'No Country for Old Men' a winner before, after the awards

by Sam Bauman

Appeal Entertainment Editor

"No Country for Old Men" came into the Oscars race as a top-heavy favorite and lef t the big winner. And for good reasons; it is a taunt, powerful film, a giant step away from most Western thrillers.

It was written, directed, and produced by Joel and Ethan Coen and stars Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, and Javier Bardem. It mines the brothers' dark world of chance and randomness. Wrong place is the key here.

We ran a review back in late 2007, but here is a second look at an Academy Award winner far from the usual middlebrow winners.

Carefully adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel "No Country," it tells the story of a drug deal gone wrong and the ensuing cat-and-mouse drama as three men crisscross each other's paths in the desert landscape of 1980s West Texas.

"No Country" received eight Academy Award nominations and won Golden Globe Awards for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role and Best Screenplay.

While there are three stars basically (Jones, Brolin and Bardem), the three never appear on screen together. Jones is the local sheriff, Brolin a welder who stumbles on a drug sale gone bad with all involved (including a dog) left sprawled in the south Texas border landscape.

Bardem - in a kind of Dutch-boy hair style - is simply evil embodied as the hired gun sent to recover the drug money. He moves slowly, menacingly, an implacable force of evil. He is assigned by drug dealers to recover the $2 million that Brolin finds and takes. A bounty hunter, Woody Harrelson, is also involved and while he is another kind of evil, he is a dim shadow of the menace of Bardem.

Brolin takes the money home, tells his wife Jean (Kelly Macdonald, a quietly fine actress) to flee as he already has been chased by the Mexican drug syndicate killers. Then he's on the run, pursued by Bardem who has a gadget that tracks the $2 million.

Jones is the local sheriff, but he's ready to retire and lacks the drive to pursue the killers.

The chase scenes are riveting, as Bardem closes in on Brolin, but Brolin is slain by the Mexican drug killers after his mother-in-law gives away his hiding place.

It's difficult to sum up this film, it's hard to decide who really is the lead character. Brolin is in much of the film, Bardem as well and Jones gets to close things out while telling his wife that he had two dreams. When she asks as he pauses, what happened, he says wryly, "I woke up."

This is a fine cast, from the gas station operator in a verbal battle with Bardem, to the defiant scene in which Kelly Macdonald refuses to play Bardem's coin-flipping life-or-death game.

The three leads are simply perfect for their roles. Jones doesn't really do much more than recreate his tough old man roles. Brolin is tight and effective as he eludes Bardem. But Bardem is probably the most memorable here. Evil always fascinates.

This is not a tidy movie, with all loose ends tied up. Apparently the Coen brothers felt that life didn't work that way so neither did they.

From the opening scene where Brolin fails to down a deer while hunting in a vast landscape of emptiness, to the last view of Jones, who is in the wrong country, this is a film to treasure.

It richly deserved the Academy Award.