Brothers grim

Javier Bardem plays a violent serial killer in the Coen brothers film No Country for Old Men. (Richard Foreman/Miramax Films/Alliance Atlantis)

Serial killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) has an improbable Little Dutch Boy hair wedge and a burnt-out hollow for a soul. In union, these traits mark the merging of brother directors Joel and Ethan Coen — visual wits and lovers of silly hair — and American author Cormac McCarthy, a man who has spent a career scouring a dusty North America for some sign of providence. 

McCarthy’s 2003 novel, No Country for Old Men, takes its title from the William Butler Yeats poem Sailing to Byzantium, with its famous line, “Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.” There was a time when the Coens, too, seemed transfixed by inescapable mortality, and the feeble, human shoves against the inevitable end. That was back in their Young Turk days, when they burst forth as the darlings of independent cinema with the taut revenge drama Blood Simple (1984). Few directors have a deeper understanding of greed, either as folly (The Big Lebowski), tragedy (Miller’s Crossing) or — at their best – both (Fargo).

But in the past few years, the Coens have dulled a little. They’ve rubbed that distinct style to pebble-smooth perfection in films like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. Their darker instincts are too often eclipsed by cool design and smirking humour, making them strangely indistinguishable from the legions of Coen-lite imitators out there. With varying levels of success, the Coens’ ironic, distanced sensibility has become the most popular term in the hipster indie auteur vocabulary, from Napolean Dynamite to Wes Anderson to the upcoming teen pregnancy comedy Juno.

In a recent essay in The Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn wrote that the “quirk” aesthetic is the dominant mode of contemporary indie art: “Quirk is an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream. It features mannered ingenuousness, an embrace of small moments, narrative randomness, situationally amusing but not hilarious character juxtapositions.…” Hirschorn doesn’t trace this phenomenon back to the Coens, but he could. From the moment that hard-bitten criminals got cuddly with the cute, blond baby (nutty juxtaposition alert!) in 1987’s Raising Arizona, the die was cast. The Coen quirk is always fun to look at, but isn’t that too modest a goal for their gifts? The brothers have the capacity to blow minds and sear hearts, and what they have to say about humanity may be better said with blood than with cleverness.

Directors Ethan Coen, left, and Joel Coen on the set of No Country for Old Men. (Richard Foreman/Miramax Films/Alliance Atlantis)

And so it is a great pleasure to see the Coens re-awakening and returning to the moral muck of their best work. No Country for Old Men is set in 1980 in the sepia desert of west Texas. There, on the edge of Mexico, evil-made-manifest Chigurh (a brilliant, unshakeable performance from Bardem) is running a bloodbath that floods the west. Before he kills, he likes to flip a coin first, a sign of universal chaos masking as order. Depending on the coin-toss outcome, he may take a cattle stun gun and blow a hole through the loser. The Coens use their eye for weird beauty, filling their film with regular-faced, hard-working people whose deaths — perhaps like their lives? — are swift and unremarked upon.

As Chigurh sweeps across the land, a greasy moustache of a man named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon a botched drug deal in the desert. Spontaneously, he steals a “satchel of money” (a phrase that sounds best with a Texan accent) worth two million dollars. But this neophyte criminal is also a husband who cares for his wife (Kelly Macdonald). His instincts are complicated: he’s haunted by the moans of a dying man at the site of the drug deal carnage, and he returns later with water for him. Chigurh spies Llewelyn, and soon, they’re playing cat-and-mouse in the desert. The chase is edge-of-seat tense and head-in-jacket gory, with great, thankful bursts of laughter that I won’t describe here. The surprises are many; the revulsion is necessary.

Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is the closest thing to good in No Country. His job, from which he is about to retire, has kept him equally steeped in horror and honour. He is Yeats’s useless old man (“a tattered coat upon a stick”), exhausted and running out of faith. The sheriff is officially tracking down the killer, but he often chooses to continue reading the newspaper rather than go to the crime scene. Jones is a marvel; he speaks in a resigned mumble, as if he’s been anticipating this madness before him his whole life.

McCarthy paints a merciless world: no doubt, no regret, no mourning. It is a country of appetites with no hope of beyond. What a great landing place for the Coens, expert in revealing the ugliness of human lust. Though McCarthy’s sparse poetry makes for some beautiful dialogue, a line from the Coens-authored Fargo kept coming to my mind: “There’s more to life than a little money, you know.”

For those who prefer their Coen brothers surreal or cute, this explosion of existentialist anger may seem like a betrayal. But at a time when America has a new and intimate understanding of violence, the film feels like an epiphany, a return to urgency from two indie masters, long overdue.

No Country for Old Men opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on Nov. 9, and in other Canadian cities on Nov. 16.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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