Joel & Ethan Coen
Non è un Paese per Vecchi

The cinematic journey of the Coen brothers is like an oscillator, starting from a point, moving away but eventually always returning to the starting point. Already with Fargo in 1996, the Coens revisited the beloved noir of their beginnings, moving it from the desert lands of Texas in Blood Simple to the frozen landscapes of Minnesota. After spending almost the entire first half of the last decade on comedy, the two filmmakers felt the need to return to their roots, and the opportunity came with the proposal to adapt a novel by Cormac McCarthy. 

It's not the first time the two brothers have drawn inspiration from another work, but it is certainly the first time that the adaptation is very faithful to the original; while their previous film, Ladykillers, had many differences from the original movie, No Country for Old Men had only a few cuts compared to the eponymous novel, also because the work is already saturated with a series of themes dear to the Coens.

Texas, 1980. Llewyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder from a remote village on the Mexican border, finds 2 million dollars in a briefcase at the site of what seems to have been a bloody gunfight over a drug deal. This act forces him to abandon his home, his wife, and be relentlessly hunted by both Mexican smugglers and the serial killer Anton Chigurh (a stunning Javier Bardem, who won an Oscar), silent and psychotic, even using a gas tank to fire nails as a weapon. On their trail, in a futile attempt to save Llewyn, is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, nearing retirement and increasingly disheartened and pessimistic about the fate of his country and the world in general. 

Even though the Coens did not create these characters, they have much in common with those the duo typically creates. Moss is the typical Coen anti-hero, an ordinary man who believes he can turn his life around for the better, but once again, the directors' pessimism offers him no escape. Money is always both curse and delight, the prosperity that leads to ruin, for which heinous or reckless acts are committed, without foreseeing the consequences. Another figure is the killer Chigurh, representing the inescapable Fate, embodied by a coin, utterly devoid of feelings (or irony) and leaving an endless trail of death and destruction behind; his violence is gratuitous but not brutal, he doesn't kill for pleasure but only to achieve his goal as quickly as possible; this character can be seen as the development of the motorcycle killer from Raising Arizona. 

Finally, we have Sheriff Bell: unlike Marge Gunderson (Fargo), who manages to contain the surrounding evil with her common sense and positivity, Ed Tom is nearing retirement, observing the gruesome events more like a disinterested spectator, not even trying to stop what is happening. But this isn't merely due to age: Ed Tom would be "old" even at 20 because he grew up with values no longer reflective of his surrounding reality; trying to intervene would mean admitting he's part of this world he refuses to accept. The sheriff's character is introduced via the initial narration, but until halfway through the film, his presence is almost negligible; as the story progresses and the clash between Moss and Chigurh unfolds, his presence, words, and thoughts become increasingly significant, and the initial western-noir gradually transforms into an existential drama.

Not only does the American dream come out shattered, but there's not a glimmer of hope or purity, as Moss's widow discovers to her detriment, a victim of actions she had nothing to do with. Irony is present, as the duo provides unexpected moments of comedy in some dialogues, helpful in easing the tension, but there's irony also in the role reversal: Moss shifts from antelope hunter to Chigurh's prey, and the killer becomes a victim of Fate through a car accident.

From a technical standpoint, the Coens pare everything down to the essentials: no camera virtuosity and no music (just a few years prior, their films were packed with musical sequences), and even the dialogues are minimalistic, aligned with Cormac McCarthy's tradition (some are faithfully reproduced). As already mentioned, both the film and the book mislead the unsuspecting viewer/reader with a story that seems like a modern western but quickly morphs into something else, expecting a showdown between the three main characters, yet incredibly, they barely meet throughout the film, while the death of what should be the main character, Moss, occurs off-screen and is shown after the fact.

A refined film with strong contrasts, violent and with deep moral undertones, you expect a showdown, but instead, you only get the internal reckoning of Sheriff Bell, one of the rare cases where both public and critics agree (besides Bardem's Oscar, the film won three more statues and numerous additional awards) and certainly one of the highest points in the Coen brother's filmography.

RATING = 8.5