The Big Picture · Discussion

5. ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘W.’ | Mission Accomplished

August 26, 2025/ 49 min/ Brian Raftery

The 'Mission Accomplished' series pairs the two films that took the Bush years head-on: the Coen brothers' 'No Country for Old Men,' which swept the 2008 Oscars on a coin toss and a bolt pistol, and Oliver Stone's 'W.,' the sympathetic Bush biopic no studio would fund and no one in 2008 wanted to see. Stone, plus actors Gene Jones and Barry Corbin, talk to Brian Raftery. Ends on the 2008 election and the arrival of Iron Man.

7 films across 2 segments.

AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.

‘No Country for Old Men’with Gene Jones and Barry Corbin

No Country for Old Men 2007

The Coen brothers' Best Picture winner, from Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel. Josh Brolin as Llewellyn Moss, who takes $2M from a drug deal gone wrong in the West Texas desert; Javier Bardem as the bolt-pistol hitman Anton Chigurh; Tommy Lee Jones as the overmatched Sheriff Ed Tom Bell; Woody Harrelson as the bounty hunter; Kelly Macdonald as Moss's wife. The episode sits inside two scenes: the five-minute gas-station coin toss (Gene Jones, who says the Coens gave him no direction and just listened from behind the counter) and Bell's visit to the wheelchair-bound Ellis (Barry Corbin), whose 'you can't stop what's coming' Raftery calls the best scene in any film of the 2000s. Set in 1980, it read in 2007 as the Bush years in disguise.

There Will Be Blood 2007

The year's other downbeat titan: Daniel Day-Lewis as a sociopathic oilman who beats his rival to death with a bowling pin ('I drink your milkshake'). Lost Best Picture to 'No Country' at the 2008 ceremony Jon Stewart opened by asking whether Hollywood needed a hug.

‘W.’with Oliver Stone

W. 2008

Oliver Stone's George W. Bush biopic, shot in five months in Louisiana to make the November 2008 election. Josh Brolin (fresh off 'No Country') as Bush, cheery and gentlemanly and fed his ideas by others; Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, the film's real villain; James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush; Elizabeth Banks as Laura; Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell. Christian Bale was cast first and dropped out. No studio would touch it, so Stone raised ~$27M overseas. More satiric and more sympathetic than anyone expected (Stone found Bush hard to hate), it made about $25M in the U.S. against a country already sick of the man.

World Trade Center 2006

Stone's 9/11 film with Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña as two officers trapped in the rubble. Feared to be a conspiracy screed, it came out somber and apolitical, a surprise hit that had some longtime fans wondering if Stone had gone soft.

Nixon 1995

Stone's biopic of the 37th president, even-handed but unsparing about the drinking and paranoia. The benchmark critics used to argue 'W.' went too easy on Bush.

American Dreamz 2006

Paul Weitz's satire with Dennis Quaid as a barely-literate president who has people read the papers for him, one of the Bush-era political films audiences skipped. (The transcript mishears the title as 'American Dreams.')

Rendition 2007

Torture drama with Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, and Jake Gyllenhaal that came and went, proof, Raftery argues, that audiences went to the movies to avoid the news, not relive it.

Also mentioned raised along the way

The rest of the 2007 Oscar field Michael Clayton Atonement The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Juno

2000s Best Picture winners, before this Million Dollar Baby The Departed Crash

The Coens' crime classics Blood Simple Miller's Crossing Fargo

Oliver Stone's earlier America Platoon Born on the Fourth of July JFK Wall Street The Doors

In passing Toy Story The Manchurian Candidate

Teased for the finale Iron Man

Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads

TV Northern ExposureTulsa King

Unmade Pinkville

Ads NetflixT-Mobile Home Run DerbyCarvanaBoar's HeadNOS EnergyMint Mobile