BY: JERRY P

The Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's nihilistic border tale is now out on DVD. Three men, millions in cash, and unrelenting violence - Brolin, Bardem, and Jones give nuanced performances in this Oscar-winning film.

Daniel Plainview, the oilman of There Will Be Blood, is a rank amateur in murder and mayhem when compared to Anton Chigurh, the peculiar but intense villain of No Country For Old Men, the Academy Award-winning film by the Coen brothers, fashioned from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel. Clearly, the two films were not tailored to the taste of moviegoers who go to movies for escape or entertainment; indeed, some Hollywood types think both films are intentionally and perversely anti-commercial, which of course is blasphemy in the industry, and why so few Americans have lined up to see these two bleak films. They are, however, despite their dark themes, the class movies of 2007. Plainview and Chigurh are two of the most downbeat, nasty, and nihilistic fictional anti-heroes in recent American cinema. They are characters that seem to match the seething unconscious of an America hell-bent on chaos and self-destruction. They are our shadow writ large.

It all starts with Llewelyn Moss going hunting for antelope in West Texas country, near the Mexican border. Moss (Josh Brolin) is an impoverished welder who lives in a trailer with his young wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald). He stumbles on a horrendous scene of carnage, obviously a drug deal gone bad. He investigates. There are several vehicles, one truck carrying bricks of ‘Mexican Brown,’ six or seven corpses, one dead dog, and one Mexican who is alive but mortally wounded. He asks for water, but Moss has none. He also finds a satchel full of money, $2 million in $100 bills. Unable to resist the money, he walks back to his truck and goes home. That act sets up the rest of the story, which is one long, complicated chase scene.

Enter Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who dresses in black, has a pageboy haircut and an eccentric weapon of choice - a pneumatic gun that doesn’t look lethal at first glance, but always gives him a bit of an advantage over his victims. We are never quite sure what his role is in the heroin transaction or the killings out in the desert. But he wants the money, and he goes after it with a relentless, inexorable single-mindedness, like a murderous flash flood that will sweep away all in front of it as it hurries toward its target. Moss is no slouch as an adversary, but he can't match the ferocity of his opponent. Moss makes a terrible mistake right at the outset of the chase; it is the kind of error Chigurh, the killing machine, would never make.

The third protagonist in this crime triangle is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a reflective third-generation Texas lawman, who has seen it all and carries his burden with a world-weariness that finally drives him to retirement. Sheriff Bell is one of the ‘Old Men’ referenced in the title of the story. He can’t believe the crazy violence of the contemporary world. He collects stories of bizarre and senseless violence in Texas and elsewhere, and realizes that Anton Chigurh has raised the bar when it comes to violence, irrationality, and brutality. By the end of the story he is ready to quit a world he no longer comprehends. We, like him, want no more of the madness that has infected the world.

Both the book and the film end with Sheriff Bell telling his wife about a dream he has had about his father, also a Lawman, like his father before him. Bell is on horseback traveling through a snowy mountain pass. His father, also on horseback, a blanket wrapped around him, trots on by him, carrying a “horn filled with light,” with which “he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold.” That image of the torch of light being passed on through the generations is an image and gesture of understanding that I for one treasure as a counterbalance to the insane nihilism of Anton Chigurh, the ultimate psychopathic serial killer, the fictional scourge of West Texas and the American psyche.