When someone says the word America,"" we all conjure up different images in our minds. Some might think of a painfully mundane New Jersey suburb, some of a farm in a remote corner of northern Wisconsin, some of consumption-crazed midtown Manhattan. We have these images in our head of what we believe America to be, but few of us have the ability to adequately express them. This is the nature of the Coen brothers' wonderful gift and the reason that films like ""No Country for Old Men"" stand out as consistently canonical in modern cinema.
The plot itself is archetypal and not for those averse to graphic violence. It centers on three characters, the most memorable of which is a serial murderer named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who stalks across Texas in search of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and his stolen $2 million. The third character is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who seems to exist in a calmer, more meandering reality than the other two, whose adrenaline-fueled cat-and-mouse game give the film a place in the thriller genre.
But like any other Coen brothers film, what sets ""No Country"" apart from the competition is the supporting cast. Characters played by non-actors with names like ""Gas Station Proprietor,"" ""Boot Salesman"" and ""Mexican in Bathtub"" often steal the scene from Hollywood veterans. Other directors use characters like these merely to provide the main characters something to work off of and react to, but the Coen brothers use minor characters the same way they use major ones. They paint characters onscreen like no other filmmaking team in mainstream American cinema, making them so real that one can smell their cologne when they enter a shot.
Their talent for creating characters certainly isn't underutilized with their portrayal of the main characters. Moss' wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) is the epitome of modest charm and beauty. Macdonald plays the character with a sweetness and an innocence that makes it impossible not to fall deeply in love with her from the moment she reveals her intoxicating Texas twang.
Jones' sheriff is likewise a character who stirs up tremendous amounts of empathy. Though he does get caught up in the film's ubiquitous violence, he is purposefully distant from the physical world around him, choosing instead to ruminate on his arrival at the autumn of his life.
Ultimately, the film is more stunning than entertaining, using the landscape of near-silence and long, empty expanses and a cast of characters in the vein of an old Spaghetti Western. But though the landscape seems empty and the characters one-dimensional, they fuse together to collectively portray America more accurately than a deftly-directed documentary on the same subject ever could.
""No Country for Old Men,"" like many other Coen brothers films, exists in an America that is pure and timeless. This America, though it has never existed, is more than a fictional creation because it is an America that exists in our collective consciousness. An America like this is always just a little bit further down that long, straight stretch of Texas highway.
