BEST PICTURE SHOWCASE: "No Country For Old Men" (2007)

Joel & Ethan Coen are considered genius writers and directors. They should be. They have given us some classic films over time, many of which have been award-winning. However, for the most part, Oscars eluded them. Sure, they would get nominations, but until the 2008 ceremony they didn't find themselves accepting the awards. That changed with No Country For Old Men, a combination crime drama/western set in 1980 throughout the state of Texas. It is based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel. Many critics hailed this as the best film of their careers, and the Coen mantles wound up quite heavy with prizes as a result of it. I personally was not all that thrilled with the movie when I first saw it. I found it lacking in some character development, and moreso I found it lacking in closure. I was obviously in the minority, however.

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The film opens with a narrative by Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who is a third-generation sheriff of the area. He's lamenting how much more violent the area seems to have gotten as he's gotten older. As he's telling us this, we see a traffic stop that leads to the arrest of someone. Back at the police station, the arresting officer is talking to the sheriff on the phone, but behind him we see the arrested man contort himself to get his handcuffed hands and arms in front of him and slowly walk over to the officer. Just as the officer hangs up the phone, the man takes the chain of the handcuffs and strangles the officer with the crazed look in his face seen above. That man is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hired hitman. Chigurh removes the cuffs, then goes into the restroom to clean the blood off of himself. After leaving the station, he pulls over a motorist in the officer's car and kills the motorist with his weapon of choice. I had to look up the exact name of the item, and it's a homemade captive bolt pistol, or cattle gun. This homemade version is an air tank with a hose and a nozzle, but the nozzle blows out a blast of air as if it were a bullet, leaving a hole. This is sometimes used to incapacitate livestock.

Having been introduced to Chigurh, we cut to Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) hunting deer. His shot seems to miss, but he treks to the area to see if there is any signs of having hit the animal. Indeed, he finds a blood trail, but it only leads to an old dog. As he makes this discovery, however, he also sees something from afar that makes him want to take a closer look. He winds up coming across several vehicles, along with dead Mexican men and dogs. As he's checking around and picking up the now-unowned guns, he finds one man still barely alive, and by seeing a ton of drugs in the back of one truck deduces this was a drug deal gone bad. Somehow, Moss also determines there's still one man unaccounted for, so Moss continues to search, eventually finding that man under a tree, long-deceased, and with a satchel. Upon opening the satchel, he sees stacks and stacks of money.

Moss brings the bag home to his trailer, where his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) isn't really sure whether to believe his casual mentions of two million dollars or not. That night, Moss decides to bring water to the man, but he's not alone. Two men in a truck begin to chase down and shoot at Moss, who gets hit in the shoulder but escapes. Moss returns home, tells Carla Jean to leave town and go to her mother's, and then hides out in a motel, putting the money into an air vent. Moss then rents out a second room elsewhere at the hotel to actually stay in, since he fears he's being followed by the men from earlier. What Moss doesn't know is that it's actually Chigurh on his trail, as he's been hired to retrieve the money and that money has a hidden tracking device stuffed within, which Chigurh has the receiver for. How is all this explained? Well...it's not. I don't know who hired him, or why he's after the money. He just is. If anyone knows the answer to that question, feel free to tell me, because I've seen the movie twice and I still don't know who he's answering to, being that he kills just about every person he comes into contact with.

Chigurh breaks into Moss's trailer and learns his name by the mail left on the ground. He opens a bottle of milk, sits on the couch and plans his next move. A short time later, Sheriff Bell and his deputy appear there as well and are angered to see the milk out, still sweating condensation, which shows they didn't miss him by much. Bell knows who Moss and Chigurh both are, and he knows he has to find Moss first to try and keep him safe.

Some time later as Chigurh is driving, his receiver beeps. He slows down as it beeps faster, pulling into a motel parking lot, and he eventually determines the very room the money is hidden in. Therefore, Chigurh assumes Moss is in there too. Moss is actually in the second room which, miraculously, has a connecting air vent that he can get the money from the other side, which is what he's doing just as he hears gunshots. Those shots are Chigurh, who has burst into the first room and is killing the group of Mexicans inside who have already broken in and are waiting for Moss as well, to ambush him and get the money. Moss gets the money and hits the road once again, still unaware he's being tracked.

