No Country for Old Men (2007 - The Coen Brothers)
Joel & Ethan Coen return to the screen with an ode to violence and, just as importantly, fate. Returning to Texas as a setting for the first time since
Blood Simple (their debut twenty-three years ago), this one is less Noir and more modern Western. This is West Texas in the late 1970s, from the open range to the trailer parks, small towns and cheap motels on the way to the Mexican border. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a welder out hunting by himself one day when he stumbles upon the scene of a drug deal gone very bad, leaving all the parties dead among hundreds of spent shells in the nowhere of the desert. They've also left their truckbed full of drugs, which Moss has no use for, and a case full of money, which Moss can't resist. He knows of course that people will come looking for it, but it's worth the risk - even though he has a wife (Kelly Macdonald). Some men do come looking for it, and worse is the one mysterious assassin (Javier Bardem) who is more psychopathic vampire than a man, an emotionless and startlingly efficient death merchant. Moss is smart, crafty and determined, but at heart he's essentially a good man, which slows him up. The thing that tracks him is just as smart, more experienced in such affairs of death and deceit, and has absolutely no compunctions about killing anything and everything that gets in his way.
Also in the mix is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a career lawman who has seen so much over the years that he is almost numb to it all. Not just the violence, but he has lost his faith in the law, in Texas, and in just about every soul that walks the earth. He knows Moss is essentially a decent man in over his head and he sincerely wishes it would all end without more bloodshed, but he knows better than that. There are some great, tense scenes of carnage in the cat & mouse pursuit, and while most do have that Coen stamp of dark humor and are so extreme they illicit laughter, this is not a comedy in even the way
Fargo is. Not that
Fargo is a knee-slapper or a comedy the way
Raising Arizona and
The Big Lebowski are, but there is a quirkiness to the characters in
Fargo, even the antagonists, that undercuts the death, even with something as grisly as the woodchipper. Woody Harrelson's bounty hunter is the only character in
No Country who even approaches quirky, and while Bardem is barely human and probably not in the least bit realistic, this Terminator with bangs in his face and an compressed air tank for a weapon is the personification of Death and not a figure of jest. In the end
No Country for Old Men is about fate, and about the inability to outrun or outsmart something as final as one's destiny.
Great cinematography from Roger Deakins again (if between this,
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and
In the Valley of Elah Deakins doesn't win his Oscar this year, he may never get one), and a subtle and effective score from Carter Burwell. This is the most mature work yet from Ethan and Joel Coen. Their sensibility is all over it especially their visual composition and ability to stage the fantastic down to the smallest details, but it stays so close to the Cormac McCarthy source material that the tone is slightly heavier and, in a way, intentionally more realistic. As dark and odd and sometimes violent as their filmography is, they make very moral films with heroes (as flawed as they may be) and villains instead of nihilistic antiheroes swimming in Pulp for Pulp's sake. Here again are the good and the evil, and while on the surface this may be the most misanthropic and pessimistic Coen Bros.' movie yet, there's still an overall sense of morality and the lasting inevitability of fate.
GRADE: A
Great movie, but
Miller's Crossing is still my favorite from the Coen Brothers...
Blood Simple (1984), B+
Raising Arizona (1987), A
Miller's Crossing (1990), A+
Barton Fink (1991), A+
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), A
Fargo (1996), A-
The Big Lebowski (1998), A
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), A
The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), A-
Intolerable Cruelty (2003), B+
The Ladykillers (2004), B
No Country for Old Men (2007), A
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