J Paul Johnson
No Country for Old Men hasn’t aged, or if it has, it has like a fine wine, and what a lovely evening you’ll spend with The Criterion Collection‘s new 4K special edition, revisiting one of the 21st century’s best films. Not that it’s ever lacked for accolades, having won four Academy Awards—including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay for the Coen brothers Joel and Ethan and Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem in an unforgettable role—but on 4K disc the film is sharper, more potent than ever, its imagery and narrative as crisp and arid as the desert setting its characters inhabit.
The plot, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, is a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, hide-and-seek, kill or be killed. Out hunting, retired welder and Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) happens upon a drug deal gone wrong, a massacre that has left a half-dozen men dead, one of them, having briefly escaped before succumbing to his wounds, with a satchel containing some two million dollars in cash. That might prove a windfall for Moss, if he can steal away with it unnoticed. But with the drugs still loaded on one of the gang’s trucks and the cash missing, it’s apparent others will want to track it down.
Those include Bardem’s Anton Chigurh as one of cinema’s most indelible characters, a hitman with an impenetrable stare and deadly dry humor, a little like Bergman’s Bengt Ekerot except carrying a compression bolt pistol and tank instead of a scythe: when he appears, death is imminent. Chigurh slowly, stealthily stalks Moss and the two-million-dollar satchel, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, while weary sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Fellow Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones) pursues them both.
A sly, suspenseful mix of desert noir, dark comedy, and existential thriller, No Country for Old Men is taut and tricky, building up its themes of fate and chance while its body count mounts and Moss and Chigurh finally meet, albeit off camera, after several close calls. Its second half may not quite equal its impeccable first, but with near-perfect performances from the three leads Brolin, Bardem, and Jones and a strong supporting cast, it’s nonetheless riveting all the way through. No Country for Old Men is signature Coen-Brothers filmmaking: wry, funny, thoughtful, suspenseful, surprising, and, in this particular case, absolutely unforgettable.
Here, the film is presented in a new 4K digital master created from a 4K digital intermediate made from the 35mm original camera negative, the process and product supervised and approved by director of photography Roger Deakins, with a 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. While few would ever complain about the extant Disney Blu-ray version released in 2008, here Criterion one-ups even that excellent release with near-bitch black levels, granular detail in both close-ups and landscape shots, and a balanced color scheme.
Special Features
Often when upgrading their previously-released catalog titles from DVD to Blu-ray and from Blu-ray to DVD, Criterion has left their special features menu and even packaging intact. Here, with No Country for Old Men entering the collection as Spine #1243, Criterion includes both previously-released archival content along with more than an hour’s worth of newly-commissioned special features. No commentary track is available.
Joel and Ethan Coen with Megan Abbott: In this wide-ranging 4-minute interview with fiction writer and scholar Megan Abbott, the Coens get giddy. So giddy, in fact, they almost never stop giggling along with Abbott. But both Joel and Ethan disclose a number of revelations and anecdotes about the film’s production in a delightful featurette complemented by clips from the film, still images, behind-the-scenes footage, excerpts from the source novel and script, and more. I might add it’s a delight to be sufficiently past the pandemic to once again enjoy new content produced in a studio rather than conducted in Zoom’s stifling boxes.
Roger Deakins and David Diliberto:Â To Abbott also goes the charge of interviewing the film’s DP, the venerable Deakins, and associate producer Diliberto, in this 34-minute featurette. Unlike the interview with the Coens, this one does not rely on footage of the conversation itself but instead is presented almost entirely with Deakins’ cinematography. It’s also a good deal less giddy, if not short of good humor.
The remaining special features are all extant from prior releases of the film and made within a year or two of the film’s release. They include:
- Archival interviews with actors Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kelly Macdonald (25 min).
- “An Incredibly Unauthorized Documentary”: a nine-minute behind-the-scenes documentary produced by Brolin, featuring charming off-the-cuff footage shot with cheek and narrated by the film’s star with not a little attitude towards its directors and a not-so-anonymous interviewee.
- “The Making of No Country for Old Men.” A rather garden-variety 24-minute production featurette, but one that is generous in its interviews with the directors and cast and rich in insight.
- “Working with the Coens”: a brief eight-minute interview with Bardem.
- “Diary of a Country Sheriff”: a brief interview with Jones.
Fans of the film who already own an earlier Blu-ray or DVD edition of No Country for Old Men are likely to recognize all of the above, save for the two newly produced featurettes and perhaps Brolin’s rakish mini-do. All of the supplementary content is presented in English, though no subtitles that I can find are available except for the main feature. It’s hard to fathom how in this day and age Criterion can continue to ignore the accommodations a percentage of its patrons require.
Also included in the packaging are an excellent new essay by novelist Francine Prose and a 2007 piece on the film by author Larry McMurtry, accompanied by a new cover illustration by Juan Esteban R.
Altogether, the star of the show is the stunning 4K remaster itself, providing the opportunity to see No Country for Old Men in the best iteration current consumer technology can provide. New content in the form of the 2024 interviews is a bonus, and the earlier featurettes are, for what it’s worth, still worth watching—all of which make this film, like Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and Inside Llewyn Davis before it a Coen Brothers film worthy of a spot in The Criterion Collection
