Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 18:23, 20 April 2012

No Country for Old Men
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Joel Coen Ethan Coen
Screenplay by	Joel Coen Ethan Coen
Produced by	Joel Coen Ethan Coen Scott Rudin
Starring	Tommy Lee Jones Javier Bardem Josh Brolin
Cinematography	Roger Deakins
Edited by	Roderick Jaynes
Music by	Carter Burwell
Distributed by	Miramax Films Paramount Vantage
Release date	November 9, 2007 (2007-11-09)
Running time	122 minutes
Country	Template:Film US
Language	English
Budget	$25 million
Box office	$171,627,166

No Country for Old Men is a 2007 American crime thriller film written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, and is based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. It stars Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin, and tells the story of an ordinary man to whom chance delivers a fortune that is not his, and the ensuing cat-and-mouse drama, as three men crisscross each other's paths in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas. Themes of fate, conscience and circumstance re-emerge that the Coen brothers have previously explored in Blood Simple and Fargo.

Production was scheduled for May 2006, and the film was shot primarily in New Mexico and Las Vegas, and other scenes were filmed around Marfa and Sanderson in West Texas. The film premiered in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 19, and commercially opened in limited release in 28 theaters in the United States on November 9, 2007, grossing $1,226,333 over the opening weekend, and opened in the United Kingdom (limited release) and Ireland on January 18, 2008. It became the biggest box-office hit for the Coens to date, grossing more than 170 million dollars worldwide, until it was surpassed by True Grit in 2010.

No Country for Old Men received universal critical acclaim, and appeared on more critics' top ten lists (354) than any other film of 2007, and was the most selected as the best film of the year. It is regarded by many critics as the Coen brothers finest film. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "as good a film as the Coen brothers...have ever made," The Guardian journalist John Patterson said the film proved "that 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 the Rolling Stone said that it is "a new career peak for the Coen brothers" and is "as entertaining as hell."

Among its four Oscars at the 2008 Academy Awards were awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, allowing the Coen brothers to join the five previous directors honored three times for the same film. In addition, the film won three British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) including Best Director, and two Golden Globes. The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year.

Plot

West Texas in June 1980 is desolate, wide open country, and Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) laments the increasing violence in a region where he, like his father and grandfather before him, has risen to the office of sheriff.

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hunting pronghorn, comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone awry: several dead men and dogs, a wounded Mexican begging for water, and two million dollars in a satchel that he takes to his trailer home. Late that night, he returns with water for the dying man, but is chased away by two men in a truck and loses his vehicle. When he gets back home he grabs the cash, sends his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) to her mother's, and makes his way to a motel in the next countywhere he hides the satchel in the air vent of his room.

Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is a hitman who has been hired to recover the money. He has already strangled a sheriff's deputy to escape custody and stolen a car by using a captive bolt pistol to kill the driver. Now he carries a receiver that traces the money via a tracking device concealed inside the satchel. Bursting into Moss' hideout at night, Chigurh surprises a group of Mexicans set to ambush Moss, and murders them all. Moss, who has rented the connecting room on the other side, is one step ahead. By the time Chigurh removes the vent cover with a dime, Moss is already back on the road with the cash.

In a border town hotel, Moss finally finds the electronic bug, but not before Chigurh is upon him. A firefight between them spills onto the streets, leaving both men wounded. Moss flees across the border, collapsing from his injuries before he is taken to a Mexican hospital. There, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), another hired operative, offers protection in return for the money.

After Chigurh cleans and stitches his own wounds with stolen supplies, he gets the drop on Wells back at his hotel and kills him just as Moss calls the room. Picking up the call and casually raising his feet to avoid the spreading blood, Chigurh promises Moss that Carla Jean will go untouched if he gives up the money. Moss remains defiant.

Moss arranges to rendezvous with his wife at a motel in El Paso to give her the money and send her out of harm's way. She reluctantly accepts Bell's offer to save her husband, but he arrives only in time to see a pickup carrying several men speeding away from the motel and Moss lying dead in his room. That night, Bell returns to the crime scene and finds the lock blown out in his suspect's familiar style. Chigurh hides behind the door of a motel room, observing the shifting light through an empty lock hole. His gun drawn, Bell enters Moss' room and notices that the vent cover has been removed with a dime and the vent is empty.

Bell visits his Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin), an ex-lawman. Bell plans to retire because he feels "overmatched," but Ellis points out that the region has always been violent. For Ellis, thinking it is "all waiting on you, that's vanity."

Carla Jean returns from her mother's funeral to find Chigurh waiting in the bedroom. When she tells him she does not have the money, he recalls the pledge he made to her husband that could have spared her. The best he will offer is a coin toss for her life, but she says that the choice is his. Chigurh leaves the house alone and carefully checks the soles of his boots. As he drives away, he is injured in a car accident and abandons the damaged vehicle.

Now retired, Bell shares two dreams with his wife (Tess Harper), both involving his deceased father. In the first dream he lost "some money" that his father had given him; in the second, he and his father were riding horses through a snowy mountain pass. His father, who was carrying fire in a horn, quietly passed by with his head down, "going on ahead, and fixin' to make a fire" in the surrounding dark and cold. Bell knew that when he got there his father would be waiting.

Cast

• Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a laconic, soon-to-retire county sheriff on the trail of Chigurh and Moss.
• Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, a hitman hired to recover the missing money. The character was a recurrence of the "Unstoppable Evil" archetype found in the Coen brothers' work, though the brothers wanted to avoid one-dimensionality, particularly a comparison to The Terminator. The Coen brothers sought to cast someone "who could have come from Mars" to avoid a sense of identification. The brothers introduced the character in the beginning of the film in a manner similar to the opening of the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Chigurh has been perceived as a "modern equivalent of Death from Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal." Chigurh's distinctive look was derived from a 1979 photo from a book supplied by Jones which featured photos of brothel patrons on the Texas-Mexico border. After seeing himself with the new hairdo for the first time, Bardem reportedly said, "I'm not going to be laid for three months." Bardem signed on because he had been a Coens' fan ever since he saw their debut, Blood Simple.
• Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, a welder and Vietnam veteran who flees with two million dollars in drug money that he finds in an open field in Texas.
• Kelly Macdonald as Carla Jean Moss, Llewelyn Moss' wife. Despite having severe misgivings about her husband's plans to keep the money, she still supports him. Macdonald said that what attracted her to the character of Moss was that she "wasn't obvious. She wasn't your typical trailer trash kind of character. At first you think she's one thing and by the end of the film, you realize that she's not quite as naïve as she might come across."
• Woody Harrelson as Carson Wells, a cocky bounty hunter and acquaintance of Chigurh hired to recover the drug money.
• Garret Dillahunt as Deputy Wendell, Bell's inexperienced deputy sheriff assisting in the investigation and providing comic relief.
• Tess Harper as Loretta Bell, the sheriff's wife, who provides reassurance in his darker moods.
• Barry Corbin as Ellis, a retired deputy shot in the line of duty and now wheelchair-bound. He acts as a straight-talking sounding board to his nephew, Bell.
• Beth Grant as Agnes, Carla Jean's mother and the mother-in-law of Moss. She provides comic relief despite the fact that she is dying from "the cancer."
• Stephen Root as the man who hires Chigurh, Wells (only mentioned in passing as a possible party to the original drug deal), and the Mexicans.
• Gene Jones as Thomas Thayer, an elderly rural gas station clerk with good fortune, as his call on Anton's coin flip saves his life.
• Brandon Smith as a stern INS official wearing sunglasses as he guards the U.S.-Mexican border. He lets Moss cross once he learns he was in the Vietnam War.

Production

Producer Scott Rudin bought the book rights to McCarthy's novel and suggested a film 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 Coen brothers agreed to write and direct a film adaptation of No Country for Old Men, having identified with how the novel provided a sense of place and also how it played with genre conventions. Joel Coen said of the unconventional approach, "That 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." The Coens also identified the appeal of the novel to be its "pitiless quality." Ethan Coen explained, "That's 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 to be the second of McCarthy's work, following the 2000 film All the Pretty Horses.

Writing

"One of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat."

The Coens' script was unusually faithful to their source material. In fact, 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' reaction when finally faced with the imposing figure of Chigurh. As Kelly MacDonald explained to CanMag: "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."

Richard Corliss of Time magazine stated that "the Coen brothers have adapted literary works before. Miller's Crossing was a sly, unacknowledged blend of two Dashiell Hammett's 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." (Their 2004 film The Ladykillers is based on a 1955 British black comedy film of the same name).

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 over-compensate 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.

Director Joel Coen justified 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."

Peter Travers of the 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."

Title

The title is taken from the opening line of 20th-century Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium.":

”THAT is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect”

Richard Gilmore relates the Yeats’ poem to the Coens’ film. “The lament that can be heard in these lines,” he says, “is for no longer belonging to the country of the young. It is also a lament for the way the young neglect the wisdom of the past and, presumably, of the old … Yeats chooses Byzantium because it was a great early Christian city in which Plato’s Academy, for a time, was still allowed to function. The historical period of Byzantium was a time of culmination that was also a time of transition. In his book of mystical writings, A Vision, Yeats says, ‘I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architect and artificers…spoke to the multitude and the few alike.’ The idea of a balance and a coherence in a society’s religious, aesthetic, and practical life is Yeat’s ideal …It is an ideal rarely realized in this world and maybe not even in ancient Byzantium. Certainly within the context of the movie No Country for Old Men, one has the sense, especially from Bell as the chronicler of the times, that things are out of alignment, that balance and harmony are gone from the land and from the people.”

Differences from the novel

Tasha Robinson lists the differences between the Coen brothers award-winning script and the Cormac McCarthy novel:
“• The book is less removed about the end of the interaction between Chigurh (the Javier Bardem character) and Moss' wife …; it spells out the fact that he shoots her. She also doesn't refuse to call heads or tails on his coin: She calls it incorrectly, though they then have pretty much the same conversation they have in the film, about how he, not the coin, is deciding her fate.
• The book is also more specific about how Chigurh ended up in the car of the deputy he kills at the beginning of the film; he murdered a man for a snotty remark, then permitted himself to be captured ‘to see if I could extricate myself by an act of will.’ Explaining some aspects of his life to Carson Wells (the Woody Harrelson character) before killing him, Chigurh describes this as a vain, foolish act.
• The first hotel confrontation between Moss and Chigurh plays out very differently; rather than punching out the lock and wounding Moss, Chigurh apparently steals a key from the murdered clerk and quietly enters Moss' room, and Moss hides and takes him captive at gunpoint, so they have a chance to see and know each other. Then Moss runs and the chase/shootout begins.
• There's a scene where Chigurh delivers the recovered cash to some higher-up whom he's never met before, but whom he's clearly decided is now his employer; he presents the money and they come to terms after a brief ‘How did you find me?’ ‘What difference does it make?’ conversation.
• There's also a protracted scene toward the end where Sheriff Bell interviews one of the kids who witnessed Chigurh's car accident, and apparently stole Chigurh's gun out of his car afterward.
• The … chase scene with the dog that follows Moss downstream until he manages to dry out his gun and shoot it is an invention of the film, and doesn't appear in the book in any way.
• Where the film last sees Moss alive heading off to have a beer with a lady who calls to him from poolside at her hotel, the book has a lengthy interlude between him and a young female hitchhiker, whom he gives money and advice ... He actually dies because he puts down his gun when the Mexicans following him take her hostage.”
Robinson adds that “the list of plot changes above may seem long, but they represent a small percentage of the actual story, which mostly plays out in the film exactly as McCarthy puts it on the page, scene for scene, conversation for conversation. A lot of the speeches and wittiest exchanges are verbatim from the book.”

