Coen of silence

Josh Brolin is a man of few words in No Country for Old Men.

Introductions can tell you a lot about movie characters, and the very first time we meet No Country for Old Men’s Llewelyn Moss, the tough-looking Texan is staring at an antelope through a rifle scope. Moss’s weathered look suggests that he’s lived a hard life, but there’s something else about the way this hunter watches and waits: He’s familiar with the patient habits of the predator. After Moss stumbles across a drug deal gone very wrong, he spies a bag of loot. Our man grabs the cash and skedaddles. Barely any lines are spoken, yet we know almost everything we need to about Moss in a scant few scenes.

Thanks to directors Joel and Ethan Coen, Cormac McCarthy’s lean, mean 2005 crime novel has been adapted in a manner that does justice to the author’s stark prose. It’s Josh Brolin’s performance, however, that turns Moss into something besides your average everyman in over his head. Pursued by a righteous sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and a reptilian assassin (Javier Bardem), both prone to rhapsodizing, Brolin’s protagonist demonstrates a preternatural instinct for survival while mostly keeping his yap shut. “It’s funny that you bring the loot scene up,” Brolin, 39, says, phoning from Los Angeles. “When Llewelyn finds the money, I wanted to add a line: ‘Um-hmm.’ The Coens and I went over that grunt for three hours: What’s going through his head? Will the audience think the guy is totally schizophrenic? They even made me try out a variety of different ‘um-hmms’ to see which one worked best.” He chuckles. “Every time that part of the movie comes up and my character grunts, I hear Ethan laughing somewhere in the audience. He has a distinctive little heh-heh-heh.”

Though Brolin was a fan of McCarthy’s work prior to getting the part—he refers to the writer’s apocalyptic Western masterpiece Blood Meridian as “an American version of Finnegans Wake”—he hadn’t really imagined himself as the stoic Moss. “I was in Austin making Grindhouse and hung out with Sam Shepard one night. He told me: ‘You gotta read this, it’s fantastic. Also, I heard that the Coens are making a movie out of it with Tommy Lee Jones. [Pause] I hope they don’t fuck it up.’ So I picked it up on his recommendation, but it was never like, This will be the perfect role for me. It wasn’t until the Coens called that I thought, Yeah, I can do this.”

Brolin’s rugged handsomeness and highly photogenic scowl have helped him get steady work as a charismatic badass you wouldn’t want to cross (see his recent supporting turns in American Gangster and In the Valley of Elah). What makes Moss so different from his other roles, besides being the good guy, is the way Brolin reveals the character’s thought process just by standing still. Even Javier Bardem—whose oddly coiffed hit man, Anton Chigurh, will undoubtedly enter the pantheon of creepy screen villains—was amazed at his costar’s subtlety. “What Josh did with just his eyes and body language is incredible,” Bardem says, calling in between photo shoots. “As actors, most of us feel we have to overemote; being silent or doing nothing scares us. But he plays what’s essentially a passive character in an active way, and that’s the hardest thing to do.”

“Yeah, I didn’t have a goofy hairdo to fall back on, so what could I do?” Brolin jokes. “I remember that Joel and Ethan were scared about my mustache; they didn’t want me to look like a member of the Village People. Then I saw Javier, and I realized: I don’t have to worry about a fucking thing! All the attention is going to be on you, dude.”

Given the praise that No Country for Old Men has been building since its premiere at Cannes, however, Brolin will probably find attention—in the form of year-end kudos and possible Oscar chatter—coming his way soon. None of that fazes the actor, who’s simply happy to have been part of an extraordinary piece of work. “There was this brief moment right before the lights went down at the first showing,” Brolin says. “Javier just turned to me and said, [Imitating Bardem’s voice] ‘Man, I hope this doesn’t suck.’ I mean, it’s a Coen brothers’ movie, but you never know, right? And when the lights went back up, we just looked at each other and grinned. They made a singular American movie. There’s really nothing like it.”

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