Jumping on the Hay Wagon

While I am definitely looking forward to 3:10 TO YUMA as well, there's another Western on the horizon piquing my interest at least as much: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, based on the excellent novel by Cormac McCarthy and written/directed by no less than Joel and Ethan Coen. While I enjoy their comedies (dark and not-so-dark alike), their return to hard-boiled, violent drama feels overdue, and they couldn't have picked a better story to adapt. Having read the book but not seen the movie, it's hard to provide even an opening sketch of the film for certain. It looks to be a fairly faithful adaptation, though, so I'll give it a shot (avoiding spoilers at all costs, of course): the Tex-Mex border, in or around 1980...so not long after Vietnam and still a bit away from our great technological age...a drug deal gone wrong, and something of a blue collar townie stumbles upon the site...a not-your-everyday cold-blooded killer on the loose, with a job and a mission, not necessarily the same things...and a dedicated sheriff turned philosophical, due to this seemingly new breed of violence and greed.

The townie is played by Josh Brolin, who I'm not going to call under-rated because he really hasn't done much of note (though he was strong in GRINDHOUSE, for all the camp of his story)...still, I'm wagering he's a more capable actor than his resume may show. The killer is played by the chameleonic Javier Bardem, who's been a foreign and art film favorite for quite a few years now, and he's already getting some pretty strong acclaim for this too. The sheriff is played by Tommy Lee Jones, an obvious choice and with good reason. His near-perfect directorial debut from a couple years back, THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA, was similarly a thoughtful, sometimes-brutal "modern" Western. Along with Chris Cooper, maybe Billy Bob Thornton, and very few others, Jones knows how to play these old world honorable, simple-but-never-stupid men steeped in heroic cowboy/Americana lore...the world has left them behind, it seems, but they'll keep on keepin' on as only they've known to all their lives. One can count on Jones to never over-simplify them or play them as mere archetype.

The movie isn't set for wide release until November 21, which is quite a ways away, but the trailer is out now. I have quite high hopes, as is pretty evident I'm sure, and the trailer does everything to support them.