cbsreview: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

In Cormac McCarthy's nihilistic novel No Country For Old Men from which the movie of the same title was based, one character says that Truth ought to be simple, otherwise it will be too late if a child cannot understand it.

I saw the movie last Saturday in South Beach where it had a special engagement, and I must say the majority of the viewers - myself included - had difficulty in understanding the truth of evil that in every shocking scene where Chigurh (Javier Bardem) partakes in his own feast of crime, we were like kids in a confused state of shock and repulsion, unable to react according to the dictates of rehashed parental warning: Relax, this is only a movie. One scene was in fact so abominably violent to my sensibility I had to turn my head sideways as far away from the screen as possible.

No Country For Old Men, however, despite its bloodyawful gore, was not meant to shock just for the sake of shocking. It was so urgent and respectable in its depiction of evil, the movie almost seemed like a pulic service. Of course we know this much is true: greed spells violence and we are all the more doomed to extinction if we cannot sense a greedy criminal from a mile away. Which is why, in the movie's final scene, an old uncle to Tommy Lee Jones' Sherrif Ed Tom Bell somewhat gives a warning that this world had become so violent it is no longer a place for old men. (Is it because they do know the truth, finally?)

Here's the movie's plot which is as simple as a cat and mouse's: Set in the early Mexican drug trade of the 80's somewhere in West Texas, a transaction went wrong and about 8 men are dead, 1 dying. Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin, I had no idea who this actor was but vowed to remember him from thereon) happens to be game-hunting nearby and senses the aftermath. He examines the crime spot and comes accross the one Mexican who gets an extra breath of life, he who asks, Agua, por favor. The guy is probably dying of thirst rather than of bullet wound, and Moss is in no position to grant a hapless request. The rampage, after all, is in the middle of a desert, and he himself does not appear to be carrying a drop of water.

Moss continues to follow the crime trail until he hits paydirt: a briefcase of money, all of $2M, lies near another dead Mexican. He grabs it and goes home.

Nightime comes, he rises up, goes to the kitchen, fills up a pitcher with tap water, and at that very point we did not know the domino effect is about to begin: he will bring the pitcher of water to the thirsty, dying man, and thus will make him - to us viewers at least -the closest to a hero that movie will ever have for whom we will reserve the closest empathy. But instead of being able to relieve the man of his thirst, something else happens.

And of course I will not tell you what, although I can share this: Javier Bardem was so scary that if - at the end of the movie where viewers headed towards the exit - somebody was standing at the door resembling his vampire-looking face, dead eyes, awful haircut and all, half of the moviegoers were probably going to run in different directions like disturbed ants unless they opted to freeze instead in the very arms of harm's way.

Bardem will most likely win an award, not just in next year's multiple award-giving bodies, but as one of the scariest villains of all time.