Other listed differences include:
“• omits all references to Bell's experience in World War II, which is a key to understanding his character in the novel. In the novel, in the scene with Uncle Ellis, Bell tells a long story about how he received a medal of honor in the war, which he feels he did not deserve because he ran away and left his men. Bell is haunted by his guilt about this incident, which the film completely omits.
• The opening is composed of lines taken from 3 different passages of first-person narration: (90; 63-4; 3-4). As one can see from the page numbers, the filmmakers took passages out of their contexts and reworked them into one coherent statement.
• shoot out between Chigurh and Moss after Moss escapes from Hotel Eagle: This scene intensifies the dramatic action in which Moss barely escapes in the truck and then waits for Chigurh and wounds him, momentarily turns the tables as Moss hunts Chigurh who escapes. In the novel, Chigurh gets involved with battling the Mexicans and loses track of Moss.”

Craig Kennedy adds that “one key difference is that of focus. The novel belongs to Sheriff Bell. Each chapter begins with Bell’s narration, which dovetails and counterpoints the action of the main story. Though the film opens with Bell speaking, much of what he says in the book is condensed and it turns up in other forms. Also, Bell has an entire backstory in the book that doesn’t make it into the film. The result is a movie that is more simplified thematically, but one that gives more of the characters an opportunity to shine.”

Jay Ellis elaborates on Chigurh’s encounter with the man behind the counter at the gas station. “Where McCarthy gives us Chigurh’s question as, ‘What’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss? (55)’, he says, ‘the film elides the word ‘saw’, but the Coens of course tend to the visual. Where the book describes the setting as ‘almost dark’ (52), the film clearly depicts high noon: no shadows are notable in the establishing shot of the gas station, and the sunlight is bright even if behind cloud cover. The light through two windows and a door comes evenly through three walls in the interior shots. But this difference increases our sense of the man’s desperation later, when he claims he needs to close and he closes at ‘near dark’; it is darker, as it were, in the cave of this man’s ignorance than it is outside in the bright light of truth.”

Casting

Javier Bardem told the Coens that he would happily take the part even though he hated violence, had never fired a gun, was uncomfortable speaking English and doesn’t drive a car

Actors Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones entered talks to join the cast in February 2006. Jones was the first actor to be officially cast in No Country for Old Men. The Coen brothers felt that Jones fit the role since they wanted to avoid sentimentality and not have the audiences perceive the character to be a Charley Weaver type. Praising Jones' credentials, the Coen brothers said, "He's from San Saba, Texas, not far from where the movie takes place. He's the real thing regarding that region." Joel Coen further outlined the directors' reasons for hiring Tommy Lee Jones in interview with Emanuel Levy:

There are just very, very few people who can carry a role like this one Sheriff Bell is the soul of the movie and also, in a fundamental way, the region is so much a part of Sheriff Bell, so we needed someone who understood it It's a role that also requires a kind of subtlety that only a really, really great actor can bring to it. Again, the list of these is pretty short, so when you put those two criteria together, you come up with Tommy Lee Jones. Being a Texan, the region is a part of his core.

Javier Bardem stated that the Coen brothers are his favorite directors of all time. “The complexity of Chigurh was a kind of dream,” he added. “… I saw him as a man with a mission that was beyond his control. Someone chose his fate for him. I thought of him as a man who never had sex. He doesn’t like human fluids, even his own … It was important to think about how he relates to other people, even sexually.” Bardem told the Coens that he would happily take the part even though he hated violence, had never fired a gun, was uncomfortable speaking English and doesn’t drive a car. “They weren’t concerned,” he said. “When you act, you learn things. Before ‘No Country,’ I had never held a gun and now I can drive a car. When I was doing Chigurh, my English became so good that I was dreaming in English.”

Josh Brolin joined the cast shortly after in April, prior to the start of production. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino filmed Brolin's first audition for the movie on a Panavision Genesis camera during lunch while filming Grindhouse. However, Brolin was initially overlooked for the role of Llewelyn. Other actors had been offered the role, including Heath Ledger, who turned down the offer to take time off from acting. According to Brolin, the Coens' only response to the audition tape was, "Who lit it?" Brolin said it was only due to his agents' persistence that he eventually got a callback:

What I found out now was their last casting session, they were focused on a couple of actors. They called me the night before and they said, basically, no harm, no foul. 'Leave us alone, have him come down.' I studied a few scenes and I came down and I met them, and there was really no reaction in the meeting. I walked out thinking, 'It was great meeting the Coens. I'm a big fan. That's cool.' And by the time I got home I found out they wanted me to do it.

Brolin broke his collarbone in a motorcycle accident a few days before filming was due to begin, but he and his doctor lied about the extent of his injury to the Coens and they let him continue in the role.

The Coens later wrote a short tongue-in-cheek piece for Esquire magazine called "Josh Brolin, the Casting Mistake of the Year," in which they claimed to have believed that they had cast James Brolin in the role of the aging Vietnam vet, and upon realizing their mistake were forced to reset the movie in the year 1980, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to recast Tommy Lee Jones' role with Shia LaBeouf.

Kelly Macdonald's agent originally wasn't sure she was right for the part of Moss' wife, and Macdonald is reported as having to "fight for the role." She was ultimately nominated for a BAFTA for best supporting actress.

Filming

The project was a co-production between Miramax Films and Paramount's classics-based division in a 50/50 partnership, and production was scheduled for May 2006 in New Mexico and Texas. With a total budget of $25 million, production was slated to take place in the cities of Las Vegas, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as in the state of Texas. Filmmakers estimated spending between $12 and $17 million of the budget in New Mexico. A movie set of a border checkpoint was built at the intersection of Interstate 25 and New Mexico State Highway 65. The bulk of the film was shot in New Mexico, and primarily there in Las Vegas, which doubled as the border towns of Eagle Pass and Del Rio, Texas. The U.S.-Mexico border crossing bridge was actually a freeway overpass in Las Vegas. Other scenes were filmed around Marfa and Sanderson in West Texas, and the scene in the town square was filmed in Piedras Negras, Coahuila in Mexico.

The Coens expressed how the scene where a dog swims after actor Josh Brolin was filmed. "It was basically trained to kill people," they said. "The trainer had this little neon-orange toy that he would show to the dog, and the dog would start slavering and get unbelievably agitated and would do anything to get the toy. So the dog would be restrained, and Josh, before each take, would show the dog that he had the toy, he'd put it in his pants and jump into the river ... without having any idea of how fast this dog could swim. So the dog was then coming after him ... so Josh came out of the river sopping wet and pulled the thing out of his crotch and –he was talking to himself– he said, 'What do you do? ... Oh, I'm an actor.'"

Cinematographer Roger Deakins, collaborating with the Coen brothers for the ninth time, spoke of his approach to the film's look: "The big challenge on No Country for Old Men is making it very realistic, to match the story. It's early days, but I'm imagining doing it very edgy and dark, and quite sparse. Not so stylized." In an interview with Lynnea Chapman King, Deakins commented on the violent scenes he filmed for the Coens. “There is an awkward dilemma attached to the work that needs to be considered”, he says. “No Country certainly contains scenes of some very realistically staged fictional violence, but I wouldn’t say it was in any way gratuitous or voyeuristic. Without this violet depiction of evil there would not be the emotional “pay off” at the end of the film when Ed Tom bemoans the fact that God has not entered his life.”

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, cinematographer Deakins described how “everything's worked out” when working with the Coens. “Everything's storyboarded before we start shooting,” Deakins said. “In No Country, there's maybe only a dozen shots that are not in the final film. It's that order of planning. And we only shot 250,000 feet, whereas most productions of that size might shoot 700,000 or a million feet of film. It's quite precise, the way they approach everything.”

Deakins further elaborated that in the scene where Chigurh makes a gas-station clerk toss a coin the camera is physically moving forward so slowly that the audience isn't even aware of the move. “We never use a zoom,” he said. “I don't even carry a zoom lens with me, unless it's for something very specific … When the camera itself moves forward, the audience is moving, too. You're actually getting closer to somebody or something. It has, to me, a much more powerful effect, because it's a three-dimensional move. A zoom is more like a focusing of attention. You're just standing in the same place and concentrating on one smaller element in the frame. Emotionally, that's a very different effect.”

Mick Hubris-Cherrier stresses that “latent violence is the psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who has already left behind a collection of corpses in his search for pilfered money, has arrived at the hideout of Carla Jean, the wife of the man who took the money. We already know that Chigurh can kill easily, or he can just as easily let people go. But we don’t know which Chigurh is in the room with Carla Jean as she tries to reason with him to spare her life. The Coens (and D.P. Roger Deakins) chose to place Chigurh in the shadows in a corner of the room. The decision to expose for the bright areas of the room (… his hands in the sun) and allow Chigurh’s face to fall several stops into underexposure heightens the tension of the scene because it keeps his features difficult to make out and his intensions inscrutable.”

Directing

The Coen brothers acknowledge the influence of Sam Peckinpah's work on their own. In an interview for The Guardian, they said, "Hard men in the south-west shooting each other – that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing. We were aware of those similarities, certainly." They discuss choreographing and directing the film's violent scenes in the Sydney Morning Herald: "'That stuff is such fun to do', the brothers chime in at the mention of their penchant for blood-letting. 'Even Javier would come in by the end of the movie, rub his hands together and say, 'OK, who am I killing today?' adds Joel. 'It's fun to figure out', says Ethan. 'It's fun working out how to choreograph it, how to shoot it, how to engage audiences watching it.'"

Director Joel Coen described the process of film making: “I can almost set my watch by how I'm going to feel at different stages of the process. It's always identical, whether the movie ends up working or not. I think when you watch the dailies, the film that you shoot every day, you're very excited by it and very optimistic about how it's going to work. And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.”

Josh Brolin discussed the Coens’ directing style in an interview, saying that the brothers "only really say what needs to be said. They don't sit there as directors and manipulate you and go into page after page to try to get you to a certain place. They may come in and say one word or two words, so that was nice to be around in order to feed the other thing. What should I do right now? I'll just watch Ethan go humming to himself and pacing. Maybe that's what I should do, too.'"

David Gritten of The Daily Telegraph wonders: "Are the Coens finally growing up?" He adds: "If feels pessimistic, Joel insists that's not the Coens' responsibility: 'I don't think the movie is more or less so than the novel. We tried to give it the same feeling.' The brothers do concede, however, that it's a dark piece of storytelling. 'It's refreshing for us to do different kinds of things,' says Ethan, 'and we'd just done a couple of comedies.'"

Musical score and sound

"What you hear mostly is a suffocating silence" ... Skip Lievsay, the film’s sound editor said: "I think makes the movie much more suspenseful. You’re not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone"

The Coens minimized the score used in the film, leaving large sections devoid of music. The concept was Ethan's, who persuaded a skeptical Joel to go with the idea. There is some music in the movie, scored by the Coens' longtime composer, Carter Burwell, but after finding that "most musical instruments didn't fit with the minimalist sound sculpture he had in mind he used singing bowls, standing metal bells traditionally employed in Buddhist meditation practice that produce a sustained tone when rubbed." The movie contains a "mere" 16 minutes of music, with several of those in the end credits. The music in the trailer was called "Diabolic Clockwork" by Two Steps From Hell. Sound editing and effects were provided by another longtime Coens collaborator, Skip Lievsay, who used a mixture of emphatic sounds (gun shots) and ambient noise (engine noise, prairie winds) in the mix. The Foley for the captive bolt pistol used by Chigurh was created using a pneumatic nail gun.

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker states that “there is barely any music, sensual or otherwise, and Carter Burwell’s score is little more than a fitful murmur.”, and Douglas McFarland states that “perhaps salient formal characteristic is the absence, with one telling exception, of a musical soundtrack, creating a mood conductive to thoughtful and unornamented speculation in what is otherwise a fierce and destructive landscape.”

Jay Ellis, however, disagrees. “ missed the extremely quiet but audible fade in a few tones from a keyboard beginning when Chigurh flips the coin for the gas station man”, he said. “This ambient music (by long-time Coens collaborator Carter Burwell) grows imperceptibly in volume so that it is easily missed as an element of the mis-en-scene. But it is there, telling our unconscious that something different is occurring with the toss; this becomes certain when it ends as Chigurh uncovers the coin on the counter. The deepest danger has passed as soon as Chigurh finds (and Javier Bardem’s acting confirms this) and reveals to the man that he has won.” In order to achieve such sound effect, Burwell "tuned the music’s swelling hum to the 60-hertz frequency of a refrigerator."

