NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a mesmerizing new thriller from filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, based on the acclaimed novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning American master, Cormac McCarthy.
The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. Featuring a cast that includes Academy Award®-winner Tommy Lee Jones (“The Fugitive,” “Men in Black”), Josh Brolin (“Grindhouse”), Academy Award®-nominee Javier Bardem (“The Sea Inside”), Academy Award®-nominee Woody Harrelson (“The People Vs. Larry Flynt”) and Kelly Macdonald (“Trainspotting”), NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is written for the screen and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, produced by Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, and executive produced by Robert Graf and Mark Roybal.
The story begins when Llewelyn Moss (BROLIN) finds a pickup truck surrounded by a sentry of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back.
When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law – in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell (JONES) – can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers – in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives (BARDEM) – the film simultaneously strips down the American crime drama and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible, and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
At the heart of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN are its characters – men and women who inhabit a rapidly changing West – a place where lawlessness has led to a brave new world of international drug running and where the old rules no longer seem to apply. Against this backdrop, Sheriff Bell becomes a main lynchpin of the story – a stoic, philosophical law man with a dry-as-bone sense of humor and a rock-solid moral foundation who is bedeviled by the advent of the drug trade’s new breed of criminal and the violence it has brought to the land that he loves. Astonished by his new reality, Sheriff Bell represents an acute, heartbroken yearning for the more honorable way things used to be.
“The movie is, no surprise given the title of the book, in part about Sheriff Bell’s perspective on time going by, on aging and on things changing,” says Joel Coen.
