Old-Hat Reviews: No Country for Old Men

Just in case you're confused, this is the film with Javier Bardem and the terrible haircut, not the one with Daniel Day Lewis and the milkshake. If that helps clear things up at all.

This had been sitting on our to-be-watched shelf for possibly months before we finally got around to it, because it was lodged in my mind as one of those worthy Oscar films that I really should see but didn't hugely want to because it would probably be depressing. I'd forgotten that it's a Coen brothers film; in fact it doesn't have a lot of the Coen hallmarks - at least going by Fargo, which I always think of as quintessential Coen (partly because I haven't seen them all, but let's gloss over that - I've seen The Big Lebowski and Burn After Reading too, but those are definitely in the realm of comedy and this sure as heck ain't). The sense of the quietly ridiculous that normally hangs around a Coen brothers film was very very subtle here - noticeable only in Bardem's quite quite terrifyingly loony hit man, and Josh Brolin's mother-in-law, who had The Cancer and wasn't going to let anyone forget it.

There were a few things about the film that made it particularly interesting to me: it's partly set in border-country Texas, and I just happen to have spent two years living in border-country Texas, albeit further down the river from Del Rio. Not that I could identify with the drug dealing, but the Mariachi singers certainly struck a chord in my memory.

We were surprised to see Kelly Macdonald - best known as the young girl in Trainspotting - as Josh Brolin's wife here. As we'd just spent previous evenings watching her in the very excellent BBC mini-series State of Play, in which she has her real, strong Glasgow accent, it was hard not to miss the tiny glitches in her Texas drawl, but I think she did a pretty good job.

Let me take a moment to tell you about State of Play. If you have a two-DVD gap in your Netflix list, I highly recommend you go and put this on it. It was later made into an allegedly-not-bad Ben Affleck movie, but I'm sure the original is far superior. It has a great cast, with the aforementioned Kelly Macdonald; a floppy-haired and before-he-was-famous James McAvoy; a guy called John Simm, who played The Master in several episodes of last year's Dr Who, if you happen to have a clue what I'm talking about there; and the always wonderful Bill Nighy. (Forgotten who he is? Remember the pervy aging rock star in Love Actually? Him.) It's about a politician whose girlfriend dies in suspicious circumstances, and the investigative reporting team who race the police to figure it all out. Gritty, realistic, BBC, those accents you people all love, damn good TV.

Sorry. Back to the review this is actually meant to be. Tommy Lee Jones does a good job as the laconic and sadly jaded sherrif. (Am I the only person who always thinks of Oz from Buffy when the word "laconic" comes up? /Quick Google search./ No, apparently I'm not.) Josh Brolin almost makes a moustache sexy with his McGyver-ish hunter with a heart of gold and questionable morals. (The film is set in 1980, which explains Bardem's haircut - apparently modelled on a photo of a brothel client from 1979. Lovely.)

I don't want to say anything more about the plot because I'm sure someone out there hasn't seen it and I always think the less you know about a film the better. But it was certainly worth seeing, I enjoyed it despite everything, and it's not at all unremitting gloom - somehow, those Coens make you think there's a laugh just around the next corner even when it turns out to be a crazy-eyed Mexican with a huge shotgun and a silencer. Rent it.