Dennis Lim of The New York Times stressed that “there is virtually no music on the soundtrack of this tense, methodical thriller. Long passages are entirely wordless. In some of the most gripping sequences what you hear mostly is a suffocating silence." Skip Lievsay, the film’s sound editor called this approach “quite a remarkable experiment,” and added that “suspense thrillers in Hollywood are traditionally done almost entirely with music. The idea here was to remove the safety net that lets the audience feel like they know what’s going to happen. I think it makes the movie much more suspenseful. You’re not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone.”

Jeffrey Overstreet adds that “the scenes in which Chigurh stalks Moss are as suspenseful as anything the Coens have ever staged. And that has as much to do with what we hear as what we see. No Country for Old Men lacks a traditional soundtrack, but don't say it doesn't have music. The blip-blip-blip of a transponder becomes as frightening as the famous theme from Jaws. The sound of footsteps on the hardwood floors of a hotel hallway are as ominous as the drums of war. When the leather of a briefcase squeaks against the metal of a ventilation shaft, you'll cringe, and the distant echo of a telephone ringing in a hotel lobby will jangle your nerves."

Style

While No Country for Old Men is a "doggedly faithful" adaptation of McCarthy's 2005 novel and its themes, the film also revisits themes which the Coens had explored in their earlier movies Blood Simple and Fargo. The three films share common themes, such as pessimism and nihilism. The novel's motifs of chance, free-will, and predestination are familiar territory for the Coen brothers, who presented similar threads and tapestries of "fate circumstance" in earlier works including Raising Arizona, which featured another hitman, albeit less serious in tone. Numerous critics cited the importance of chance to both the novel and the film, focusing on Chigurh's fate-deciding coin flipping, but noted that the nature of the film medium made it difficult to include the "self-reflective qualities of McCarthy's novel."

Still, the Coens open the film with a voice-over narration by Tommy Lee Jones (who plays Sheriff Ed Tom Bell) set against the barren Texas country landscape where he makes his home. His ruminations on a teenager he sent to the chair explain that, although the newspapers described the boy's murder of his 14-year-old girlfriend as a crime of passion, "he tolt me there weren't nothin' passionate about it. Said he'd been fixin' to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he'd kill somebody again. Said he was goin' to hell. Reckoned he'd be there in about 15 minutes." Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert praised the narration. “These words sounded verbatim to me from No Country for Old Men, the novel by Cormac McCarthy”, he said. “But I find they are not quite. And their impact has been improved upon in the delivery. When I get the DVD of this film, I will listen to that stretch of narration several times; Jones delivers it with a vocal precision and contained emotion that is extraordinary, and it sets up the entire film."

In The Village Voice, Scott Foundas writes that "Like McCarthy, the Coens are markedly less interested in who (if anyone) gets away with the loot than in the primal forces that urge the characters forward... In the end, everyone in No Country for Old Men is both hunter and hunted, members of some endangered species trying to forestall their extinction." Roger Ebert writes that "the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice."

New York Times critic A. O. Scott observes that Chigurh, Moss, and Bell each "occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined."

Variety critic Todd McCarthy describes Chigurh's modus operandi: “Death walks hand in hand with Chigurh wherever he goes, unless he decides otherwise .... f everything you've done in your life has led you to him, he may explain to his about-to-be victims, your time might just have come. 'You don't have to do this,' the innocent invariably insist to a man whose murderous code dictates otherwise. Occasionally, however, he will allow someone to decide his own fate by coin toss, notably in a tense early scene in an old filling station marbled with nervous humor”.

Jim Emerson describes how the Coens introduced Chigurh in one of the first scenes when he strangles the deputy who arrested him: “A killer rises: Our first blurred sight of Chigurh's face … As he moves forward, into focus, to make his first kill, we still don't get a good look at him because his head rises above the top of the frame. His victim, the deputy, never sees what's coming, and Chigurh, chillingly, doesn't even bother to look at his face while he garrotes him.”

Critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian stated that "the savoury, serio-comic tang of the Coens' film-making style is recognisably present, as is their predilection for the weirdness of hotels and motels". But he added that they "have found something that has heightened and deepened their identity as film-makers: a real sense of seriousness, a sense that their offbeat Americana and gruesome and surreal comic contortions can really be more than the sum of their parts".

Geoff Andrew of ‘’Time Out London’’ said that the Coens “find a cinematic equivalent to McCarthy’s language: his narrative ellipses, play with point of view, and structural concerns such as the exploration of the similarities and differences between Moss, Chigurh and Bell. Certain virtuoso sequences feel near-abstract in their focus on objects, sounds, light, colour or camera angle rather than on human presence ... Notwithstanding much marvellous deadpan humour, this is one of their darkest efforts”.

Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone spoke of the "dehumanization" in the film. "Recent movies about Iraq have pushed hard to show the growing dehumanization infecting our world," he said. "No Country doesn't have to preach or wave a flag — it carries in its bones the virus of what we've become. The Coens squeeze us without mercy in a vise of tension and suspense, but only to force us to look into an abyss of our own making."

Depicted violence

Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan commented on the violence depicted in the film: “The Coen brothers dropped the mask. They've put violence on screen before, lots of it, but not like this. Not anything like this. No Country for Old Men doesn't celebrate or smile at violence; it despairs of it.” However, Turan explained that “no one should see No Country for Old Men underestimating the intensity of its violence. But it's also clear that the Coen brothers and McCarthy are not interested in violence for its own sake, but for what it says about the world we live in … As the film begins, a confident deputy says I got it under control, and in moments he is dead. He didn't have anywhere near the mastery he imagined. And in this despairing vision, neither does anyone else.”

NPR critic Bob Mondello adds that “despite working with a plot about implacable malice, the Coen Brothers don't ever overdo. You could even say they know the value of understatement: At one point they garner chills simply by having a character check the soles of his boots as he steps from a doorway into the sunlight. By that time, blood has pooled often enough in No Country for Old Men that they don't have to show you what he's checking for.”

Critic Stephanie Zacharek of Salon states that “this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel touches on brutal themes, but never really gets its hands dirty. The movie’s violence isn’t pulpy and visceral, the kind of thing that hits like a fist; it’s brutal, and rather relentless, but there are still several layers of comfortable distance between it and us. At one point a character lifts his cowboy boot, daintily, so it won’t be mussed by the pool of blood gathering at his feet … The Coens have often used cruel violence to make their points — that’s nothing new — but putting that violence to work in the service of allegedly deep themes isn’t the same as actually getting your hands dirty. No Country for Old Men feels less like a breathing, thinking movie than an exercise. That may be partly because it’s an adaptation of a book by a contemporary author who’s usually spoken of in hushed, respectful, hat-in-hand tones, as if he were a schoolmarm who’d finally brought some sense and order to a lawless town.”

Ryan P. Doom explains how the violence devolves as the film progresses. “The savagery of American violence,” he says, “begins with Chigurh’s introduction: a quick one-two punch of strangulation and a bloody cattle gun. The strangulation in particular demonstrates the level of the Coens’ capability to create realistic carnage-to allow the audience to understand the horror that violence delivers.

Over the duration of No country for Old Men, Chigurh kills a total of 12 (possibly more) people, and, curiously enough, the violence devolves as the film progresses. During the first half of the film, the Coens never shy from unleashing Chigurh … The devolution of violence starts with Chigurh’s shootout with Moss in the hotel. Aside from the truck owner who is shot in the head after Moss flags him down, both the hotel clerk and Well’s death occur offscrean. Well’s death in particular demonstrates that murder means nothing. Calm beyond comfort, the camera pans away when Chigurh shoots Wells with a silenced shotgun as the phone rings. He answers. It’s Moss, and while they talk, blood oozes across the room toward Chigurh’s feet. Not moving, he places his feet up on the bed and continues the conversation as the blood continues to spread across the floor. By the time he keeps his promise of visiting Carla Jean, the resolution and the violence appear incomplete. Though we’re not shown Carla Jean’s death, when Chigurh exits and checks the bottom of his socks for blood, it’s a clear indication that his brand of violence has struck again.”

Similarities to earlier Coen brothers' films

Richard Gillmore states that “the previous Coen brothers’ movie that has the most in common with No Country for Old Men is, in fact, Fargo (1996). In Fargo there is an older, wiser police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) just as there is in No Country for Old Men. In both movies, a local police officer is confronted with some grisly murders committed by men who are not from his or her town. In both movies, greed lies behind the plots. Both movies feature as a central character a cold-blooded killer who does not seem quite human and whom the police officer seeks to apprehend.”

Joel Coen seems to agree. In an interview with David Gritten of the The Daily Telegraph, Gritten states that "overall seems to belong in a rarefied category of Coen films occupied only by Fargo (1996), which ... is also a crime story with a decent small-town sheriff as its central character. Joel sighs. 'I know. There are parallels.' He shakes his head. 'These things really should seem obvious to us.'"

Richard Corliss of Time magazine adds that "there’s also Tommy Lee Jones playing a cop as righteous as Marge in Fargo.", while Paul Arendt of the BBC stated that the film transplants the "despairing nihilism and tar-black humour of Fargo to the arid plains of Blood Simple."

Genre

"Crime western noir horror comedy"

For Gillmore, “No Country for Old Men is, and is not, a western. It takes place in the West and its main protagonists are what you might call westerners. On the other hand, the plot revolves around a drug deal that has gone bad; it involves four-wheel-drive vehicles, semiautomatic weapons, and executives in high-rise buildings, none of which would seem to belong in a western.”

In an interview with The New York Times, the Coens "do not agree that is a western. 'When we think about westerns,' Joel explained, 'we think about horses and six-guns, saloons and hitching posts.' Ethan, who was sitting next to his older brother on the couch in their cluttered college-dorm-like production office in downtown Manhattan, continued the thought. ' No Country for Old Men is sort of a western,' he said, 'and sort of not.'"

William J. Devlin categorizes the film as a “neo-western,” distinguishing it from the classic western by the way it “demonstrates a decline, or decay, of the traditional western ideal... The moral framework of the West – or the country, or the world – is changing. The traditional western framework that contained innocent and wholesome westerners striving to live out the American Dream, typical villains driven by greed and power, and the heroes who fought for what is right, is fading. The villains, or the criminals, act in such a way that the traditional hero cannot make sense of their criminal behavior. While the traditional villains, such as Ryker and Wilson , are immoral and clearly 'bad guys', we can understand them because their actions are rational. We can see their actions are based on moral egoism, measured by their own self interests. But in the world of No Country for Old Men, the 'bad guys' act irrationally. They don’t even act with criminal passion. As such, Bell cannot comprehend the enemies he should be confronting as the hero of today—for him, 'it’s hard to even take measure.'"

Devlin adds that "the stability of the western film collapses in the sense that we lose the order of the western narrative that provides us with the happy ending in which good triumphs over evil. In No Country for Old Men, without the final showdown between the hero and the villain, good cannot triumph. And so we see that the good either is killed (Llewelyn) or runs away (Bell). But does this mean that evil triumphs over good? Not necessarily. Bad guys, such as Wells and Chigurh’s boss are killed, but it takes an even worse person to do it."

Gillmore, though, finds "a mixing of the two great American movie genres, the western and film noir," which "reflect the two sides of the American psyche. On the one hand, there is a western in which the westerner is faced with overwhelming odds, but between his perseverance and his skill, he overcomes the odds and triumphs. This allegorizes the optimism of the American psyche. In film noir, on the other hand, the hero is smart (more or less) and wily and there are many obstacles to overcome, the odds are against him, and, in fact, he fails to overcome them. He is overwhelmed by the juggernaut of other people’s evil or by the way the world just happens to go. This genre reflects the pessimism and fatalism of the American psyche. With No Country for Old Men, the Coens combine these two genres into one movie. It is a western with a tragic, existential, film noir ending. The western speaks to our youth (and nostalgically to us in our old age); film noir speaks to the sadder wisdom of age. No Country for Old Men speaks of both.”

