There is a shot in NCFOM, three seconds long at most, in which the camera holds on the close-up of a crumpled candy bar wrapper. As we watch, the wrapper springs back slightly, the theater filling with the hugely amplified noise of its unfolding. There it is: the melding of the Coen Brother's filmmaking style with the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, writer of the novel upon which the film is based. A useless piece of detritus, the inconsequential remains from the satisfaction of a small human want slowly unwinds, ticking off the seconds. This sort of detail is a hallmark of the Coen's. Exploited as a device to build suspense in a scene involving two men who face each other over the counter of a convenience store, the piece of cellophane is a stand-in for the entire film which unfolds with the same excruciating inevitability.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is fast coming to the conclusion he is no longer up to the task. He seems to perpetually sit before a plate of eggs and ham and biscuits, unable to eat from brooding over the situation. The weary bags beneath his eyes, skin eroded like the twin washouts of a dry arroyo, telegraph his exhaustion. Sheriff Bell is surrounded by young deputies who, just as he once must have, ricochet from one shocking crime scene to another, insulating themselves from the horror with their police procedure. West Texas is Sheriff Bell's territory and a new amorality is afoot. The Sheriff's uncle, a retired lawman, employing a language that is pure Cormac McCarthy, warns that some awful thing is building up to happen, something that will make no concession to anyone and any individual who thinks otherwise is engaging in a form of vanity.

The awful thing is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hitman who moves over the Texas hardpan like a force of nature, seemingly capricious in his use of violence, yet operating by a code, as one character notes, that transcends everything, even money. The tools of Chigurh's trade: a shotgun fitted with a silencer and a bolt gun of the sort normally used to dispatch steers in a slaughterhouse. The Texas of the movie is bathed in a light so brilliant that watching the film makes your eyes tear up. The pitiless sun reveals all insufficiencies and the outlaw, Chigurh, arrives to pass judgment. The hitman is particularly hard on any older male whom he determines to have lived a soft, non-trying life. In the scene of the wadded up candy bar wrapper, Chugurh presents the middle-aged clerk of a gas station/convenience store, a man who married into his livelihood, with a simple coin toss. It is a game of chance that, according to Chugurh, the man has been playing for all his life. Beneath the unremitting glare of the Coen Brother's Texas sky all human-made objects appears flimsy and make-shift. Everything the inhabitants of this landscape use is a mere stop-gap until they can afford, or find, or steal, something better. This is a distinctly Coen trademark, the sense that all appurtenances, the vehicles their characters drive, the houses they live in, even their boots are but the flimsiest of contrivances, useful as far as they go, but ultimately a shambles. The only objects seeming to have substance in the film are the weapons the vigorous and sharp-sighted use against one another. It is no country for old men.

The movie ends, or rather collapses, upon a black screen where eventually, after a good while in which most of the audience continues to sit stock still, the credits appear. I found myself leaving my seat and gathering up my belongings with the same slow, deliberate movements employed by the characters in the film. Nothing is by chance, everything is for a purpose. The fellow in an adjoining seat discovered he had lost his keys and I handed him a flashlight, even turning it on for him. When he failed to find the keys I told him I was sorry. Infected with the film's sense of fatalism, it seemed to me the incident would certainly be the first in a series of missteps leading the man into a downward spiral from which he would never recover.

Lovely