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Herald rating: * * * * *
They have given us the ridiculous (The Ladykillers and The Hudsucker Proxy) and the sublime (Fargo and The Big Lebowski). The Coen brothers' newest is their best yet.
Adapting the 2005 novel by the master of southwestern gothic, Cormac McCarthy, with considerable reverence, they suppress their characteristic tendency to wild pastiche (be warned that the lyrical ending closely mirrors the novel's, and the filmgoers exasperated by it will be those whose ideas of narrative have been completely hijacked by Hollywood).
Instead they turn in a masterfully controlled piece of genre film-making, a classical formalist masterpiece which is a sustained exercise in suspense.
Set in 1980 in the dry lands of West Texas, it is, in its bare bones, a cinematic cliche: bad men chase bad money and things go bad. But the characters - and the marvellous performances that bring them to life - lend the storyline a hulking, even mythic quality.
It becomes a haunting rumination on greed, and a piercing elegy for something forever lost.
Of the complicated (but easy-to-follow) plotline, little will be revealed here. Hunting in the desert, Llewellyn Moss (Brolin), a self-styled cowboy, stumbles on a drug deal gone sour. Everybody - well, almost everybody - is dead and there's a satchel with $2 million in it. Well, what would you do?
By the end of the first reel he's on the run, pursued by Anton Chigurh (Bardem), a psychopath of weary demeanour whose tool of trade is a bulky slaughterhouse stun gun. We've known him barely five minutes and he's killed two people. But it's Moss and the satchel he's after. And after both of them is Sheriff Bell (Jones).
Bell is the film's centre of gravity. Jones, surely the most dependably convincing American actor alive, chews some great lines (when his deputy describes the desert murder scene as a mess, he studies it through crinkled eyes and says, "If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here"). But it's his mourning for the country in which his father kept the peace that bookends the film and keeps its undercurrents flowing.
Roger Deakins' cinematography shows us the wild, wide landscapes as if we are seeing them for the first time; Bardem's killer, a badass with a bad haircut, keeps the tension ratcheted up; and MacDonald does a great trailer-park bride.
But it's Jones who carries the film's meaning, and does so effortlessly. He - and the Coens - have never been better.
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly MacDonald, Woody Harrelson.
Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen.
Running time: 122 mins
Rating: R16, graphic violence.
Screening: Berkeley, Hoyts, SkyCity, Rialto.
Verdict: A bloodsoaked thriller set in West Texas in 1980 is the Coen brothers' best yet.