Deborah Biancott debates that the film is a “western gothic”. “Cormac McCarthy becomes a kind of genre thief,” she says, “taking tropes from the thriller, the road movie, the western, and –most notably– Gothic literature to build a tale that feels both modern and timeless. He uses Gothic structure in particular to examine modern anxieties: loss of faith, anonymous violence, angst, madness, and moral decline. For No Country for Old Men is a Gothic story, a struggle for and with God, an examination of a humanity haunted by its past and condemned to the horrors of its future. It’s an examination of class and inheritance, with the good ol’ boys of Texas up against anonymous drug barons in high (and high-security) glass towers. It’s a story about the mess and unholiness of modern human existence. And it’s a tale of unrepentant evil, the frightening but compelling bad guy who lives by a moral code that is unrecognizable and alien. The wanderer, the psychopath, Anton Chigurh, is a man who’s supernaturally invincible. He’s a man with no particular class loyalties, no particular background, no particular –and this is important– community.”

Still, Paul Arendt of the BBC states that "No Country can be enjoyed as a straightforward genre thriller (and there are suspense sequences here that rival the best of Hitchcock)", while Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian observes that many genres such as "crime western noir horror comedy" are reflected in the film.

Themes and analysis

Themes of principle, higher laws and fate

Gillmore states that “I read the sudden and violent crash that occurs right after Chigurh leaves the house where Carla Jean was staying as a sign that there are higher laws yet in the universe than Chigurh’s principle. As Chigurh is to Carla Jean, so are the higher laws to Chigurh. What the nature of those higher laws is I am not sure, but Chigurh’s principle is no defense against them. Since these laws are higher and counter to Chigurh’s principles, there is some reason to hope that they are also more sympathetic to human wishes and desires than Chigurh is, but is a small hope indeed.”

Enda McCaffrey focuses on the theme of ‘fate’. “The absence of an authentic value system in Chigurh is further intimated in the riposte ‘You don’t have to do this’, first used by Carson Wells in his exchange with Chigurh and repeated in the scene between Carla and Chigurh at the end of the film,” he said. “Both scenes highlight Chigurh’s ethical wasteland. In both exchanges, Chigurh does not respond to the moral reproaches inferred by the riposte; to do so would be a tacit acknowledgment of the secular morality he opposes … In requesting Carson and Carla to choose life or death on the toss of a coin, Chigurh is not just deferring choice to the realms of gratuity but he is also handing responsibility over to ‘fate' in an act of bad faith that prevents him from taking responsibility for his own ethical choices.”

Richard Gillmore states that “each of is expressing a twofold understanding about the world. On the one hand, there is an inevitability, a sense that the world goes on it its way and that it does not have much to do with our human desires and concerns. On the other hand there is a sense that we contribute to our own inevitable futures with every decision we make, with every act we commit, that what is perhaps hardest to live with is not the inevitability that is associated with future we are looking at that is the result of what we have done in the past. In biblical language, we reap what we sow.”

Themes of theological beliefs and religious values

McCaffrey explains that “Moss lives and experiences his alienation in his action, choices and decisions. We are first introduced to him as a nomad in the desert, an eponymous drifter who lives off the land and his own self-acquired skill in shooting pronghorn; his Vietnam blues and trailer lifestyle, coupled with his new found ‘profession’ as welder, bear witness to a washed-up life on the fringe. Moss and his actions embody acausality; an ‘unsuccessful’ rifle shot leads illogically and ironically to blood to reveal the presence of limping Doberman, which in turn leads Moss to a drug bust and the fated loot. Ironically, it is his return to the scene of the drug bust the next day (a move mirrored later in the film in the sheriff’s fated return to the scene of the crime – both further demonstrations of the triumph of inconsequentiality over sense and reason) that proves significant in the film’s acausal trajectory, in Moss’ ‘ethical’ profile and in his existentialist self-projection. McFarland … explains Moss’ return to help the lone survivor as a moral choice, motivated by (religious) compassion and an obligation to pre-established values.”

Alan Noble finds in Sheriff Bell’s dream at the end of the film “a hope for redemption outside of mankind”. “By the film’s end,” he says, “Bell seems to come to the conclusion that the evil that he has witness is unstoppable, and so he retires from his job as sheriff. This hopelessness concerning man’s ability to confront evil leads Bell to comment to his uncle, ‘I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t.’ Quotes like these have caused some critics to mistakenly label the film as nihilistic. The strikingly bleak cinematography, the lack of any music, the unrelenting violence, the absence of a show-down/confrontation between good and evil, and the sheriff’s retirement all lead the viewer to conclude that humans are ultimately and unchangeably evil. But the Coens (like McCarthy) leave us with a glimmer of hope in the form of a dream Bell relates to his wife. Going beyond nihilism, No Country‘s final scene (if properly understood) gives viewers a hope for redemption outside of mankind. While I would not recommend this film to everyone, for those who are not uncomfortable with violence and profanity, No Country compellingly exposes mankind’s profound need for salvation outside of itself.”

Jeffrey Overstreet adds that “we've never seen the Coens descend so far into the abyss of human depravity. Their primary endeavor—from Blood Simple to Miller's Crossing, from O Brother Where Art Thou? to The Big Lebowski—has always been to ask if the human heart might discover grace in a world spoiled by greed, murder, and folly. Mining the brittle stone of McCarthy's nihilistic narrative, the Coens can't find any trace of hope … ‘You can't stop what's coming,’ a prophetic old man tells Sheriff Bell. And Bell, so proud of his heritage of lawmen, is miserable at his insufficiency. ‘It ain't all waitin' on you,’ the old man cautions him. ‘That's vanity.’ And we're left facing questions that haunt so many great works of art: Who is the world waiting on? If God exists, why doesn't he intervene to prevent such apocalyptic violence? Whatever the answers might be, No Country for Old Men suggests that truth, justice, and the American way are not enough to save us from the dark and deadly winds of change.”

Themes of degenerate times, evolving evil, and ageing anxieties

“ feels that the evil surrounding him has metastasized beyond his comprehension and that he can no longer even pretend that he can deal productively with it"

William J. Devlin analyzes the opening narrative of “the traditional western hero portrayed by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Bell relates the following about himself and his life in the West: ‘I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty five . Hard to believe. Grandfather was a lawman. Father too … You can’t help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would’ve operated these times.’ Here, Bell acknowledges that he is part of a tradition – and not simply that of generations of lawmen in his family … But it is now 1980, and times have changed in at least three significant ways. First, the western frontier is no longer characterized as the ‘Wild West,’ where the land is unpopulated and unsettled, power-hungry tycoons dominate the innocent, and legal order is yet to be established. Second, though the ‘Wild West’ has been ‘tamed’ in one respect, the modern West has a new breed of lawlessness, Bell explains in his opening narrative ‘… The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure.’ … Third, the hero of the West has grown old. Bell is no longer a young, twenty-five-years-old sheriff, ready and willing to act accordingly to his moral duties … Instead, he is now weary and cautious: ‘… But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard.’ … Though the western frontier has been tamed so that towns have been settled and cities have developed, a new kind of wildness has now spread and ravaged the world. Bell, part of the tradition of the ‘old-timers’ … is confused as to how to handle this new immoral wildfire.”

William Luhr focuses on the experiences of the retiring lawman played by Tommy Lee Jones at the beginning of the film. “ feels that the evil surrounding him has metastasized beyond his comprehension and that he can no longer even pretend that he can deal productively with it," he said. "On one level, such comments reflect anxieties shared by many older people who feel that their world is passing them by, that the securities upon which they have built their lives are becoming ignored or invalidated. But Seven, No Country for Old Men and other recent neo-noirs indicate that more is involved, that a new era of evil is emerging. Such films partake of a millennial sensibility, a sense that the world is entering a phase so degenerate that traditional agents of law, stability, and continuity can no longer cope with, or even understand, it. Such films offer no hope for a viable future, only the remote possibility of individual detachment from it all.”

Anton Chigurh as a ghost, the Devil or the Antichrist

Manuel Broncano describes Chigurh as the ‘Antichrist’. “Of the three major branches of Christian eschatology,” he says, "No Country for Old Men orchestrates an apocalyptic rhetoric by which drug dealing is described as a devastating and biblical-like plague and Anton Chigurh as a true Antichrist. Furthermore … the text identifies him as the human agent of the demon Mammon. All this we learn through Sheriff Bell’s remembrance, in his attempt at making sense of things that go beyond his understanding … The opening monologue provides an interesting clue about the religious architecture of the narrative: the unnamed convict is depicted as a man who ‘knew he was going to hell’, a man who by his own admission has no soul. It is therefore evil at its purest, in close resemblance to Anton Chigurh, ‘the true and living prophet of destruction’, a being that is ‘real’ beyond doubt, for the narrator has been witness to his deeds. The sheriff is an individual who does not want to put ‘his soul to hazard’, a requisite to confront evil.”

Don Graham states that “we are introduced to one of Satan’s chief subalterns, Anton Chigurh, he of the pneumatic device, an otherworldly psychopath possessed of a philosophical bent … Chigurh’s philosophy doesn’t come from Christianity but from a source that’s not identified and is therefore sure to intrigue the intrepid McCarthy exegetes on the Internet … Bell is anti-abortion, anti-drugs, and anti-kids who dye their hair green and put bones in their noses. He thinks the disintegration of civic polity is much advanced. He thinks things begin to fall apart when people stop using ordinary manners … Bell’s forebodings, his absolute certitude that evil, however mysterious, certainly does exist, his very seriousness –all of this deepens and extends the beyond the predictable boundaries of thriller.”

Jim Welsh assures that “there is no ultimate showdown between the professional lawman and the professional assassin, and one wonders if this is by accident or by design … Sheriff Bell is tracking a killer, but there will be no clear, dramatic confrontation, perhaps because Sheriff Bell knows he can’t cheat Death or kill the Devil, that the deck may be stacked against him. If not the Devil, then maybe a ghost, as Bell himself suggests? So who said he was chasing an abstraction? … The killer, the ‘ghost’, Anton Chigurh, seems too spooky, too otherworldly to be ‘real.’ Considering what happens to him in the story, Chigurh ought to be dead, but at the end, after being broadsided by an auto accident, he limps away to continue his never exactly specified mission. The man and his motives are utterly mysterious. Chigurh would seem to be the very personification of the Antichrist.”

While discussing shooting techniques in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cinematographer Roger Deakins wondered whether Chigurh was present in the motel room (where Moss was murdered) when Sheriff Bell returned at night to the crime scene. “I wanted the motel room to be totally black,” he said, “because Chigurh is hiding in the corner. Or is he? So you wanted this kind of mystery.”

“Or , to quote Joel Coen from a bonus DVD feature on the making of the film, ‘It’s about a good guy, a bad guy, and a guy in between. Moss is the guy in between.’ (‘The Making of No Country,' 2008) … This is a very serviceable genre story for the Coen brothers to transform into an Oscar-worthy motion picture, and a playground of archetypes (from the mythical Celtic to the Bible) and stereotypes raised above the level of cliché’ and taken beyond the realm of allegory.”

Anton Chigurh as the Grim Reaper

Actor Josh Brolin described the character of Anton Chigurh as "the Grim Reaper." He added in a press interview released by Miramax: "He's the devil incarnate ... You don't understand , you can't pigeonhole it. You can't categorize it. He's very malleable, but not malleable on your terms, malleable on his own terms." Javier Bardem said of his character: "That's his power: You cannot really understand him completely. The good thing about Anton Chigurh is that he can't be described. He's not even described in the book by Cormac McCarthy. He doesn't need to be explained. It's a character that comes out of the land and, at the end, comes back to the land, which means everything ... What Anton Chigurh does is a new kind of violence, and I guess one of the issues that the novel, and the script and the movie, is talking about is the way to understand this huge wave of violence that has taken the world. Chigurh more than represents, he symbolizes the violence. shows that violence doesn't really have an explanation sometimes, or any roots. It just happens, and it's unstoppable."

