No Country for Old Men marks returns to true crime form

It's always fascinated me how simple crime stories can stand for so much that is wrong - and right - with society when they are successful. While there is no genre more overplayed, a well-crafted crime story can comment on the issues of morality and the human condition in so many fresh ways. Crime movies this year have been particularly focused on the issues of morality and society - 3:10 to Yuma gave an almost compelling vision of a man torn over the paradoxes of individual principles while transporting a killer across the barren west, while American Gangster and Michael Clayton are supposedly complex looks at a world of dark dealings coloured by shades of gray. However, No Country for Old Men will likely provide the most effective look at moral decay and ambivalence of any film this year. The story is simple enough: down-on-his-luck welder Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds a bunch of dead bodies and a satchel with $2 million from a drug deal gone awry in the Texan desert. Uncertain, but confident in his impunity, Moss takes off with the money, only to realize that even the most seemingly anonymous actions come with consequences. He's soon on the run from ruthless killer Anton Chigurh (played be a super-creepy Javier Bardem) and noble sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) trying to stop him for different reasons. The contrast inherent in the interactions between the brutal Chigurh, the desperate Moss, and the tired Bell provides a perfect context for reflection about the fundamental underpinnings of good and evil. Moss' uncertain moral code leads him to decisions that trigger what he quickly identifies as not a chase, but a hunt, in which he is woefully under-prepared for survival. What's created here is a story about well-meaning men in a society that, like Chigurh, is both moving forward and digressing into violence too quickly for either of them to keep up.

But while these revelations give the film a strong literary weight, it succeeds largely on account of flawless execution. To call this film a 'return to form' for directors Joel and Ethan Coen is an understatement, as their recent output (The Ladykillers, and the strikingly innocuous Intolerable Cruelty) isn't even in the same league. Even the wildly clever southern-fried Odyssey in O Brother, Where Art Thou? appears stylistically bloated in comparison to this. The dialogue and plotting is terse thanks to the gifted source material from Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy, but the creation of mood and tension by the Coens is exquisite.

The film may be punctuated with moments of truly striking brutality, but the spaces left in between, shown in eerie silence without a music score, create an atmosphere that is palpably creepy, thanks in large part to Javier Bardem's performance. Like any great film villain (Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs comes to mind), Bardem's Anton permeates every frame of this movie. Even in his absence, his menacing spectre poisons the atmosphere. Watching every character in this movie face the shattering realizations of their own inadequacy, both in the face of the morally vacant Chigurh and in their understanding of the proper reconciliation of moral code and action, is truly revelatory.

From the beginning, Chigurh is established as unpredictable, but more importantly unwavering: a representation of the coming inevitabilities that each character must face. Out of this comes a salient message about fatalism and path-dependency. As one character poignantly notes, "you can't stop what's coming", which is what the protagonists each realize with varying degrees of acceptance. However, the story is most effective in showing us how difficult it is to even realize what we've set in motion and how our moral sense so often fails to produce just rewards. A provocative story that is successful largely through brilliantly tense and efficient execution, this may in fact be the best film the Coens have ever made.