Adapted from the novel No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
When he stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, Llewelyn Moss can't resist the temptation of taking the millions of dollars in cash he finds. But the people who own that cash want it back, and the man they send to retrieve it, Anton Chigurh, is a force to be reckoned with. The county sheriff does all he can to either catch Chigurh or find Moss before it's too late.
I know this movie is very highly acclaimed and a lot of people really like it, but it's just not my cup of tea. It's too violent, and nothing good happens, and it doesn't help to know that this whole thing could have been prevented if Moss had just walked away. But while I personally don't happen to like this movie, I will say that it is a very good adaptation of the novel (which, unsurprisingly, I also didn't particularly care for).
A few details were changed here and there, and obviously some things were cut out, but overall I think the Coen brothers did a good job of deciding what to keep and what to change. Chigurh is described in the book as looking nothing like Javier Bardem, but I don't think it would have been possible to play that character better than he did, so his appearance was fairly irrelevant. The book does have a lot more about the sheriff in it: he introduces every chapter, so we get a lot more of his backstory, but I think it was a good choice to focus less on him and more on Moss. The main storyline is quite consistent with the book until toward the climax. In both versions, Moss is with a woman, but who she is and why they're together is completely different, and she's way more important in the book. But again, for the sake of simplifying and focusing the story, I think they made the right decision there as well.
I wondered going into this if reading the book and re-watching the movie so many years later would make me like it more than I did during my Best Picture project. While I still don't like the story at all, this time I was able to recognize that it's very well done, for what it is. It's definitely one of the better novel-to-screen adaptations I've seen. But I think if I decide in the future to tackle another category that this movie won, I might have to skip it, because I'm not sure I can sit through it again.
Next up is yet another Best Picture Winner: Slumdog Millionaire, based on the novel by Vikas Swarup
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