Alison Young states that “when Carla Jean refuses to call the coin toss on the grounds that the decision to kill her is being made by Chigurh rather than by a coin, he dismisses her protest: ‘But I got here the same way the coin did’. It is because of this code that he kills Carla Jean.”

William J. Devlin provides us with “an insight into Chigurh’s twisted moral consistency. First, Chigurh does not appeal to money or power as the greatest end for which one should strive. Second, Chigurh does not appear to be acting purely out of self-interest. By murdering his boss and Carla Jean, he gains nothing for himself. These two points help us to see why the traditional villain couldn’t make sense of Chigurh. His actions are not motivated by what normally drives the bad guy; he is not selfish and egotistical. Third, Chigurh’s own justification of his actions doesn’t appeal to the consequences that are produced; rather like Kant’s deontology, he justifies his actions insofar as they are ‘good’ in themselves. He kills his boss on the principle that his boss made a wrong decision. He did not stick with the one right tool, and so this bad decision entails the act of Chigurh murdering him. Likewise, Chigurh admits that there is nothing he gains from killing Carla Jean. But he must do it because he gave his word.”

The Hunter, the hunted and triplet occurrences

Scott Foundas stresses that “‘Hold still’ –it’s what the hunters say to the hunted in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men … the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on the crest of a West Texas ridge … the steely assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) instructing the terrified motorist to whose skull he has just placed the lethal end of a pressurized cattle gun.” Foundas claims that “in the end, everyone in No Country for Old Men is both hunter and hunted, members of some endangered species trying to forestall their extinction. Even Anton Chigurh, it turns out, bleeds when wounded.”

Lydia R. Cooper focuses on the chase of the hunter to the hunted and claims that “events happen three times … No Country for Old Men follows three central characters, Llewelyn Moss, who steals a suitcase full of drug money; Anton Chigurh, who chases Moss to retrieve the money; and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who chases Chigurh. The chase is segmented by major plot events that occur in triplet. For example, Moss encounters Chigurh three times. He escapes from Chigurh twice but is killed during the third encounter. First, Moss runs to Del Rio and cleverly outwits Chigurh, barely escaping him … next, Moss goes to Eagle Pass and gets in a shoot-out with Chigurh but manages to escape … and last, Moss takes his wife to El Paso, puts her on a bus, and flees … but when he stops at a hotel there, he is caught and killed in a shootout … Likewise, Chigurh narrowly escapes death three times. He is first caught with a distinctive murder instrument that could be linked to his past crimes and earn him the death penalty, but he escapes by killing the deputy … next, he gets shot in Eagle Pass but lives … and finally, he goes to El Paso to shoot Carla Jean and gets hit by a car but lives… Bell almost encounters –but just misses– Chigurh three times as well, completing the tri-episodic narrative patterns for the three characters. First, arriving at Moss’ Desert Aire trailer after Chigurh has left … second, Bell surveys the wreckage after the shoot-out in Eagle Pass … having missed Chigurh … and last, Bell arrives at the Van Horn motel while Chigurh is (presumably) still in the parking lot, but Chigurh manages to escape.”

Crime of theft and variant ethical perceptions

Alison Young states that “in terms of plot, No Country for Old Men centers on one man’s theft of two million dollars from a drug deal, and the pursuit that follows on from his theft (and which results in his death). The film is a chase movie, but it is also, unusually, both a crime movie and a detective story. Although ostensibly a criminal, Llewelyn Moss is the film’s hero, an Everyman figure who commits a crime in unusual circumstances, and the spectator is thus able to view his theft an understandable rather than reprehensible.”

Stacey Peebles adds that “… later that night , he makes the decision to return to the circle of cars to give water to the wounded man who had begged him for it. He admits to Carla Jean that he’s about to do something ‘dumber’n hell’, but that he has to do it anyway. Moss has demonstrated his opportunism as well as his caution, and here he shows himself to be principled, even though putting those principles into action conflicts with his highly developed pragmatism.”

The violent act of seeing and the “politics of visibility”

Alison Reed explains that the film is “about seeing and who has the power to see: Chigurh everyone who wields the gaze within a country that excludes him on the basis of violent act of seeing …When Llewelyn calls asking for Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), Chigurh answers the phone and demands: ‘You need to come see me’. Chigurh is obsessed with the sight of his victims. Those who threaten to ‘see’ him (beyond the literal meaning) have little chance of survival. Wells is shocked to hear that Llewelyn has seen Chigurh: ‘You've seen him, and you're not dead?’. At a gas station Chigurh buys a bag of cashews, but this transaction quickly goes awry when the gas station proprietor makes friendly conversation: Gas Station Proprietor: Y'all gettin' any rain up your way? / Chigurh: What way would that be? / Gas Station Proprietor: I seen you was from Dallas. / Chigurh: What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo? This man's attempt to pin Chigurh down geographically triggers the chance chain of events that wagers his life on a coin toss. Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) thus irreversibly seals her fate when she says: ‘I knowed you was crazy when I saw you sitting there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me’ … When the accountant in the businessman’s office asks if Chigurh is going to kill him, Chigurh responds: ‘That depends. Do you see me?’. The accountant’s lack of sight and resulting inability to fix a racialized identity on Chigurh saves his life. Chigurh’s desire to control and redirect the gaze also explains the outcome of Sheriff Bell’s encounter with Chigurh. After Llewelyn’s murder, Bell returns to the crime scene, noting that the door has seemingly been opened using Chigurh’s trademark weapon. Suspecting of Chigurh, Officer Bell draws his gun. Bell and Chigurh see each other’s reflections in the shot-out lock, but Chigurh does not murder Bell because Bell does not acknowledge this moment of seeing. Bell’s pretending to have not seen Chigurh suggests his own resignation to the force of inexplicable, lawless violence in the film: the force that Chigurh wholly embodies. Yet what goes unsaid in this scene, and the politics of visibility therein—explain Chigurh’s motivation for not killing the cowardly, unseeing accountant and for killing Llewelyn’s brave, seeing wife—Chigurh murders those who fix meaning on his appearance.

Chigurh evades the dominant order’s gaze by escaping un-interpellated from white suburbia. In Chigurh’s final scene, he is hit broadside at a suburban intersection. With one of his eyes bulging from his skull and a bone poking out from his elbow, he sits down on the sidewalk. In addition to the noonday sun, this scene has an under-saturated, bleached-out quality, and Chigurh is momentarily paler due to the impact of the crash. Two boys riding bicycles approach him, at which point Chigurh offers one of the boys money for his shirt to fasten a makeshift sling for his arm. The boy tries to decline, but Chigurh replies: ‘Take it. You didn’t see me. I was already gone’ … Chigurh ultimately escapes unseen into white suburbia on the nearly corrupted innocence of a kid, who does not identify him as the other. His inability to “see” Chigurh also saves his life. Chigurh quickly leaves the scene of the car accident, and in so doing, remains outside of the law.”

Ethno-racial perceptions vs. the US-Mexican border

Alison Reed states that “it seems no coincidence that the Coen brothers’ filmic reproduction of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men erupts in a xenophobic political era obsessed with national boundaries … Between U.S. and Mexico border stations lies the Rio Grande River, which disrupts the fixed line between the Spanish-speaking, dark-skinned other and the Western cowboy. In this fluid, ambiguous space on the bridge between Mexican and American land, Llewelyn first confronts the American subject as racialized other. Suffering potentially fatal wounds from Chigurh’s semiautomatic machine gun and leaking blood from his boots, Llewelyn stumbles past the U.S. border checkpoint. In this in-between space, Llewelyn meets a group of college-aged men returning to the United States … When Llewelyn’s appearance cannot be explained by a car accident, these white men in turn codify him as the Mexican other … As the figure of the abject at the border between Mexico and America, life and death, self and other, he decides to throw the rest of the money over the bridge before entering Mexico. His jacket, concealing his blood-stained shirt, and his beer, excusing his sweaty, dirty, damp and otherwise unkempt appearance, carry him safely into Mexican territory without hassle from the uninterested border patrol guard.

Upon entering Mexico, Llewelyn forfeits his markers of whiteness—the cowboy hat, the crisp white work shirt, the stiff denim—and thus all too easily slides into otherness. After his encounter with the three American men, he wakes up in a Mexican hospital with the bounty hunter Carson Wells at his side. The bouquet of flowers that Wells holds out in front of him starkly contrasts the white walls and sterile furniture of the small hospital room. Llewelyn, stripped of the visual cues that mark his whiteness and instead draped in a nondescript hospital gown, appears Mexican only in relation to his environment: his darkly tanned skin, slick black hair, moustache, and four o’clock shadow juxtaposed against the whiteness of the hospital walls and of Carson Wells. Wells, hovering over him with blond hair, blue eyes, and a cowboy hat, replaces Llewelyn as cowboy: without the visual markers of his Texan identity, Llewelyn no longer clearly reads as white. When Llewelyn walks back into Texas, still wearing his white hospital gown, he must convince the Border Patrol agent to admit him back into the United States. Unconvinced and threatening, the border patrol agent admits Llewelyn only at the moment in which Llewelyn secures his status as a Vietnam War veteran. Unable to be pinned racially, Llewelyn proves his whiteness only by virtue of his military service.

Bringing the ethno-racially ambiguous Llewelyn into relief is the Mexican other—unspoken, unspeakable, dangerous. The Mexican actors in this film, all extras, are the butt of racist jokes. For instance, Bell notes that ‘Supposedly, a coyote won't eat a Mexican’ and Carla Jean’s mother exclaims that ‘It’s not often you see a Mexican in a suit’. The film’s sensationalist depiction of Mexicans as drug trafficking criminals goes unrecognized because they are depoliticized, nameless faces. Llewelyn’s and Chigurh’s visual ambiguity points to the ease with which categories of race and ethnicity slide into indeterminacy.”

The role of women

“A man can either wither away quietly into retirement or fashion himself a sling for his broken body–still disappearing from the scene like a ghost. In either case, No Country for Old Men shows that a ghost is all that is left of masculine or patriarchal systems and codes"

Ryan P. Doom claims that “the women in No Country for Old Men serve no purpose other than to offer support. They do not influence the story in regards to action or the decisions that the men make. It’s as if the setting were indeed in the Old West, as if the women lacked the right to vote. Tough minded and independent they might be, but both Carla Jean and Loretta Bell (Tess Harper) mainly just complement their husbands and care for them. They exist outside the men’s world and cannot understand the unrelenting violence the men face until faced with it themselves.”

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times believes this issue is observed in many Hollywood pictures. “IRON MAN, Batman, Big Angry Green Man — to judge from the new popcorn season,” she says, “it seems as if Hollywood has realized that the best way to deal with its female troubles is to not have any, women, that is … That’s as true for the dumbest and smartest of comedies as for the most critically revered dramas, from No Country for Old Men (but especially for women) to There Will Be Blood (but no women). Welcome to the new, post-female American cinema.”

Monica Hesse of The Washington Post further complains that “ decide that "No Country for Old Men" -- dark, stark, violent -- is better than "Juno," a comedy about a pregnant teen. They nominate Cate Blanchett for playing a man, but judge her against women. (This was really a mind-trap.)”

Erin K. Johns, however, disagrees. “First portrayed as an obedient and subservient wife,” she says, “Carla Jean gains agency as the film progresses; she becomes a woman at odds not only with her husband, Llewelyn, but also with Anton Chigurh, the systematic and cold psychopathic killer who relies on the system of fate … Carla Jean Moss and Loretta Bell, Ed Tom’s wife, recognize and work with and against all of the different and constantly adapting masculine systems. The two major women in the film offer the only places of resistance to the ultimate masculine system: the justified fate that Chigurh inflicts through death.

