15 years out and No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh is still one of the most intimidating and unstoppable forces in American cinema.

I've been re-reading Cormac McCarthy novels since his recent passing and then moved over to rewatching movies based on his books -- No Country for Old Men and The Road.

McCarthy is known for a few hallmarks, one of which is characters who embody unstoppable forces of evil, will, and violence. Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, for example: a 7-foot-tall polyglot polymath who is loquacious, elegant, eloquent, hairless, albino, and giddily degenerate and bloodthirsty in a way that embodies the worst, darkest, most violent aspects of the unsettled West and the hearts of men in general.

I hope to someday see Holden on-screen, but until then, Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men is one of the most interesting, intimidating, and unstoppable forces of enigmatic malevolence in American cinema.

He kills, he kills, he kills. His reasons are his own. Sometimes it is out of criminal necessity, eliminating witnesses. Often it is from a perverse and unknowable sense of honor. He kills because his employers hired others to seek out the same money he sought. It always feels like he kills because he must, even when we know he doesn't have to, as Carla Jean points out at the end.

On some level he knows that. The coin he uses to inject chance into some of his murders travels the same path to arrive at his victims as he does, as he points out. He knows there's just him and his understanding of the new criminality in that world that so worries the sheriff Ed Tom and his colleagues, and that makes even Carson Wells, the chatty gentleman hitman played by Woody Harrelson, seem oddly out of place.

Javier Bardem became one of my favorite actors after seeing this movie. His scenes with the shop clerk, and the sequence in which he causes an explosive distraction in order to raid the pharmacy and then returns to his hotel room to silently tend to the wounds Moss gave him during their shootout are some of my favorite sequences and scenes in film.

tl;dr: Oh man is No Country for Old Men good. Oh man, is Anton Chigurh an amazing villain.

Submitted June 30, 2023 at 06:34AM by NimdokBennyandAM https://ift.tt/S7iHrmY