Moss next bunks at a hotel near the U.S./Mexico border. As he lies in bed, he decides there's no way he could have been found, so he goes into the satchel and digs around, finally finding the bug. Its light is flashing as well, which alerts him that he may again have been found. Moss calls the desk but gets no answer, and since the desk clerk earlier said he would be there all night, Moss knows he's in trouble. He slowly turns out the lights, prepares his rifle, and sits on the bed facing the door. Under the door, he can see shadows quietly stop in front of it, then disappear after a few seconds. Suddenly, the lock is blown out of the door, stunning Moss for a moment, but not long enough to stop him from blasting at the door with his rifle. Moss jumps out of the window just before Chigurh bursts in and takes another shot with his weapon. The battle spills onto the streets. Moss hitchhikes a ride but before he can finish telling the driver where he's headed, the driver is blown away by Chigurh from afar. Moss commandeers the vehicle as it is being shot to Hell, and finally crashes. He hides behind another car and is able to injure Chigurh with a shotgun blast. Both men flee, and Moss ultimately decides to cross the border to escape. He first throws the satchel over a fence into some heavy grass, then goes over into Mexico himself before finally collapsing.

Waking up in a Mexican hospital, Moss sees Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) waiting for him. Wells has been hired to protect Moss and his price is the money, or at least a good chunk of it. Moss turns down the offer and Wells tells him where he's staying and how to contact him. Wells returns to his room, but Chigurh is waiting for him. They go back and forth for awhile, and as Wells's hotel phone rings, Chigurh kills him and answers it. It's Moss. He tells Moss that his wife, staying in Odessa, is the next target unless he gets the satchel back. Moss tells him in no uncertain terms to go pound salt.

Moss then makes plans for his wife and her mother to go to El Paso and meet him there. Carla Jean has also accepted protection from Sheriff Bell. Neither of these come to fruition for her, as upon arriving in El Paso, a group of Mexicans who somehow have found them kill her mother, and then find Bell at the hotel too. Sheriff Bell arrives at that hotel just as the killers speed off, and finds Moss dead in his room. Later that night, he returns to the hotel room and sees the room door has been blown off in Chigurh's signature manner. Chigurh has already been there post-murder and been looking for the satchel to no avail.

Carla Jean returns to her home after her mother's funeral. Chigurh is waiting for her. They talk. More ambiguous stuff happens. She's probably killed too. And then Chigurh gets into a car crash and limps away. And Sheriff Bell has retired, and gives another narrative, and by this point I'm done. Roll credits, please. Thank you.

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Yeah...I just don't get the love for this movie, I really don't. It finishes and you're just left with many more questions than you have answers. The money's still out in that field somewhere? Everybody's dead except the sheriff and Chigurh? Why is Tommy Lee Jones the first name on the marquee but in the movie the least? Was the guy who hired Carson Wells the same guy who earlier hired Chigurh? The answer to that last question is "Yes", but I only learned that through research. That man is unnamed in the movie but played by Stephen Root, and he hired not only Wells and Chigurh, but all those Mexicans as well. Why? I don't fucking know. I doubt there even is a concrete answer because that's just how the Coens operate. This is what drives me insane about Joel & Ethan Coen. For every great film they make (Fargo, True Grit), they seem to make two films that feel like you just spent two hours watching an unfinished screenplay (A Serious Man, The Man Who Wasn't There). Perhaps the original novel had the same level of ambiguity, perhaps not. I haven't read it, nor do I plan to. Movies should be able to make sense on their own without a secondary guide. This film doesn't.

But what do I know? Lots of people love the film. It did quite well at the box office. It made just about every year-end Top 10 list. Most notably, it won tons of awards, including four Oscars out of eight nominations. Wins came in the categories of Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director (making this the only film other than West Side Story to have more than one director win the prize), Best Supporting Actor (Bardem's win was the first by a Spanish actor) and, of course, Best Picture. (It was up against Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton and There Will Be Blood. I've watched Michael Clayton about 10 times and never get tired of it, so there in my opinion is the film that should have won.) Maybe I just didn't "get" this movie. Give No Country For Old Men a try and come to your own conclusions. Just pay close attention, because you'll be needing to fill in some blanks mentally on your own.