In the scenes involving Ed Tom and Loretta, Loretta always functions as the voice of reason and common sense; her attitude is one of great confidence and mockery in her position as responsible wife and homemaker. As Ed Tom loads the horse and attempts to placate his wife, Loretta responds by laying out the “law” he should be following at work:

Codes, whether original or new, are thus inscribed in the masculine gender throughout No Country for Old Men regardless of whether Chigurh is a psychopath or not. The real psychopathic system is the law, the patriarchal system that demanded subjects, objects, and no resistance–a system that both Loretta and Carla Jean recognize and attempt to resist in different ways.

By refusing to call the coin toss , Carla Jean proves that the coin really has no say and that in the end it is just Chigurh; she exposes the insignificance of the code that Chigurh lives by because she realizes that it is yet another masculine code. The coin toss code is the same as Llewelyn’s hunter code and Ed Tom’s law.

Although set in the 1980s, No Country for Old Men exposes the rapidly changing gender structure of the twenty-first century: one where stereotypical and traditional male roles are constantly being resisted and replaced by roles that have traditionally been termed feminine … Perhaps, as the end of the movie suggests, a man can either wither away quietly into retirement or fashion himself a sling for his broken body–still disappearing from the scene like a ghost. In either case, No Country for Old Men shows that a ghost is all that is left of masculine or patriarchal systems and codes.”

Film ending and final scene

"Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?"

Dana Stevens of Slate criticized the film ending. “Even in their best films”, she said, “the Coens have trouble with endings (witness the mood-destroying Sam Elliot speech that weighs down the final minutes of the otherwise delightful The Big Lebowski). The last scene of No Country for Old Men, in which Bell recounts his dreams to his wife Loretta (Tess Harper) is a tacked-on chunk of Meaning that seems to bear no relation to the tragically futile bloodbath we've just witnessed.”

Curt Holman of CL Atlanta also argues that “there's something deflating about the film's final scenes. McCarthy raises the ancient problem of human evil: Is it an inherent flaw of human nature, or the net result of random fate? McCarthy seems to conclude that it's a generational thing. ‘Anytime you quit hearing 'Sir' and 'Ma'am’, the end is pretty much in sight,’ says Bell, and you suspect he's only half-kidding.”

Actor Josh Brolin, however, defended the ending of the film. "I love that people are talking about this movie. I love that people leave the movie saying, 'I hate the ending. I was so pissed.' Good, it was supposed to piss you off," the 39-year-old star told MTV News. "You completely lend yourself to character and then you're completely raped of this character. I don't find it manipulative at all. I find it to be a great homage to that kind of violence." After being chased by Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh the entire movie, Brolin meets his violent end off-screen. Soon after, his wife is brutally murdered off-screen as well. After all that build-up, all that destruction, the film ends, not with an orgasmic culmination of violence, but with a quiet monologue from Sheriff Tom Bell Tommy Lee Jones. "If you were expecting something different, Brolin argues, that "says more about you than the movie. You wanted to see his death, why? Because you're used to it. Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?" he asked.

Ciro Discepolo emphasizes that “the key to understand the whole film … is the two dreams that Tommy Lee Jones relates to his mate in the final scene,” he said. “In his first dream, the sheriff sees his own father handing over some money that he would lose: old generations handed over to us values we have lost. The other dream shows the sheriff and his father riding a horse. They have to pass through a narrow and dark mountain pass. His father overtakes him and lights a natural torch; he then settles down and lights a fire that gives light and warmth, then he waits for his son. This is the hope that the country – that country and every country – could eventually find out the right way to a place with a warm fire and much more light.”

Lucia Bozzola explains the meaning of the "dream" in the final scene. "Considering that Bell opened the film by musing that his law enforcement progenitors wouldn’t know what to make of the violence nowadays", she said, "not to mention all of the references to Chigurh as a ghost, it’s not that tough to figure out why Bell’s dream matters, or why he’s chosen this path. He’s never going to be able to do what his father did as far as law and order because there’s always going to be a specter that’s ahead of him. Or a Terminator. If he’s going to survive in this country, a good man has to give up. I suppose this is how the West was lost."

Release

Theatrical run

No Country for Old Men premiered in Competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 19. The film commercially opened in limited release in 28 theaters in the United States on November 9, 2007, grossing $1,226,333 over the opening weekend. The film expanded to a wide release in 860 theaters in the United States on November 21, 2007, grossing $7,776,773 over the first weekend. The film subsequently increased the number of theaters to 2,037. The film opened in Australia on December 26, 2007, and in the United Kingdom (limited release) and Ireland on January 18, 2008. As of February 13, 2009, the film has grossed $74,283,000 domestically (United States). No Country for Old Men became the biggest box-office hit for the Coens to date. It was surpassed by True Grit in 2010.

Home media

Buena Vista Home Entertainment released the movie on DVD and in the high definition Blu-ray format on March 11, 2008 in the US. The only extras are three behind–the–scenes featurettes. Website Blu-ray.com gave the picture quality an almost full mark and stated that it “stands on the highest rung of the home video ladder. Color vibrancy, black level, resolution and contrast are reference quality,” while the “entire sequence and the film overall sounds very convincing.” Website High-Def Digest stated that “the Blu-ray edition is magnificent … it may not have a compelling supplemental package, but it does have a striking video transfer and an excellent PCM audio track.”

The Region 2 DVD (courtesy of Paramount) was released on June 2. If purchased from Play.com the DVD comes with a set of limited edition art cards. HMV is selling the DVD in an exclusive Steelbook case. The film was released on Blu-ray Disc in the UK on September 8, 2008. A 2-disc Special Edition with Digital Copy was released on DVD and Blu-ray on April 7, 2009.

Reception

"This is frighteningly intelligent and imaginative"

"For formalists –those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design– it’s pure heaven"

No Country for Old Men received very few negative reviews. Upon release the film was widely discussed as a possible candidate for several Oscars, before going on to receive eight nominations, eventually winning four Academy Awards in 2008. Javier Bardem, in particular, has received considerable praise for his performance in the film. James Berardinelli gave it three-and-a-half stars, saying:

Expecting normalcy from a Coen Brothers production is a pointless endeavor, but anticipating brilliance isn't outlandish.... The story is full of unexpected twists and switchbacks, and opportunities for the audience to gear down and take a breath are few and far between. Like Alfred Hitchcock with Psycho, the filmmakers don’t want viewers to become too comfortable with any of the characters.... probably the most compelling screen villain since Anthony Hopkins brought Hannibal Lecter to life in The Silence of the Lambs.... And, while the ending may be a sore point for some, it will have others chuckling and nodding their heads appreciatively (albeit perhaps after a brief "WTF?" when the end credits begin to roll). That's what good cinema is expected to do.

Roger Ebert went even further, giving it four stars. He said:

Consider another scene in which the dialogue is as good as any you will hear this year. Chigurh enters a rundown gas station in the middle of wilderness and begins to play a word game with the old man (Gene Jones) behind the cash register, who becomes very nervous. It is clear they are talking about whether Chigurh will kill him. Chigurh has by no means made up his mind. Without explaining why, he asks the man to call the flip of a coin. Listen to what they say, how they say it, how they imply the stakes. Listen to their timing. You want to applaud the writing, which comes from the Coen brothers, out of McCarthy.... This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate.

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker was more measured:

The Coens certainly honor the novelist’s abiding preference for the mythical over the modern.... So what do we end up with? Well, as a thriller, “No Country for Old Men” is tight, pointed, and immune to the temptations of speed. I found myself in the same predicament with the film as with the book—approaching both in a state of rare excitement, yet willing myself, all too soon, to be more engaged than I actually was.... We gradually realize that “No Country for Old Men” is not telling a tale—the plot remains open-ended—but reinforcing the legend of a place, like a poem adding to an oral tradition. Texas is presented as a state of being, where good and evil circle doggedly around each other, and it just doesn’t occur to Moss that he could take his black bag, catch a flight, and seek a world elsewhere. I was awed by the control of the movie, which seems as pressurized as Chigurh’s murder machine, but after an hour and a quarter I felt that it had made its point and done all the damage it could. In the event, it crawls past the two-hour mark, and you sense that the Coens, like their unkillable villain, are prepared to go on forever.

Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post said:

You can't say it cuts to the chase. There was never anything to cut from to the chase. It's all chase, which means that it offers almost zero in character development. Each of the figures is given, a la standard thriller operating procedure, a single moral or psychological attribute and then acts in accordance to that principle and nothing else, without doubts, contradictions or ambivalence.

Andrew Sarris said:

As for the nihilism on display in No Country for Old Men, the collaboration between the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy was a marriage made in heaven or, more likely, hell.... I will not describe the narrative in any great detail both because I would be perceived as spoiling the “fun” of discovering the many surprises for yourself, and because I cannot look at it and write about it in any other way than as an exercise in cosmic futility. Yet, I’m not sorry I saw it over a running time of 122 minutes, just about the length of time I’d like to spend on a quick in-and-out visit to hell.

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian said of the film:

It's the best of the career so far. The Coens are back with a vengeance, showing their various imitators and detractors what great American film-making looks like. The result is a dark, violent and deeply disquieting drama, leavened with brilliant noirish wisecracks, and boasting three leading male performances with all the spectacular virility of Texan steers. And all of it hard and sharp as a diamond ... Watching this film has something of the elemental thrill of watching a cloud-shadow spread with miraculous speed over a vast, empty landscape: it has a chilly, portentous intuition of what America is.

Geoff Andrew of Time Out London said that:

The film exerts a grip from start to end. A masterly tale of the good, the deranged and the doomed that inflects the raw violence of the west with a wry acknowledgement of the demise of codes of honour, this is frighteningly intelligent and imaginative.

Richard Corliss of Time magazine chose the film as the best of the year, and said:

After two decades of being brilliant on the movie margins, the Coens are ready for their closeup, and maybe their Oscar. By any standards, it’s a super-violent thriller, as scary as the black hole where a madman’s heart should be. Sure to be the brothers’ most honored movie since Fargo, it’s a great showcase for Joel and Ethan’s storytelling finesse and filmmaking power. Just in their 50s now, the Coen brothers should be entertaining and challenging us for decades to come.

Paul Arendt of the BBC gave the film a full mark and said:

doesn't require a defense: it is a magnificent return to form … is both a searing thriller and an elegy for a collapsing society … The Coen brothers have once again placed themselves at the very forefront of American cinema.

A. O. Scott of The New York Times stated that:

For formalists –those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design– it’s pure heaven ... leaves behind the jangled, stunned sensation of having witnessed a ruthless application of craft.

As of March 23, 2012, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes recorded that 214 of 226 (95%) critics gave the film a positive review,

Reviews

• Allmovie
• Empire
• Filmcritic.com
• Roger Ebert
• Rolling Stone
• Premiere

Top ten lists

The film appeared on more critics' top ten lists (354) than any other film of 2007, and was more critics' #1 film (90) than any other. Some of the notable critics' placement of No Country for Old Men are:

Accolades

"We're very thankful to all of you out there for continuing to let us play in our corner of the sandbox"

No Country for Old Men was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, including Best Picture. Additionally, Javier Bardem won Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role; the Coen brothers won Achievement in Directing (Best Director) and Best Adapted Screenplay. Other nominations included Best Film Editing (the Coen brothers as Roderick Jaynes), Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins), Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.

Javier Bardem became the first Spanish actor to win an Oscar. "Thank you to the Coens for being crazy enough to think I could do that and put one of the most horrible hair cuts in history on my head," Bardem said in his acceptance speech at the 80th Academy Awards. He dedicated the award to Spain and to his mother, the Spanish movie and television actress Pilar Bardem, who accompanied him to the ceremony. "Mama, this is for you. This is for your grandparents and your parents, Rafael and Matilde, this is for the comedians of Spain who like you have brought dignity and pride to our profession. This is for Spain and this is for all of you," said Bardem, speaking in rapid Spanish.

While accepting the award for Best Director at the 80th Academy Awards, Joel Coen said that “Ethan and I have been making stories with movie cameras since we were kids”, recalling a Super 8 film they made titled “Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go”. “Honestly”, he said, “what we do now doesn't feel that much different from what we were doing then. We're very thankful to all of you out there for continuing to let us play in our corner of the sandbox." It was only the second time in Oscar history that two individuals shared the directing honor (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins were the first, winning for 1961’s West Side Story).

