback story on which they made their name; this is their tersest film since Blood Simple (1984). At the same time, they bring out humor in Cormac McCarthy’s source novel that McCarthy surely didn’t intend. Theirs is a different kind of understatement: The project forces the Coens to resist cracking wise, but it also doesn’t prevent them from going fully tongue-in-cheek when their villain taunts a gas-station attendant.

With a cadence so dry it crackles (an anecdote about the “contest between man and steer” is a shoo-in for monologue of the year), Jones plays a sheriff on the trail of two men—a hunter named Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), who finds a briefcase of drug money and aims to keep it, and an implacable killer named Chigurh (Bardem), who tracks Llewelyn with robotic determination. A movie that wants nothing more than to tighten the vice grip of its plot, No Country is beautifully structured: The Coens create crisp visual parallels among the three principals, and they approach the conventions of the chase film with an eye for the most complicated way to get from A to B. (The motel standoff is a set piece for the ages.) If they go wrong at all, it’s in dwelling too long on Jones’s world-weary aphorisms; his resignation seems alien to a duo whose movies have rarely felt more alive.