Javier Bardem

Ben Walters and J.M. Tyree find Javier Bardem's performance in No Country for Old Men extraordinary, and they supply the measure of it: in his hands a line asking what time you went to bed turns into a credible death threat, despite his ridiculous haircut, or perhaps because of it. The novel's killer, on their account, improves in the translation to film. They tie the man he plays to a continuing inquiry of the directors' as well, the one interrogating American manhood, and suggest cheerfully that its most successful example may be a serial killer. Within that line they take Chigurh for a model of self-sufficiency and read him as a parody of Reagan-era cowboy morality.