No Country for Old Men

Javier Bardem is the focus of this film, the focus of the story, and the focus period. His performance leaps out at you, like a panther in the jungle who stealthily watches you from afar until the moment he leaps at your throat, twisting and turning you. Your heart racing, your belief suspended, you struggle to survive. Within the first five minutes Ifelt like this--trapped, captured, wondering if i could/should continue watching the film. Because what i saw before me on the movie screen transcended make-believe.

Bardem has always been extraordinary--in diverse roles that range from a Cuban poet dying of AIDS to a police detective shot down during a confrontation and paralyzed from the waist down. He's starred in A Sea Inside, Before Night Falls, Jamon, Jamon, and Live Flesh--to name just of few of his phenomenal performances. In No Country for Old Men, Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, an emotionless killer who within the first few minutes of the film kills his arresting officer by strangling him with his handcuffs, and soon after uses a cattle stun gun (that he carries around as nonchalantly as most of us carry our wallets) to kill the driver of a car he suddenly decides he wants.

The story centers around a drug deal gone bad. Multiple murders. A guy who chances on the money from the deal--Llewellan Moss (Josh Brolin), takes it and then has the Bardem character hot on his heals with all the stuff that goes with a guy who is essentially proof that the devil exists . . .

Shot in Texas and New Mexico, the desolation of the area speaks of lawlessness that has somehow survived from the days of the Old West. And yet there is an order and simplicity to those who abide the law, as if they can't see or acknowledge the presence of the likes of Chigurh. When asked to throw a coin, a shopkeeper moves along with the game, somehow not giving in to what he must know is clear: if he doesn't call it right, he's about to lose his life.

Some of the character actors are so good you swear they were spotted in some soda shop or gas station in West Texas and are just playing themselves. But Bardem is on a level all his own. He portrays the kind of frightening that makes you queasy. I don't mean in terms of blood and gore, but in the sense of the numbing, gut-wrenching feeling you get from staring at pure evil. Lke looking into the eyes of Charlie Manson. That's why it was often difficult to watch the film. I didn't want affirmation that the devil exists. And yet I was drawn to the utter dakness and sociopathic perfection of Bardem's character.

Written and directed by the Coen brothers, also starring Tommy Lee Jones as the local county sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, this movie does justice to the dark visions of Cormac McCarthy's novel, upon which the movie is based. Jone's character is an old man who doesn't understand the evil that walks the land, even though he's been dealing with it all his adult life. And we're left to wonder, like him, what kind of country this is that allows the likes of Bardem's character to survive.