great beyond

sheriff ed tom bell: ..he killed a fourteen year-old girl. papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there weren't nothin' passionate about it. said he'd be fixin' to kill someone for as long as he could remember. said if i left him out there he'd kill somebody again. said he was goin' to hell. reckoned he's be there in about 15 minutes.

tommy lee jones is the philosopher in no country for old men. and it seems he remains just that: a mind that is able to make sense of the bleakness his universe, but is unable to do anything about it. one character even accuses him of "vanity" for thinking he can actually change anything at all.

the movie is about llewelyn moss, the josh brolin character, who comes across a drug deal gone wrong and decides to keep the money he finds there for himself. for moss, it is not about the choices one makes, but rather how one lives after those choices are already made. he spends no time imagining that other possibility without the bag of money. it's already there, already his. the question is how to stay alive.

and finally we cannot forget javier bardem: anton chigurh (moss thought the last name was "sugar"). chigurh escapes definition. one reason why bardem deserves (and would deserve) every award in the world (yes, awards, we all love them): a million actors can pull off a difficult role, a million of them can show a range of emotions without appearing have a torn cartilage, but only a few can tread in that dangerous territory of the seemingly simple and one-dimensional character, and those few manage to make robots and monsters and puppets (which in mediocre movies are fairly easy to understand) not only charming, but incomprehensible, unknowable, more-than-human and therefore beyond the human faculty for reason. chigurh could easily have been the terminator. well, he is not, never was.

no country for old men is comedy; it's the darkest you will ever see. you laugh and cover your mouth. even when alone, you look around to assure yourself no one saw you laughing.