No Country for Old Men Review
by Jonathan Moya (jjmoya1955 AT yahoo DOT com)December 4th, 2007
No Country for Old Men (2007)
A Movie Review by Jonathan Moya
Rating: 3 out of 5 or B.
The Review:
That hairdo Javier Bardem wears as the character Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men imparts a strange, scary, and almost timelessly evil quality to his strong Hispanic features. There is a strong hint of Spanish Inquisition monk chop to go with that bad boy rock star wave and the chisel profile that echoes a stony heart. Chigurh could be a Golem or an Easter Island Moai brought to life. He pursues his victim Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin in a breakout performance) with the relentlessness of a curse.
That's all the history the directors Joel and Ethan Coen and Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the source novel, provide for Chigurh- but then a dramatic conception doesn't need one. This is a chase movie where survival is the only pay off and the money is just a McGuffin- the trick object with mystical importance that gets the plot started.
While hunting antelope Llewelyn Moss gets the kill of a lifetime when he comes upon the bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone murderously wrong. Parsing the crime scene he finds a pickup truck with bricks of cocaine in its bed, and a satchel with nearly $2 million in money in the clutch of a dead man under the shade of an old majestic tree. The only survivor is a soon to be dead Mexican begging for water. This wouldn't be a movie if Moss decided not to keep the money.
Moss who lives in a trailer with his wife Carla Jean (the Scottish actress Kelly McDonald pitch perfect in both West Texas accent and performance) is a two tour Vietnam vet now scraping a living as a part-time welder.
"I'm fixin' to do something dumber than hell, but I'm going anyways," he says to Carla Jean after telling her about the money. Under the cover of night Moss takes a jug of water to the dying Mexican- only to have the rest of the drug posse show up. Moss just barely escapes.
The next day Chigurh (after killing the two Texas good ole boys who hired him) is on the hunt for Moss and the money.
The low camera angles, the morbidly funny leg surgery Chigurh performs on himself and Bardem's deliberate monotone delivery impart Terminator relentlessness to the pursuit. Bardem even looks like a sculpted down Schwarzenegger.
"What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss?" "Call it friend-o," is Chigurh's self-styled existential killing catch phrase. His murder weapon of choice is a pneumatic gun with a retractable bolt attached to a compression cylinder that can pop door locks off- the supposedly kinder, more humane weapon of the slaughterhouse.
The old man of the title is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones at his most laconic), who acts as a semi-narrator. He survives because he always manages to be one step behind. His inability to find and stop the carnage has him feeling useless and despairing of whether there is really true justice in the world.
Overlooking the crime scene from a ridge, Bell's deputy exclaims "It's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?" "If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here," Bell replies. He is the good guy powerless to do good. That disengagement with life leaves Bell full of regrets and feeling like a coward.
In Cormac McCarthy's world the survivors live life as an anti-climax, mourning the possibilities and missed opportunities. It's a chase where the tropes of narrative, particularly that of the Western, are reversed. It is only by chance whether the hero lives or dies- either by the remnants of the Mexican drug posse or by Chigurh. Or whether the evildoer gets to walk away, just barely surviving the car crash with bones poking from his skin. It's a coin toss. "Call it friendo." The only sure thing is that no one ever gets the money.
McCarthy's novels deflate dramatic tension rather than resolve it. The perfect example: the prideful bounty hunter Carson Wells (a totally bemused Woody Harrelson in for the shock of his life) who occupies twenty pages in the novel and fifteen minutes on screen gets whacked by Chigurh with barely an afterthought or a fight. Wells whole existence is a pretentious literary game that McCarthy plays on the reader. His novels end with a nihilistic whisper rather than a bang.
The Coens don't change a thing. Their movies have always been extended sick jokes-and the McCarthy vision aligns perfectly with their own weird little cinema world.
The whole Moss-Chigurh chase both exults in meaning and subverts it. Life may be in the details, but in the movies the details have to lead to something important. To have Moss floating face down in a motel pool while Mexicans drug dealers scramble to get onto a screeching pickup pulling out, or to have Moss' wife spit in the face of a Chigurh coin toss without showing the life or death result only makes the previous eighty wonderfully paced and suspenseful minutes a slowly deflating, farty little balloon. Cheating the audience this way is perfectly fine if box-office lucre isn't the objective.
The Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns (essentially remakes of Akira Kurosawa samurai films) of the 60's where nihilistic to the hilt and yet were nicely dramatically resolved. And oh, they also had huge box office.
I call it friend-o. Heads get an A. Tail gets a B. It's a B.
The Credits:
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen; written by Joel Coen; adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy; edited by Roderick Jaynes; music score composed by Carter Burwell; cinematography by Roger Deakins; set decoration by Nancy Haigh; production designed by Jess Gonchor; costumes designed by Mary Zophres; sound and sound design by Peter Kurland and Craig Berkey; art direction by John Perry Goldsmith; produced by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, and Scott Rudin. Released by Miramax Films. Running time: 122 minutes.
WITH: Tommy Lee Jones (Ed Tom Bell), Javier Bardem (Anton Chigurh), Josh Brolin (Llewelyn Moss), Woody Harrelson (Carson Wells), Kelly MacDonald (Carla Jean Moss), Garret Dillahunt (Wendell), Tess Harper (Loretta Bell), Barry Corbin (Ellis)
"No Country for Old Men" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). A lot of killing.
Copyright 2007 by Jonathan Moya
http://www. jonathanmoya.com
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