Review of No Country for Old Men (2007) by Zachary P — 18 Oct 2013

From the moment I heard Tommy Lee Jones's opening monologue in No Country for Old Men, I kind of figured Tommy Lee for my daddy. They're a lot alike. Whenever my family watches a movie with some kind of sadistic, gleeful villain, no matter how many of my brothers liked the movie, my daddy didn't really care for just the darkness. Couldn't abide by it. Plus my momma's in love with Tommy Lee and she's in love with Daddy. So there's that.

I reckon Westerns deal mostly with physics. You got your forces and your stationary objects. Your forces are the good guys, and they have to move the objects, which are the bad guys, and then the movie's ended well. The question No Country for Old Men raises is, what if your object is equal to your force?

Javier Bardem supplies the object, a hitman who operates on a code that is always merciless and often sadistic, and is terrifying in the role. Josh Brolin is a cowboy that defies the object. If he can simply move it, he stands to profit immensely. If he can't, he loses everything. And so he'll do whatever it takes to move it. Woody Harrelson is a bounty hunter opposing the object. He moves it because that's his job. Kelly MacDonald is Brolin's wife, who refuses to play by the object's rules. If she doesn't accept it, maybe it doesn't exist. And Tommy Lee (playing a man instead of a cartoon, as he is so often cast in his age), well, he's the sheriff, who says this at the outset:

"There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville here awhile back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a 14 year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it.... Said that if they turned him out, he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell: 'Be there in about fifteen minutes.' I don't know what to make of that. I surely don't.".

What if your object is equal to your force? That question is No Country for Old Men.