No Country for Old Men
15, Nationwide
No Country for Old Men, adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is not for the squeamish or easily spooked, or at least should not be for the squeamish and easily spooked. I am both — in spades — yet found it almost ecstatically absorbing. This is not to say I liked it. But neither is it to say that I didn’t. It’s not a film that asks to be either liked or disliked. It just is, branding itself on to you like a heated iron.
It is set in Texas, in 1980, on the USA–Mexico border where the men are men (‘Quit yer hollerin’,’ they say to their womenfolk) and the desert landscape is vast and dry and desolate. Into this landscape — this intensely cinematic landscape — comes Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder and Vietnam War veteran who, out hunting, stumbles across the aftermath of a drug-related gun battle which has left almost everyone dead.
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