January Movie Pick: 'No Country for Old Men'

Spoilers: If you haven't seen the movie, go watch it and come back. The film makes you think for a while that the only mistake Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, makes is going back to give water to that poor dying man. However, the hunters prove themselves capable of finding whoever they are looking for. Our main protagonist tells his wife, 'At the point when you stop looking for 2 million dollars?' as a rhetorical question—a question that hits you, signaling that there is going to be a final showdown. It's weird that every time I watch this movie, I completely forget it. To be honest, I think that is a gift from the movie gods because experiencing all the shock and craft behind it every time is pure pleasure.

This is the story of death, much like watching 'Tom & Jerry' where the cat is after the mouse, the dog is after the cat, the cat kills the owner of the house, and the mouse escapes the police dog, all while killing some of the other dogs. You know that episode. But yeah, this is a story about death; no one can escape it, and it is coming for everyone, patiently. We start with Llewelyn Moss, whose hunt is disturbed by a wounded dog. He follows the hurt animal to a deal gone wrong in the desert, where he finds a ton of cocaine, 2 million dollars, and a bunch of dead humans and dogs around it. There are some details in the search for the money that were Unbelievably well thought out. I learned a lot watching this movie. He takes the money and goes home, but he comes back because the sole survivor needed water, or he saw his face and was planning to kill him. He took water with him, so that's a promising act. But soon after returning to the crime scene, the chase begins.

At some point, I lost the logic behind the chase, but until the third act, I was able to follow every decision clearly and discover, once again after my amnesia, that this movie is incredibly well-crafted and smart. The two directors, also behind none other than 'The Big Lebowski,' create a nerve-wracking 2-hour chase without a stop. No one is able to rest, portraying the ongoing chase by death that we all experience. Javier Bardem, playing one of the most psychotic vicious murderers that I have ever seen, takes on the role of death for a while and goes after everything. He just shows up and takes you out brutally just like that. Sometimes he gives you a choice if you want to flip the coin, leaving your destiny to luck, but most of the time, if he meets you, you are gutted. Going through my notes from yesterday, I wrote that if Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar for the Joker, Bardem should've win for the portrayal of evil itself. It is like evil was trying to be balanced for a while with these heads and tails games, giving you a 50/50 chance. This was his form of mercy. I watched today as Bardem received an Oscar for portraying that vile man Anton Chigurh for best supporting actor. When you see the joy radiating from him while he takes the award and thanks his mom and Spain, you see the 180 between him and this unstoppable machine that is Chigurh. There was even a calculated logic behind the weapon he chose, as if the Coen brothers were consulted with real-life murder experts, and they probably were, with all the logic and details. No one Anton wanted escaped, not even Llewelyn Moss, who I came to really like. So imagine my surprise and shock seeing him laying down death in a crime scene discovered by our Sheriff. We were rooting for him. And the way the directors didn't show neither his death nor the deal that went wrong from the beginning, only the obscene aftermath. Chigurh then proceeded with his promise, going after Moss's wife Carla, played by Kelly Macdonald, who left an awfully good impression, and they didn't show her death scene either. Yet, they left you with your brewing imagination working on what happened before he went out from that house. I find it really troubling that I am able to forget such a masterpiece, yet strangely satisfying. There are more movies that I would love to forget like this one so I can experience them once more like it is for the first time.

Our Sheriff couldn't keep up with this league of killers. These hunters were at the top of their game, and sometimes when I couldn't follow the logic of the decisions (which is a super interesting task for the next watch if I don't forget), my thoughts just gave up, leaving it to their skills and intuition. Sheriff Bell was always one step behind them, even when it seemed that he is so close. For a moment at the end when he returned to the crime scene to expect once more because he had a hunch or something, it seemed just for a moment that he made a conscious decision to enter the wrong door because he felt that behind the real one was the evil presence of Chigurh and his real end. Explaining his dreams to his wife at the end about his dead father, who died younger than he is now and how in his second dream his father passed him by carrying this flame in a horn, and that he went to some cold place. The sheriff then continues, saying that whenever he gets to that dark and cold place, he felt that his father will be there. It left me thinking, 'What is this movie about?' Besides a very compelling story. Is that why I keep forgetting it because the end was so dry? And then it hit me and continues to hit me. This was a movie about death and how inevitable it is, but sometimes you can choose to slow the process down because life, no matter how quick it is, is something that you know better how to do than dying. And after all, you have to make some sense of it even though everything seems unreasonable. I love this movie, and I am afraid that this time I won't forget it, but that won't stop me from seeing it again.

Iliya Badev