Theatrical Review of No Country for Old Men

---

Tools:
Send to a friend »

---

Note: In the following joint theatrical review, both John and Chris provide their takes on the Coen brothers movie.

The Movie According to John:
People have lavished high praise and numerous awards on "No Country for Old Men," and it deserves much of the acclaim. I, too, found things to enjoy, but somewhere just after the halfway point, my enthusiasm began to wane, and by the end I had soured on the film considerably. Understand, most critics loved the movie, so mine is a minority report, a counterpoint to the flood of good news you'll hear from most everyone else.

Somewhere in southwest Texas near the Mexican border, a hunter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), stumbles upon the remains of a bloodbath, a drug war gone bad, leaving everybody dead. There, he finds a pickup truck loaded with drugs and a briefcase filled with over $2,000,000. He takes the money and runs.

The big business interests behind the drug transaction hire a professional assassin, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), to track down whomever took their money, and the assassin is very, very good at his job. Along the course of the chase, a local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), begins figuring it all out and trying to intervene.

The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel ("Miller's Crossing," "Fargo," "The Big Lebowski," "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"), wrote and directed 2007's "No Country for Old Men" from the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy. Lay any credit or any blame for the movie at the doorsteps of the Coens and McCarthy equally, as I understand the brothers did a faithful job in their screen adaptation.

I must admit that while I admired the movie's craftsmanship greatly, along with some of its excitement and tension and most of its subtly sardonic humor, I didn't entirely care for the film itself.

The idea of the film is to turn the conventional Western thriller on its head. So while the filmmakers intend for a lot of things to look familiar, expect the unexpected. The Coens fashion "No Country" with great care, recognizing that in order to build suspense you have to slow down and establish quiet first. Indeed, it's the quiet loneliness of the movie's characters and locations that probably comes over best--and the associated violence that erupts from it. There are vast stretches of stillness that match the vast stretches of desert so beautifully photographed by the Coens' favorite cinematographer, Roger Deakins. Together, the filmmakers work to create a tense narrative that often has one on the edge of one's seat. At least, until you get used to it and begin tiring of the repetition. Almost concurrently, the Coens inject pithy, sometimes homespun, sometimes caustic comments into the proceedings, apparently taking huge chunks of dialogue directly from the book. All for the good. But after that, things went downhill fast.

The quiet, the solitude, the tension, the photography, and the wit are all up against what I viewed as the story's uncertain intent; largely stereotyped caricatures; lack of a central character; muddled themes; melodramatic, pulp-fiction action; and wholly unsatisfying ending.

Let's start with film's intent, since that is the basis for most of my criticism. If this had been a straight-ahead action thriller, I would gladly have accepted the exaggerated shenanigans that go on in the story. I love movies like "Pulp Fiction," "Kill Bill," "Sin City," and "Grindhouse." But the Coens' movie purports to do more than that. The tone of "No Country" has "high moral content" written all over it. That's where the trouble lies for me; the filmmakers clearly intend their bloody crime tale to represent some profound comment on American society and its declining moral values, a sort of thriller for the intellectual set. Yet I found the movie's somber attempts at enlightenment at odds with its corny theatrics. It's like trying to find some deep, inner meaning in "Die-Hard." It doesn't work and only spoils the experience trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I appreciate the Coens' attempt to make something unique from a well-worn genre, but I probably would have liked the movie better had they done it without all the vague symbolism.

Next, there's the issue of so many shallow people in one movie, with none of them taking the lead. Again, this is what I might have expected from a typical action yarn, where a lack of depth doesn't matter; but I didn't expect it from as earnest a movie as this one, which seems to reach for something higher. Ostensibly, the main character in "No Country" is Brolin's Moss, an iconic symbol for the rugged individualist who feels he's so self-reliant he can fight the system his way. Yet we met this very guy some forty years before in Kirk Douglas's "Lonely Are the Brave." Besides that, Moss is only in parts of the film. Then there's Jones's local sheriff, another folksy type that Jones has played often enough already, and just because he's good at it doesn't make it right. The sheriff isn't the main character, either, always being on the fringes of solving the crime but never quite finding the center of things. He's mostly just fun to watch and listen to, like a Greek chorus commenting on but not affecting the events; although it is also he who carries most of the burden of the film's ultimate argument. Go figure. Woody Harrelson's charismatic bounty hunter comes and goes before we even know it, and for all his character's assumed smarts, he' pretty dumb and certainly no main character. There are also the wives of the Moss and sheriff characters, (Kelly Macdonald and Tess Harper), who act as dutiful spouses with hardly any screen time.

Which leaves the bad guy, the automaton killer, Chigurh, as a candidate for main character. At first I thought he was really scary, an archetypal demon, the personification of evil, and as performed by Bardem, he is quite good. Well, that lasted for about ten or fifteen minutes. Then Chigurh simply degenerates into another Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, or, better, Schwarzzengger evil Terminator. He is one of those villains who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent; he's all-knowing, all powerful, and everywhere at once, sporting a Prince Valiant hairdo and dragging a slaughtering gun behind him. Ultimately, what we get is a movie without a central character to bring it together. There is not even a Hitchcockian "Psycho" central character, where one main character dies and another character takes over. The story leaves us with no one to root for and no one to truly care about, good or bad, not even a serious heavy.

