The Plot: Llewellyn Moss (Brolin) thinks he's a rich man after discovering two million dollars at the site of a drug deal gone bad.  But after he foolishly returns to the scene, he finds both Mexican gangsters and the dangerous Anton Chigurh (Bardem) on his trail.  Meanwhile, sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Jones) is following the case with a growing sense of disillusionment.

I bet the first guy he killed was his barber.

The Flax Take:
In many ways, the Coen Brothers as filmmakers have always placed style on a pedestal well above substance. If anything, the style of their films sometimes serves as the substance; take The Big Lebowski, for example, a fairly straightforward yarn once you dig past the layers of zany characters and crackling dialogue. Their latest, the modern Western No Country for Old Men, is not about to break this mold; the problem is that neither the style nor the substance seem up to the task of carrying a two-hour film.

The basic plot of No Country follows Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who comes across the remains of a drug deal gone bad while out hunting. Moss makes off with a satchel containing two million dollars, but makes the mistake of returning to the scene later that night with a jug of water for a dying man. The man is now quite dead, and Moss has alerted those looking for the money to his presence at the scene. He soon finds himself in a grim chase, fleeing before the hired killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem).

The Coens’ slow pace and lack of music for most of the film make much of No Country a severe drag, although these factors both contribute to ratcheting up the tension. We, the audience, know what manner of a man is after Moss long before he realizes it himself, and we fear for him. At the same time, the Coens implicitly ask us whether we should be fearing for him – Moss, after all, is basically a thief, and while that doesn’t place him as far out on the continuum of sin as the murderous Chigurh, it certainly doesn’t make him the hero of the film. Chigurh himself appears to operate using a very warped sense of morality, though certain scenes in which he apparently kills out of sheer convenience suggest otherwise.

The film’s true hero, assuming there can be said to be one, is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who in curiously ironic fashion is always one step behind the actual action. The film opens with narration from Jones, discussing how many of the sheriffs he knew as a young man didn’t even wear guns; this is subsequently contrasted with the violence Bell comes across throughout the film. But if the film is Bell’s story – and it opens and closes on him, suggesting as much – he is an oddly passive observer for much of it. No Country’s moral lessons – in particular the idea that a punishable offense is a punishable offense, even if it seems odd that someone less moral is doing the punishing – come from the Moss/Chigurh plot, though the irony is that Moss might have gotten away clean if not for the fact that his morals got the best of him. The film’s ideas get a bit muddled as a result. What, exactly, is it saying about morality if the real moral seems to be that evil triumphs and no good deed goes unpunished?

It’s the character of Chigurh that provides the stickiest subject. How he fits into the plot to begin with is frustratingly unclear, and his motivations are correspondingly hazy. For example, after being hired to track Moss, he kills the two men who hire him. Why, we don’t know. My guess would be that Chigurh – who rolls through the film like a force of nature more than a character – acts almost as a kind of avenging spirit, punishing everyone who is in any way guilty. However, our first encounters with him feature him murdering a deputy who had the temerity to arrest him and then a motorist for no other reason than, I assume, that Chigurh does not want to be seen driving a police car. These muddy the character’s waters, and even if he is placed into the film as a sort of avenger, it’s not clear how that connects to Bell’s story, nor how the vaguely supernatural nature of that angle would mesh with what otherwise seems to be an attempt at a realistic portrayal of place and time on the part of the Coens.

The Coens leave us a lot to chew on, but unfortunately they don’t present it in the most appealing package. While the deliberate pace and lack of music add to the tension, they also – particularly in places where the tension is not as high, such as the opening hunting scene, which takes place long before the chase begins – create a plodding, shift-in-your-seat, check-your-watch experience that ranks up there with the most restless I’ve ever felt in a theater. I don’t inherently have a problem with slow pacing, but many scenes felt like they could have been told in half the time, if not less, without sacrificing anything in meaning. I found this to be more distracting than anything; rather than encouraging me to search for hidden themes, the slow movement simply began to drain my enthusiasm for watching the film at all.

The Coen Brothers have made good films, and they’ve made great films, but with No Country for Old Men I’m not willing to make a case that they’ve done either. It’s a morally complex work, to be sure, but it creeps along so slowly with a wisp of a plot that the depth becomes difficult to parse – and even beyond that, the Chigurh character is so slippery that he casts doubt on any argument you’d care to make for the film’s sense of morality. No Country may be an evocative portrait of a place and time, but what kind of meaning that setting offers regarding morals and humanity is anyone’s guess.