The film was nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, winning two at the 65th Golden Globe Awards. Javier Bardem won Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture and the Coen brothers won Best Screenplay – Motion Picture. The film was also nominated for Best Motion Picture – Drama, and Best Director (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen). Earlier in 2007 it was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The Screen Actors Guild gave a nomination nod to the cast for its "Outstanding Performance." The film won top honors at the Directors Guild of America Awards for Joel and Ethan Coen. The film was nominated for nine BAFTAs in 2008 and won in three categories; Joel and Ethan Coen winning the award for Best Director, Roger Deakins winning for Best Cinematography and Javier Bardem winning for Best Supporting Actor. It has also been awarded the David di Donatello for Best Foreign Film.

Consonant with the positive critical response, No Country for Old Men received widespread formal recognition from numerous North American critics' associations (New York Film Critics Circle, Toronto Film Critics Association, Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association, National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Online, Chicago Film Critics Association, Boston Society of Film Critics, Austin Film Critics Association, and San Diego Film Critics Society). The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year for 2007, and the Australian Film Critics Association and Houston Film Critics Society both voted it best film of 2007.

Disputes

In September 2008, Tommy Lee Jones announced that he was going to sue Paramount Pictures for $10 million, which he claims he is owed for his work on the film. Jones claimed he was not paid the correct bonuses and had expenses wrongly deducted.

In April 2010, Paramount, which distributed the 2007 best picture Oscar winner via its Paramount Vantage label, was forced to pay Jones a $15.0 million box office bonus when an arbitrator found the studio's lawyers had made an error in drafting Jones' deal to star in the movie.

In December 2011, Paramount tentatively prevailed in a legal dispute with a Morgan Stanley-backed film finance entity that claims it was cheated out of profits due to the hefty payment made to Jones. Morgan Stanley's Marathon Funding, which had a multipicture financing deal with Paramount, later cried foul, claiming its arrangement entitled it to 25 percent of "net distribution revenue" from the movie. The case went to trial in front of L.A. Superior Court Judge Mark Mooney, who on Dec. 22 issued a tentative ruling siding with the studio. Mooney has found that because Paramount's relationship with Marathon was not a joint venture, the studio did not owe Marathon a fiduciary duty and thus the charge was not inappropriate.

References

1. Thompson, Gary (November 9, 2007). "Creep in the heart of Texas". Philadelphia Daily News. Retrieved January 4, 2004. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
2. Schwarzbaum, Lisa (November 7, 2007). "No Country for Old Men". EW.com. Retrieved January 4, 2004. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
3. Burr, Ty (September 11, 2007). "The Coen brothers' cat and mouse chase in the sweet land of liberty". The Boston Globe.
4. ^ Rogers, Troy. "Joel & Ethan Coen — No Country for Old Men Interview". Deadbolt.com. Retrieved November 26, 2007. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
5. ^ McCarthy, Todd (May 24, 2007). "Cannes' great divide". Variety. Retrieved December 23, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
6. "No Country for Old Men (2007) – International Box Office Results". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved December 23, 2007. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
7. ^ "'No Country' is the big winner with 4 awards". Today Show/MSNBC. February 25, 2008. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
8. "No Country for Old Men (2007)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2012-04-05.
9. "True Grit". Box Office Mojo. May 7 2011. Retrieved 12 November 2011. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
10. ^ "No Country for Old Men — Rotten Tomatoes". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2007-11-10.
11. "Home Page – Best of 2007". CriticsTop10. Retrieved April 5, 2012.
12. ^ "No Country for Old Men :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews". Rogerebert.suntimes.com. Retrieved 2012-04-05.
13. Biancolli, Amy (November 16, 2007). "No Country for Old Men: Murderously good". Houston Chronicle. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
14. Edelstein, David. "No Country for Old Men: Movie Review". New York Magazine. Retrieved April 5, 2012. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
15. Reed, Rex (November 6, 2007). "Brolin is Golden". New York Observer. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
16. ^ Patterson, John (December 21, 2007). "'We've killed a lot of animals'". London: Guardian. pp. Film/Interviews. Retrieved December 27, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
17. ^ Travers, Peter (November 1, 2007). "No Country for Old Men-Review". Rolling Stone. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
18. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_won_3_Oscars_in_one_night. The others are James L Brooks, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Jackson and Billy Wilder.
19. Reagan, Gillian (February 25, 2008). "No Country takes 4 at Oscars". New York Observer. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
20. "Bafta Film Awards 2008: The winners". BBC News. February 10, 2008. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
21. "Nominations and Winners-2007". goldenglobes.org. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
22. ^ "No Country for Old Men, Juno named to AFI's Top 10 of year". CBC. December 17, 2007. Retrieved December 22, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
23. The sign in front of Moss' trailer park indicates its location in Sanderson, the seat of Terrell County. Del Rio is the seat of Val Verde County, approximately 120 miles (200 Kilometres) from Sanderson.
24. ^ Phillips, Michael (May 21, 2007). "Coen brothers revisit Unstoppable Evil archetype". Chicago Tribune. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
25. ^ Turan, Kenneth (May 18, 2007). "Coens' Brutal Brilliance Again on Display". Los Angeles Times. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
26. DuBos, David. "MovieTalk with David DuBos". New Orleans Magazine. Archived from the original on February 7, 2008. Retrieved March 13, 2008.
27. "Javier Bardem's hair & character in "No Country for Old Men"". Youtube.com. Retrieved November 18, 2007.
28. Nathan, Ian (January 2008). "The Complete Coens". Empire. p. 173. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
29. ^ Topel, Fred. "Kelly MacDonald on No Country for Old Men". CanMag. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
30. Fleming, Michael (August 28, 2005). "Rudin books tyro novel". Variety. Retrieved December 23, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
31. Thomas, Nicholas Addison (October 9, 2005). "A mesmerizing tale of desperation". The Free Lance-Star. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
32. Corliss, Richard (May 18, 2007). "CANNES JOURNAL: Three Twisty Delights". Time. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
33. "Scripts written by Joel Coen". The Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb). {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
34. ^ Murray, Rebecca. "Josh Brolin Discusses No Country for Old Men". About.com. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
35. ^ Grossman, Lev (October 18, 2007). "A conversation between author Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, about the new movie No Country for Old Men". Time. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
36. "Vintage Catalog — No Country for Old Men". Random House. Retrieved November 10, 2008. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
37. ^ Conard, Mark T. (2009), Part 1, Chapter: “No Country for Old Men: The Coens’ Tragic Western”, by Gillmore, Richard. Cite error: The named reference "Conard" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
38. Robinson, Tasha (November 27, 2007). "Book Vs. Film: No Country For Old Men". avclub.com. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
39. "Coens' No Country for Old Men: The Art of Adaptation". roadrunner.com. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
40. Kennedy, Craig (April 30, 2008). "The Coen Twist on No Country". Movie Zeal. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
41. Spurgeon, Sara L. (2011), Part 2, Chapter 5: “Levels of Ellipsis in No Country for Old Men”, p. 102, by Ellis, Jay.
42. ^ Hirschberg, Lynn (September 4, 2008). "Portrait of a Lady Killer". T Magazine / The New York Times. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
43. Fleming, Michael (February 1, 2006). "'Country' time for Coens". Variety. Retrieved December 23, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
44. "No Country for Old Men: Joel and Ethan Coen Interview". Emanuel Levy. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
45. Fleming, Michael (August 26, 2006). "Coens' 'Country' man". Variety. Retrieved December 23, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
46. No Country for Old Men (2007) – Trivia, Internet Movie Database
47. Tallerico, Brian. "Josh Brolin — No Country For Old Men Interview". thedeadbolt.com. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
48. "Josh Brolin talks No Country for Old Men". About.com. Retrieved November 27, 2007. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
49. Coen, Joel and Ethan. "Josh Brolin, the Casting Mistake of the Year". Esquire Magazine. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
50. Evening. "Kelly Macdonald: No Country for Old Men video interview". Stv.tv. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
51. Miles, David (April 14, 2006). "Coen Brothers Coming To N.M.". The Santa Fe New Mexican. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
52. Moore, Eddie (June 29, 2006). "Make-Believe Border". Albuquerque Journal. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
53. Robey, Tim (February 10, 2006). Daily Telegraph. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)
54. Chapman King; Wallach; Welsh (2009), p. 224.
55. ^ Daly, Steve (January 03, 2008). "THE Q&A: Roger Deakins: Candid Camera Talk". Entertainment Weekly. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
56. Hurbis-Cherrier, Mick (2012), Chapter 12: Basics of Exposure, p. 256-257
57. "In for the Kill". The Sydney Morning Herald. December 21, 2007.
58. ^ Gritten, David (January 12, 2008). "No Country For Old Men: Are the Coens finally growing up?". The daily Telegraph. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
59. ^ Lim, Dennis (January 6, 2008). "Exploiting Sound, Exploring Silence". New York Times. Retrieved March 25, 2012. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
60. Lane, Anthony (November 12, 2007). "Hunting Grounds "No Country for Old Men" and "Lions for Lambs"". The New Yorker. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
61. Conard, Mark T. (2009), Part 2, Chapter: No Country for Old Men As Moral Philosophy, p. 163, by McFarland, Douglas.
62. Spurgeon, Sara L. (2011), Part 2, Chapter 5: Levels of Ellipsis in No Country for Old Men, p. 100, by Ellis, Jay.
63. ^ Overstreet, Jeffrey (November 9, 2007). "No Country for Old Men: Movie review". Christianity Today. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
64. Stratton, David. "No Country for Old Men interview". At the Movies. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
65. "Flipsidemovies". Retrieved 14 September 2010.
67. Cowley, Jason (January 12, 2008). "A shot rang out". The Guardian. London. Retrieved May 20, 2010.
68. Paul Arendt (18 January 2008). "No Country For Old Men (2008)". BBC.co.uk. Retrieved 13 September 2010.
69. Andrew Sarris (23 October 2007). "Just shoot me! Nihilism Crashes Lumet and Coen Bros". Observer.com. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
70. Weitner, Sean (November 14, 2007). "Review of No Country for Old Men". Flak Magazine. Retrieved December 21, 2007. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
71. "Both book and movie offer glimpses of a huge, mysterious pattern that we and the characters can't quite see — that only God could see, if He hadn't given up and gone home." Burr, Ty (November 9, 2007). "The Coen brothers' cat and mouse chase in the sweet land of liberty". The Boston Globe. Retrieved December 21, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
72. McCarthy, Todd (May 18, 2007). "No Country for Old Men: Cannes Film Festival Review". Variety. Retrieved December 21, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
73. Morefield, Kenneth R. "Christian Spotlight on the Movies: No Country for Old Men". Christian Spotlight. Retrieved December 21, 2007.
74. Coen, Joel and Ethan, Adapted screenplay for No Country for Old Men.
75. Foundas, Scott. "Badlands". Village Voice, November 6, 2007.
76. ^ Scott, A. O. (November 9, 2007). "He Found a Bundle of Money, And Now There's Hell to Pay". Webpage. New York Times. p. Performing Arts/Weekend Desk (1). Retrieved November 9, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
77. McCarthy, Todd (May 18, 2007). "No Country for Old Men (Movie review)". Webpage. Variety (Vol.407, Issue.2). p. 19. Retrieved May 28, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
78. Emerson, Jim (January 25, 2008). "Three kinds of violence: Zodiac, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood". Jim Emerson’s scanners – Chicago Suntimes. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
79. ^ Bradshow, Peter (January 18, 2008). "No Country for Old Men-Film Review". The Guardian. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
80. ^ Andrew, Geoff (January 14, 2008). "No Country for Old Men-Film Review". Time Out London, Issue 1952. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
81. Montagne, Renee (November 9, 2007). "Violence Overwhelms 'No Country'". NPR. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
82. Mondello, Bob (November 9, 2007). "'Country' Boys: Coen Brothers Out for Blood Again". NPR. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
83. Zacharek, Stephanie (October 5, 2007). ""No Country for Old Men": Movie review". Salon. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
84. ^ Doom, Ryan P. (2009), Chapter 12: “The Unrelenting Country: ‘No Country for Old Men (2007)’”, p. 153.
85. ^ Corliss, Richard (November 8, 2007). "The 10 best Coen brothers Moments". Time. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
86. ^ Arendt, Raul (January 18, 2008). "No Country for Old Men-Film Review". BBC. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
87. Hirschberg, Lynn (November 11, 2007). "Coen Brothers Country". The New York Times Magazine. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
88. ^ McMahon; Csaki (2010), Part 3, Chapter: No Country for Old Men: The Decline of Ethics and the West(ern), p. 221-240, by Devlin, William J.
89. Olson, Danel (2011), Chapter 43: "Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men: Western Gothic", p. 465-466, by Biancott, Deborah
90. ^ Boule'; McCaffrey. (2011), Chapter 8: Crimes of Passion, Freedom and a Clash of Sartrean Moralities in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, by McCaffrey, Enda, p. 131-138
91. Noble, Alan (December 13, 2007). "Hope Defered: No Country For Old Men". Christ and Pop Culture. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
92. ^ Luhr, William (2012), p. 211
93. Alvarez-López, Esther (2007) Eschatological Poetics, p. 75, by Broncano, Manuel, University of Leon
94. Graham, Don (2011), p. 109-114.
95. ^ Chapman King; Wallach; Welsh (2009), Chapter 7: “Borderline Evil: The Dark Side of Byzantium in No Country for Old Men, Novel and Film”, by Welsh, Jim, p.73-75.
96. Adler, Shawn (February 19, 2008). "'No Country For Old Men' Villain Might Be Scariest Big-Screen Baddie Ever: Oscar Honor Roll". 'MTV. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
97. Young, Alison (2010), Chapter 6: “No end to violence?”, p. 161
98. Foundas, Scott (November 08, 2007). "Badlands: Coen brothers transcend themselves with No Country for Old Men". LA Weekly. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
99. Cooper, Lydia R. (2011), Chapter 4: “’He’s a Psychopathic Killer But So What?’: Moral Storytelling in No Country for Old Men”
100. Young, Alison (2010), Chapter 6: “No end to violence?”, p. 149
101. Chapman King; Wallach; Welsh (2009), Chapter 11: “’Hold still’: Models of Masculinity in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men”, by Peebles, Stacey, p. 127.
102. ^ Reed, Alison. "The Ghosted Other: Ethno-Racial Violence in 'No Country for Old Men'". JGCinema.com: Cinema and Globalization. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
103. ^ Chapman King; Wallach; Welsh (2009), Chapter 12: “A Flip of the Coin: Gender Systems and Female Resistance in the Coen Brothers’ ‘No Country for Old Men’”, by Johns, Erin K., p.139-152.
104. Dargis, Manohla (May 4, 2008). "Is There a Real Woman in This Multiplex?". The New York Times. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
105. Hesse, Monica (February 22, 2009). "Gender's Role: In a Complex Category by Itself". The Washington Post. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
106. ^ Adler, Shawn (January 15, 2008). "Josh Brolin On 'No Country' Ending: 'It Was Supposed To Piss You Off'". MTV News. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
107. Stevens, Dana (November 8, 2007). "Why the new Coen brothers' masterpiece disappoints". Slate. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
108. Holman, Curt (November 14, 2007). "No Country for Old Men: Badlands. Coen Brothers return to the scene of their first crime". CL Atlanta. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
109. Discepolo, Ciro (2011), p. 8.
110. Bozzola, Lucia (November 20, 2007). ""No Country for Old Men": Western Terminator". The Simon. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
111. ^ "No Country for Old Men (2007)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved December 23, 2007. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
112. "No Country for Old Men (2007) – International Box Office Results". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved December 23, 2007. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
113. "True Grit". Boxoffice Mojo. May 7 2011. Retrieved 12 November 2011. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
114. "No Country for Old Men on DVD & Blu-ray". Retrieved 2008-01-29.
115. "No Country for Old Men Blu-ray review". Blu-ray.com. March 11, 2008. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
116. Brown, Kenneth S. (March 11, 2008). "No Country for Old Men Blu-ray review". High-Def Digest . {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
117. "Oscar Futures: Could 'No Country for Old Men' Mean No Oscars for Other Movies?".
118. Stein, Ruth (October 28, 2007). "Josh Brolin gets Oscar buzz for 'No Country for Old Men'". San Francisco Chronicle. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
119. "Review: No Country for Old Men". Reelviews.net. 2007-05-13. Retrieved 2011-08-07.
120. Ebert, Roger. "No Country for Old men". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved November 18, 2007.
121. Lane, Anthony (2009-01-07). "Hunting Grounds". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2011-08-07.
122. Hunter, Stephen (November 9, 2007). "'No Country for Old Men' Chases Its Literary Tale". The Washington Post.
123. Sarris, Andrew (2007-10-29). "Just Shoot Me! Nihilism Crashes Lumet and Coen Bros. | The New York Observer". Observer.com. Retrieved 2011-08-07.
124. Corliss, Richard (December 9, 2007). "Top 10 Everything of 2007". Time. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
125. "No Country for Old Men (2007): Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved November 10, 2007.
126. Buchanan, Jason. "No Country for Old Men > Overview". AllMovie. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
127. "Empire Reviews Central – Review of No Country For Old Men". Empireonline.com. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
128. "No Country For Old Men Movie Review, DVD Release". Filmcritic.com. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
129. "No Country for Old Men :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews". Rogerebert.suntimes.com. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
130. (Posted: Nov 1, 2007) (2007-11-01). "No Country for Old Men : Review". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2009-08-09.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
131. "Browse Movie Reviews at Premiere.com –Film Review and More". Premiere.com. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
132. "Home Page – Best of 2009". CriticsTop10. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
133. ^ "Metacritic: 2007 Film Critic Top Ten Lists". Metacritic. Archived from the original on February 23, 2008. Retrieved February 25, 2008.
134. ^ Germain, David (December 27, 2007). "'No Country for Old Men' earns nod from AP critics". Associated Press, via Columbia Daily Tribune. Archived from the original on January 3, 2008. Retrieved December 31, 2007. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
135. Ebert, Roger (December 20, 2007). "The year's ten best films and other shenanigans". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved January 5, 2008.
136. ^ Coyle, Jake (February 25, 2008). "Oscars honor Coens as best director(s)". USA Today. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
137. "The 80th Academy Awards (2008) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Retrieved 2011-11-22.
138. Serjeant, Jill (February 25, 2008). "Javier Bardem becomes first Spanish actor to win Oscar". Reuters”. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
139. "The 80th Academy Awards (2008)". The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). February 24, 2008. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
140. "65th Golden Globe Awards Nominations & Winners". goldenglobes.org. Retrieved January 13, 2008. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
141. Bergan, Ronald (May 22, 2007). "What the French papers say: Sicko and No Country For Old Men". Guardian Unlimited. London. Retrieved December 22, 2007.
142. "'Into the Wild' leads SAG nominations". Cable News Network. December 20, 2007. Archived from the original on December 21, 2007. Retrieved December 22, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
143. "Film Award Winners in 2008". BAFTA.org. Retrieved February 25, 2008. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
144. Giles, Jeff (December 10, 2007). "There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men Top Critics' Awards: New York, LA, Boston and D.C. scribes honor the best of 2007". Rotten Tomatoes / IGN Entertainment, Inc. Retrieved December 22, 2007. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
145. Coyle, Jake (December 10, 2007). "New York Film Critics choose 'No Country for Old Men'". USA Today. Retrieved December 22, 2007.
146. "No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood Top Critics' Lists in Toronto, San Diego, Austin". Rotten Tomatoes / IGN Entertainment, Inc. December 19, 2007. Retrieved December 22, 2007.
147. Associated Press (2007-12-05). "National Board of Review: 'No Country for Old Men' Best Film of '07". Fox News Network, LLC. Retrieved December 22, 2007. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
148. Maxwell, Erin (December 16, 2007). "Chicago critics love 'Country'". Variety. Retrieved December 22, 2007.
149. "Jones sues Paramount over film cash". Press Association. Retrieved July 9, 2008. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
150. Belloni, Matthew (April 23, 2010). "'NO COUNTRY' INVESTOR: TOMMY LEE JONES GOT $15 MILLION, WE GOT STIFFED". THR,Esq.-The Hollywood Reporter. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
151. Belloni, Matthew (December 30, 2011). "Paramount Wins 'No Country' Trial Over Payout to Tommy Lee Jones". The Hollywood Reporter. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)

