‘No Country for Old Men’ Made Josh Brolin A Movie Star (Again)

It’s tough to overstate the impact of No Country for Old Men on a variety of careers. The Coen brothers got their Best Picture winner a little over a decade since they first crashed the Oscars with Fargo in 1996. Javier Bardem went from being a Spanish hunk in art films to one of the greatest screen villains of all time and a hugely cast-able Hollywood figure. Everyone from Tommy Lee Jones to Roger Deakins got a career bump from starring in such a popular and critically acclaimed movie.

With the possible exception of Bardem, though, nobody got a bigger bump off of the year of No Country for Old Men than Josh Brolin. The former teen star had stayed afloat in Hollywood after resurfacing in the mid-’90s, but he was generally regarded as a B-teamer until the Coen brothers cast him as the main character (“protagonist” feels a bit too kind a word for how the film regards his Llewellyn Moss) in their big Cormac McCarthy adaptation. After 2007, Brolin was vaulted to A-list status as a leading man in adult dramas;a persona formidable enough to play the big bad in a series as mammoth as The Avengers.

If you’re going to give acting in movies a try as a teenager, so you do a lot worse with your first movie than Brolin did with The Goonies. Playing the older teen brother to Mikey (Sean Astin) and chasing him and his weird friends all over the Oregon coastline as they try to find hidden treasure and save their community from foreclosure, Brolin played a remarkably likeable heavy. He even got the film’s primary romantic storyline. Girls (and some boys, ahem) of a certain developmental age saw a lot to swoon over in that cutoff sweatshirt and red bandana.

Like many child actors, Brolin saw his roles dry up. Parts on TV shows like The Young Riders came around, but nothing on the level of Goonies. His big comeback actually came courtesy of director David O. Russell, who cast Brolin in his star-studded indie comedy Flirting with Disaster in 1996. Starring alongside the likes of Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Lily Tomlin, and Mary Tyler Moore, Brolin played Tony, an ATF agent who — along with his work and romantic partner Paul (Richard Jenkins) — get mixed up in Stiller’s search for his birth parents. Playing a bisexual character with an affinity for women’s armpits in a cult hit with a great cast was a huge step up for Brolin and put him back on the map again.

Following Flirting with Disaster, Brolin treaded water playing small parts on movies directed by major directors, including Guillermo Del Toro (Mimic), Paul Verhoeven (Hollow Man), and Woody Allen (Melinda and Melinda). An interesting run of films to say the least but nothing that stood out as a career-maker.

And then 2007 happened. It wasn’t just No Country for Old Men that landed for Brolin. He starred in the Planet Terror half of Grindhouse, directed by Robert Rodriguez, another strong ensemble picture. He played played cops who opposed the likes of Denzel Washington in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster and Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah. Any single one of those roles might not have been enough, but together, they formed the bedrock of a Jessica Chastain-esque breakthrough year.

The role of Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men is a particular one. Brolin played the lead role in the film. He’s the one who kicks off the movie by stumbling upon the aftermath of a shootout over drug money. Taking the money, Moss commits the sin that sets everything else into motion. He’s pursued by Bardem’s Chigurh, who’s on a mission to recover the money, yes, but who also operates on a code of almost divine retribution. Chigurh is a dark angel sent to punish whomever stole the money, and he burns a path through anyone standing in his way. Brolin is the protagonist in the sense that we’re following his actions, we’re afraid that Chigurh will kill him, and there’s a purely reactive part in us that wants him to get away with it. But the Coens are deeply unsympathetic to Llewelyn, whose plot to steal the money is half-baked at best and who never once seems like a match for Chigurh. Moss’s final fate is as anticlimactic as any you’re likely to get in modern moviemaking, and it feels like the Coens made an active decision to deny Moss any kind of hero’s demise.

While Bardem was the one who took home the Oscar, Brolin’s reward was a jump up to the A-list. And besides, he got his Oscar nomination the very next year in Milk. His performance in No Country for Old Men wasn’t some Star-Is-Born revelation. But you’d be amazed what playing the lead in a Best Picture winner will do for you.

Stream No Country for Old Men on Netflix