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Was "No Country for Old Men" Texas Country?

How many times have we seen films that supposedly took place in Texas with little or no sense of what the state is actually like?
On top of that, actors' attempts at Texas accents are usually pretty heinous.
But "No Country for Old Men" scored some points in at least one of those categories.

The movie is based on a book by Cormac McCarthy.
The book is partly a chilling study of a crazy-scary hit man who's like a force of nature, showing about as much mercy as a tornado tearing through Texas.
He is a hit man, that's true, but he seems overdedicated to his work.
The movie stars Tommy Lee Jones (a native Texas son), so I guess we can't fault his accent.
But some of the other actors seem to go too far.
On a drive up from Texas recently, the folks in Arkansas, Tennessee and southern Virginia sounded like they had much bigger southern accents than anyone born and reared in Texas.
Also, it seems that -- outside of the sheriff's wife and the wife of one of the main characters -- women in Texas back in the late 70s or early 80s (when the movie was set) had no idea what the 18-hour bra could do for them.
Overall, the people in the movie were almost caricatures of real Texans.
I apologize in advance if I'm hurting anyone's feelings, but the Coen brothers really shook the ugly tree during casting -- with some exceptions.
A man from San Angelo played and looked his part -- a friendly chicken farmer -- just about right.
Richard Jackson said in this story in the San Angelo Standard-Times that it was filmed in Marfa.
And the landscape in the movie has the wide open, wind-whipped feel of a desert-like West Texas.
So thank goodness for that.
The urban scenes involving low-rent hotel rooms were convincingly Texas, too, although I'm not sure if they were actually filmed there. But I think I stayed at a hotel that looked just like the ones in the movie back when I was a kid.
In general, the movie has an eerie scariness that's almost as spare and unadorned as the book. You don't realize how quiet it is or how you've been gritting your teeth until somebody starts shooting or what have you.
They call it a thriller, but it's within spitting distance of being a slasher horror movie.
What saves it is that leanness that doesn't exaggerate or try too hard to say what it's got to say.
Instead, it's an elegant, dusty tale captured on film.

Posted by Trish Choate at 05:44 PM | Permalink