No Country for Old Men is a 2007 American neo-Western crime thriller film written, directed, produced, and edited by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin, the film is set in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas, United States. The film revisits the themes of fate, conscience, and circumstance that the Coen brothers had explored in the films Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), and Fargo (1996). It follows three main characters: Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), a Vietnam War veteran and welder who stumbles upon a large sum of money in the desert, Anton Chigurh (Bardem), a hitman who is sent to recover the money, and Ed Tom Bell (Jones), a sheriff investigating the crime. The film also stars Kelly Macdonald as Moss's wife, Carla Jean, and Woody Harrelson as Carson Wells, a bounty hunter seeking Moss and the return of the money.
No Country for Old Men premiered in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 19. The film became a commercial success, grossing $171 million worldwide against a budget of $25 million. Critics praised the Coens' direction and screenplay and Bardem's performance, and the film was heavily awarded, winning four Academy Awards (including Best Picture), three BAFTAs, and two Golden Globes. The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year, and the National Board of Review selected it as the best of 2007. To date, it is the last Western film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture (the others being Cimarron in 1931, Dances With Wolves in 1990, and Unforgiven in 1992).
No Country for Old Men was considered one of the best films of 2007, and many regard it as the Coen brothers' magnum opus. It has since been widely recognized as one of the greatest films of the 2000s and 21st century. The Guardians John Patterson wrote: "the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based Western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors", and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said that it is "a new career peak for the Coen brothers" and "as entertaining as hell". In 2024, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".National Film Registry Adds 25 Titles for 2024 - Deadline
Plot
In 1980, hitman Anton Chigurh is arrested in Texas. He escapes by strangling the sheriff's deputy to death and steals a car by killing the driver with a captive bolt pistol. Later, he spares the life of a gas station owner for correctly calling a coin toss.
Llewelyn Moss is hunting pronghorns in the desert. He comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, finding several dead men, a wounded Mexican man begging for water, drugs in a truck, and a briefcase containing $2 million in cash. He takes the briefcase and returns home. Feeling guilty, he returns with water that night but finds the man dead. He looks up to the ridge and sees two armed men who pursue him in a truck. He escapes by diving into a river. After making his way back home, Moss sends his wife, Carla Jean, to stay with her mother.
Chigurh is hired to recover the missing money; meanwhile, Terrell County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell begins investigating the failed drug deal. Chigurh searches Moss's trailer home, using his bolt pistol to blow out the door lock. Moss takes a taxi to a motel in Del Rio, where he hides the briefcase in his room's air duct. When Moss returns to the motel after purchasing new boots, he sees the curtains in his room in a different position from when he left and rightly assumes he has been found. Following a tracking device hidden in the case, Chigurh goes to Moss's motel and kills three Mexican mobsters who were waiting for Moss in his room. Moss has rented a second room adjacent to his first room with access to the duct where the money is hidden. He retrieves the briefcase before Chigurh opens the duct.
Moving to a motel in the border town of Eagle Pass, Moss discovers the tracking device, but Chigurh has already found him. Their gunfight spills onto the streets, badly wounding both and killing a truck driver. Moss flees to Mexico, hiding the case along the Rio Grande. Chigurh cleans and stitches his wounds with stolen supplies. Carson Wells, a bounty hunter, visits a wounded Moss in a Mexican hospital and offers protection from Chigurh in exchange for the money, but Moss refuses. Wells locates the case but does not take it, and returns to his hotel where Chigurh ambushes him. The phone rings as Wells is bartering for his life. Chigurh fatally shoots him and takes the call from Moss, vowing to kill Carla Jean unless Moss gives up the money.
Moss retrieves the case from the Rio Grande and arranges to meet Carla Jean at a motel in El Paso, where he plans to give her the money and hide her from danger. Carla Jean's mother unknowingly reveals Moss's location to a group of Mexicans tailing them. Bell reaches the motel in El Paso, only to find that the Mexicans have killed Moss. Carla Jean arrives later and weeps when Bell somberly removes his hat.
That night, Bell returns to the crime scene and sees that the lock has been blown out. Chigurh appears to be on the other side of the door, holding his shotgun. Bell hesitantly enters and finds the room empty, and notices that the room's air duct has been opened.
Carla Jean returns from her mother's funeral to find Chigurh waiting in her bedroom. Chigurh says he must fulfill his vow, but offers a coin toss as a compromise. Carla Jean refuses to call it, saying that only he can be responsible for her fate. Chigurh checks the soles of his boots as he leaves the house. As he drives through the neighborhood, another car crashes into him, breaking his arm. He pays a passing boy for the shirt off his back to use as a sling, and limps away.
