There in a ravine are a couple of pickups and a bunch of dead bodies, ringed by guns and spent ammo, and the corpse of a pit bull, flies descending. So Llewelyn, a Vietnam vet and a taciturn fellow who lives in a trailer park with his funny, pretty wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), cautiously approaches the carnage. Holding the barrel of his rifle low and ahead, he pokes around, finds a driver still alive, finds a cargo bed full of heroin, and a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills. Enough of them to add up to $2 million.
He takes the money.
On another side of the same West Texas borderlands, a psycho with a Prince Valiant haircut and a sense of brutal irony is busy strangling a deputy sheriff, stealing his car, pulling over a driver, and blowing a hole in his head with a cattle gun. It's just the beginning of a devastating wave of bloodshed and death from the hand of this Anton Chigurh (the great Spanish actor Javier Bardem).
And so a third-generation lawman, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), has to get up from reading the paper and sipping his coffee to hunt down Moss with his money, and Chigurh with his cattle gun.
The roads, and the characters, converge. Brilliantly.
The Coens have embraced crime dramas from the outset: 1984's Blood Simple was a tasty, tricky noir; 1990's Miller's Crossing was a poetic ode to old-time gangsterdom, the rat-a-tat-tat of tommy guns, and tough guys talkin', and 1996's Fargo, with Frances McDormand as a smalltown police chief, had moments of unstinting savageness, and winking satire, too.
