No Country for Old Men

It seems at first like an odd pairing: the Coen brothers, they of the dark-humored film genre conflations, and Cormac McCarthy, the modern laureate of the Southern Gothic novel. Yet the Coens' adaptation of McCarthy's as-if-written-for-the-screen No Country for Old Men becomes a marvelous meld of sensibilities. The film is essentially a crime drama although also something of a chase film. It holds up against the Coens' earlier genre masterpieces like Miller's Crossing and Fargo and makes recent genre misfires like Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers more forgivable. The No Country for Old Men storyline is as old as the template for the brothers' first film, Blood Simple: Follow the money. At least three characters are chasing a satchel filled with $2 million. One of them is Anton Chigurh (Bardem), a character who immediately leaps to the forefront of indelible American monsters. As it unfolds, the cat-and-mouse chase is a sheer delight to watch. The performances are captivating, too.