Introduction

The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) is, like Polanski's The Ghost (2010), a faithful adaptation of the novel upon which it is based, published by Cormac McCarthy in 2005. The film begins with a voiceover by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones) as the audience is shown a short scene in which one of his deputies arrests Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem). The voiceover concludes as follows:

No Country for Old Men is set in Texas, near the border with Mexico, in the nineteen eighties, although the film reproduces the novel's timelessness to the extent that it is most accurately described as a Western. The plot is initiated when Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong while hunting, discovering five pickup trucks, eight dead men, one wounded man, and a cargo of heroin bricks. He tracks the tenth man, who left the scene on foot, and finds him dead with a briefcase full of ten thousand-dollar bundles of banknotes. Moss does what most people would want to do in the circumstances and takes the money. Later, when he is with his wife Carla Jean (played by Kelly Macdonald) in his trailer park home, he feels guilty for leaving the wounded man. He returns to the scene of the shootout that night, arriving simultaneously with more members of one of the cartels, which sets up the story as a pair of superimposed pursuits: Chigurh (who is a cartel hitman) of Moss for the purpose of recovering the money and Bell of Chigurh for the purpose of stopping the multiple murders he commits.