Bell visits a relative and former lawman, Ellis, and tells him he plans to retire because he feels overmatched by the recent violence. Ellis tells Bell that he cannot evade fate, and only vanity makes him think otherwise. Bell retires from the force. One morning, he shares two dreams with his wife. In the first, he lost some money his father had given him. In the other, as he rode on horseback through a snowy mountain pass, his father rode past him carrying fire in a horn, and he knew his father would prepare a campfire ahead for both of them.
Cast
Tommy Lee Jones as Ed Tom Bell Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss Woody Harrelson as Carson Wells Kelly Macdonald as Carla Jean Moss Garret Dillahunt as Wendell Tess Harper as Loretta Bell Barry Corbin as Ellis Stephen Root as Man who hires Wells Rodger Boyce as El Paso Sheriff Beth Grant as Carla Jean's mother Ana Reeder as Poolside Woman Matt Geistler as Poolside Man Josh Blaylock and Caleb Jones as Boys on Bikes Gene Jones as Gas Station Proprietor Kathy Lamkin as Desert Aire Manager
The role of Llewelyn Moss was originally offered to Heath Ledger, but he turned it down to spend time with his newborn daughter Matilda. Garret Dillahunt was also in the running for the role of Llewelyn Moss, auditioning five times for the role, but instead was offered the part of Wendell, Ed Tom Bell's deputy. Josh Brolin, who was not the Coens' first choice, enlisted the help of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to make an audition reel during the production of Grindhouse. His agent eventually secured a meeting with the Coens and he was given the part.
Javier Bardem nearly withdrew from the role of Anton Chigurh due to issues with scheduling. English actor Mark Strong was put on standby to take over, but the scheduling issues were resolved, and Bardem took on the role.
Production Producer Scott Rudin bought the film rights to McCarthy's novel and suggested an adaptation to the Coen brothers, who at the time were attempting to adapt the novel To the White Sea by James Dickey. By August 2005, the Coens agreed to write and direct the film, having identified with how it provided a sense of place and also how it played with genre conventions. Joel Coen said that the book's unconventional approach "was familiar, congenial to us; we're naturally attracted to subverting genre. We liked the fact that the bad guys never really meet the good guys, that McCarthy did not follow through on formula expectations." Ethan Coen explained that the "pitiless quality" was a "hallmark of the book, which has an unforgiving landscape and characters but is also about finding some kind of beauty without being sentimental." The adaptation was the second of McCarthy's work, following All the Pretty Horses in 2000.
Writing The Coens' script was mostly faithful to the source material. On their writing process, Ethan said, "One of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat." Still, they pruned where necessary. A teenage runaway who appeared late in the book and some backstory related to Bell were both removed. Also changed from the original was Carla Jean Moss's reaction when finally faced with the imposing figure of Chigurh. As explained by Kelly Macdonald, "the ending of the book is different. She reacts more in the way I react. She kind of falls apart. In the film she's been through so much and she can't lose any more. It's just she's got this quiet acceptance of it." In the book, some attention is paid to the daughter, Deborah, whom the Bells lost and who haunts the protagonist in his thoughts.
Richard Corliss of Time stated that "the Coen brothers have adapted literary works before. Miller's Crossing was a sly, unacknowledged blend of two Dashiell Hammett tales, Red Harvest and The Glass Key; and O Brother Where Art Thou? transferred the Odyssey to the American south in the 1930s. But No Country for Old Men is their first film taken, pretty straightforwardly, from a prime American novel."
The writing is also notable for its minimal use of dialogue. Josh Brolin discussed his initial nervousness with having so little dialogue to work with: I mean it was a fear, for sure, because dialogue, that's what you kind of rest upon as an actor, you know? ... Drama and all the stuff is all dialogue motivated. You have to figure out different ways to convey ideas. You don't want to overcompensate because the fear is that you're going to be boring if nothing's going on. You start doing this and this and taking off your hat and putting it on again or some bullshit that doesn't need to be there. So yeah, I was a little afraid of that in the beginning.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised the novel adaptation. "Not since Robert Altman merged with the short stories of Raymond Carver in Short Cuts have filmmakers and author fused with such devastating impact as the Coens and McCarthy. Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved."
Director Joel Coen articulated his interest in the McCarthy novel. "There's something about it – there were echoes of it in No Country for Old Men that were quite interesting for us", he said, "because it was the idea of the physical work that somebody does that helps reveal who they are and is part of the fiber of the story. Because you only saw this person in this movie making things and doing things in order to survive and to make this journey, and the fact that you were thrown back on that, as opposed to any dialogue, was interesting to us."