No Country for Old Men
I am a huge fan of Joel and Ethan Coen. With the unfortunate exception of their misjudged Ladykillers remake, every film they have made to date is a masterpiece. Their latest, No Country for Old Men, is so good that some critics have suggested it might finally win them a Best Picture Oscar, but frankly I have my doubts, given the Academy’s usual prejudice against genre fiction in the top prizes.
Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, the plot concerns a hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles across the bloody aftermath of a drug deal that went wrong. Deciding to take the money and run, he later has an attack of conscience that causes him to return to the crime scene. This triggers a deadly pursuit between himself and psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (a truly terrifying Javier Bardem), and eventually escalates into further tragedy that draws in local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and Llewelyn’s wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald).
The performances are uniformly superb. Josh Brolin is excellent as a determined man whose greed gets the better of him. Tommy Lee Jones provides the necessary humanity as he despairs at the apparently motiveless violence around him. Kelly Macdonald yet again proves that she deserves to be a major star (which I have thought ever since her superb debut in Trainspotting), and there are a number of memorable supporting roles and cameos, including one by Woody Harrelson.
But the film really belongs to Javier Bardem whose bone-chilling performance will unquestionably go down as one of cinema’s most memorably frightening killers. Everything from his unnerving presence to the way he never once raises his voice oozes menace, and every word he says puts the audience on the edge of its seat. He seems like a human terminator; above bribery, unable to be reasoned with and completely insane. But he is really more a symbol of the restless and seemingly random evil at loose in the world. This idea that bad events happen purely by chance is underscored by scenes where he tosses a coin and asks his would-be victims to call it, determining whether they live or die.
In No Country for Old Men, the Coen’s get back to basics, recalling their early classic Blood Simple. I’ve not read the book, but the brilliant, spare screenplay should almost certainly win the adaptation Oscar (the Academy are a bit less prejudiced when giving out writing awards). The stark, vivid landscapes are brilliantly photographed by cinematographer Roger Deakins, and Carter Burwell contributes an appropriately subdued music score.
Some of the Coen’s previous pictures (such as The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother where art thou?) are quasi-Faustian allegories that contain characters symbolizing both God and Satan, and their struggle for the souls of men. However, in No Country for Old Men, they seem to buy into McCarthy’s despair at the apparent random cruelty of life, and his “stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off” philosophy. The message in this film is that there is no God or justice, only a relentless and apparently motiveless evil taking the world to hell in a hand basket. The unconventionally abrupt ending (which I am informed the film shares with the book), underscores this belief, and is deliberately unsatisfying, which of course is the entire point and therefore dramatically correct. Are the Coens going through a mid-life crisis or have they genuinely lost their belief in human goodness and/or God?
Whatever soul-searching the Coen Brothers may or may not be doing, No Country for Old Men is an unremittingly bleak, nihilistic experience, tempered by a rich vein of dark humour. From a Christian point of view, it may be spiritually false, but it is also undeniably a superbly acted and utterly arresting piece of cinema, inevitably destined for masterpiece status. If you can take the bloody violence and are prepared for a very dark view of human existence, this couldn’t be more highly recommended.
Simon Dillon, January 2008.
