The Good News, Bad News No Country
An interview with star Tommy Lee Jones.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 01/02/2008
“No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody f****** chance.”
—Harry Morgan,
To Have and Have Not (1937)
No Country for Old Men is really two movies, especially for audiences who believe they may be coming to see a Coen Brothers picture along the lines of earlier crime-driven works by Joel and Ethan, such as Blood Simple (1984), Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Fargo (1996). These are pictures that managed to be smart, funny and horrific, all at the same time, and No Country, for the most part, fits well into that group.
The novel by Cormac McCarthy would seem to be an almost perfect fit. Set in 1980, it’s the story of a resourceful, somewhat haunted Vietnam vet, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who happens upon a crime scene while hunting.
Spread out over a half acre of dirt in a gully in West Texas are the bodies of a group of men, their vehicles and a dog or two, all dead or dying. Still sitting on the back of one of the pickup trucks are the stacks of packaged heroin bricks, and not far from the site, beneath a tree, is the dead man who dragged himself away with two million in cash in a case.
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