Movie Moment Monday - Call It

This is the latest entry in a series in which I present one of my favorite scenes in film history. Each scene will be posted during the first work day of every week thus making it Movie Moment Monday.

Possibly the best movie villain in recent years is Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. The film was released in 2007 and won several Oscars including the directing and adapted screenplay awards, both going to the brother duo of Joel and Ethan Coen. But the award most people remember is the Best Supporting Actor award which went to Javier Bardem who played Chigurh.

Bardem is a very gifted actor and has been nominated three times (Before Night Falls and Biutiful are his other two). Many people were introduced to Bardem through No Country, which is funny because Chigurh isn't remotely similar to Bardem. Anybody who saw one of his follow up movies like Vicky Cristina Barcelona or Eat Pray Love discovered he wasn't the creepy guy with the feminine haircut, he's actually a suave Spanish guy who belongs in the Antonio Banderas category.

His performance in the movie is so impressive and so terrifying Bardem alone is a reason to watch the film if you haven't already.

The Players

Anton Chigurh - Javier Bardem

Gas Station Proprietor - Gene Jones

The Set Up

In rural Texas Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong and finds a case filled with two million dollars. Every one in the deal is dead, or near death, so Moss decides to take the money for himself. This instantly puts a number of people on his trail, most notably Anton Chigurh or, in other words, pure evil itself. 

The scene you're about to see starts off as a simple stop for gas, but ends being one of the film's most tense scenes. And it's a very quiet tension brought on by a writing combination of Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the book, and the Coen brothers who penned the script.

The scene only has two actors in it, Bardem and Jones, and they're equally important. Jones' character simply attempts some small talk, but ends up taking part in a tennis match of dialogue in which he likely begins to fear for his life.

The scene is fairly early in the film, and even though we've already seen Chigurh kill at this point, it's in this scene we realize the power he has and how quickly one can end up dead just by being in his presence.

The film is filled with one quietly tense scene after another, but this is the most memorable and probably the most important. Chigurh is a monster for most of the film only showing flashes of humanity from time to time. In this scene, more than any other, we see brief proof he is a man and for some reason it seems to make the monster even scarier, doesn't it?