Bibliography

• Alvarez-López, Esther (2007), En/clave De Frontera, Homenaje Al Profesor, Urbano Vinuela Angulo, Oviedo, Spain: Publicaciones de la Universidad De Oviedo, ISBN 978-84-8317-681-8.
• Boule', Jean-Pierre; McCaffrey, Enda (2009), Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Sartrean Perspective, Berghahn Books, ISBN 978-0-85745-320-4.
• Chapman King, Lynnea; Wallach, Rick; Welsh, Jim (2009), No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film, Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, ISBN 978-0-8108-6729-1.
• Conard, Mark T. (2009), The Philosophy of The Coen Brothers, Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, ISBN 978-0-8131-2526-8.
• Cooper, Lydia R. (2011), No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy, Louisiana State University Press, ISBN 978-0-8071-3721-5.
• Discepolo, Ciro (2011), Neither Our Country is No Country for Old Men, Napoli: Ricerca ’90.
• Doom, Ryan P. (2009), The Brothers Coen: Unique Characters of Violence, Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, LLC, ISBN 978-0-313-35598-1.
• Graham, Don (2011), State of Minds: Texas Culture & Its Discontents, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, ISBN 978-0-292-72361-0.
• Hurbis-Cherrier, Mick (2012), Voice & Vision: A Creative Approach to Narrative Film & DV Production, Second Edition, Burlington, MA: Focal Press/Elsevier, ISBN 978-0-240-81158-1.
• Luhr, William (2012), Film Noir, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley and Sons, ISBN 978-1-4051-4594-7.
• McMahon, Jennifer L.; Csaki, Steve (2010), The Philosophy of the Western, Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, ISBN 978-0-8131-2591-6.
• Olson, Danel (2011), 21st Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., ISBN 978-0-8108-7728-3.
• Spurgeon, Sara L. (2011), Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses/No Country for Old Men/The Road, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0-8264-38201.
• Young, Alison (2010), The Scene of Violence: Cinema, Crime, Affect, New York, NY: Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-49071-9.

Further reading

• Script of No Country for Old Men by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, based on the Novel by Cormac McCarthy (Draft), raindance.org
• Dialogue transcript of No Country for Old Men. Screenplay by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, based on the Novel by Cormac McCarthy, script-o-rama.com
• "At the Border: the Limits of Knowledge in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men," Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, No. 1, 2010
• "’No Country’ hits home" (a letter to Critic Roger Ebert), rogerebert.suntimes.com

External links

• Official website on Miramax.com
• No Country for Old Men at IMDb
• No Country for Old Men at the TCM Movie Database
• Template:Amg movie
• No Country for Old Men at Rotten Tomatoes
• No Country for Old Men at Metacritic
• No Country for Old Men at Box Office Mojo

Template:Link FA

• 2007 films
• 2000s thriller films
• American crime thriller films
• Gangster films
• Films set in 1980
• Films set in Texas
• Films shot in New Mexico
• Films shot in Texas
• Films featuring a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe winning performance
• Films featuring a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winning performance
• Films based on novels
• Cormac McCarthy
• Films whose director won the Best Director Academy Award
• Films whose writer won the Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award
• Best Picture Academy Award winners
• BAFTA winners (films)
• Films directed by the Coen brothers
• Miramax Films films
• Paramount Vantage films
• English-language films
• Serial killer films
• Films set in Mexico