Moving on, there's the matter of the message, the "meaning" I referred to earlier. Surely, there is one; as I've said, the movie has "message" imprinted on every frame. Only I was never sure what the message was. Is it that evil has always existed and there is nothing anyone can do about it? That evil goes on forever? Or is it that people are more immune or indifferent to evil in America today and more prone simply to accept it? The "old men" like the sheriff long for a long-gone time when young people addressed their elders as "Sir" and "Ma'am," as though the old days with their more conservative values were somehow better than today's more-liberal world. Nonsense. There was as much evil abroad in the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as there is in the twenty-first. How are we any different? Perhaps, says the movie, we don't care anymore about the violence we see around us, desensitized as we are by newspaper headlines, gory movies, and violent TV shows? Yet, is Iraq any worse than Vietnam? Do people look at starvation in India and Africa any more apathetically today than they did a hundred years ago? Is the movie suggesting that we currently live in a hopeless, narcissistic, egotistical, self-consumed society? Maybe that's its point. But is America any worse off in these regards than it was in 1936? Or 1836? Probably not, yet this alleged national ennui runs some of the movie's characters into the ground, forcing them to give up on life, to give up caring or trying to improve anything.

Now, I know that fans of the movie (and the book) will think that I "just didn't get it," and they will be more than willing to explain to me exactly what the story "means." Sorry. I don't think that will do, not because I'm unwilling to listen but because the movie itself should be more self-evident than that. I don't dislike a fiction being deliberately ambiguous; I'd just like some assurance that the authors intended the ambiguity, that they had some idea what various interpretations audiences were likely to discuss. Here, frankly, I got the impression, for right or for wrong, that neither the Coens nor McCarthy knew what they were talking about.

OK, how about the movie's action? Well, I don't think I can name another supposedly "realistic" film (symbolism aside) with as much hyperbole and as many coincidental happenings as this one has. Satire? Maybe. Let me give you one example from early on the story: After finding the money and going home, Moss returns in the dead of night to the scene of the massacre (with a jug of water for the one gangster he noticed still clinging to life, I guess to show us that he's really a good guy at heart), and he arrives at the exact moment that another group of baddies appears on the scene. What are the odds? Fleeing for his life at this point, Moss outraces a pickup truck on foot. And wounded, he swims across a river. Then he shoots a vicious dog that's chasing him, just as the dog is about one inch from his throat. And to kill the dog, he has to pull out the clip from his handgun and replace it, presumably with a dry clip after swimming the river. But how did the spare clip stay dry? Yes, much of the action in "No Country" is stirring and fun in its way, but it's also mostly ridiculous when you think about it, and it's thinking the Coens require us to do as we watch this film. In other words, they want it both ways, and I didn't buy it.

I won't even go into the ending and the multiplicity of questions it leaves hanging. Not that I ever expect a conventional movie ending or a clear resolution to a movie's dilemmas. Life isn't like that, so why should movies be any different. I can accept happy endings, sad endings, surprise endings, twist endings, or dangling endings. But at the same time, I do expect some kind of ending, to leave the theater with something to reflect upon. I left "No Country for Old Men" with mixed feelings, asking "What the...?"

I appreciated that the Coens tried to turn the mythic West upside down by providing a healthy dose of irony to familiar fictional characters and situations. That they don't completely succeed is probably beside the point for most critics, but not for me. The fact is, the Coens sabotage their wonderfully understated style in "No Country" with the trivial substance of their narrative. Too bad. I still enjoyed much of the film, despite its being merely a "could have been."

Final disclaimer: It is just possible after all this rambling that I have totally misread the movie and that the Coens meant it entirely as a send-up, after all, a parody, a spoof of noir, action, slasher mysteries. If so, I would have to praise them for their satirical purpose but criticize them for not being obvious enough to make it clear to this lunkheaded reviewer.

John's film rating: 6/10

The Movie According to Chris:
In American films, so-called character development often takes the form of connect-the-dots psychologizing. We learn all about the character's background (ugh!) so we understand exactly what turned him into the person he is today: Character X feels Emotion Y because of Event Z that happened during his childhood. See the tedious opening act of "Batman Begins" for a particularly galling example of this phenomenon. I agree with David Mamet: a character reveals himself through action. What he does is also who he is. No need to learn about his background (ugh!)

I don't have a problem with the one-dimensionality of the characters in "No Country." Just as the basic plot is standard boilerplate for the genre (man finds bag of money from a crime gone wrong, tries to take it, gets chased by bad guys), the characters are also stock elements. My problem is simply with Chigurh. I have no idea what to make of him. This isn't a bad thing; hooray ambiguity! But I find him to be truly ridiculous, also not necessarily a bad thing but not, I expect, what the Coens (or McCarthy) intended. The films' fans claim that Chigurh is a mythical character of some sort, a representative of death or fate. That makes sense in terms of the story, but Chigurh is so damned insubstantial that he can't carry the weight of myth on his cartoon shoulders. To me, he felt more like one of Dean Koontz's endless array of serial killers, each "new" one distinguished simply by a different set of eccentricities. I was on the fence about him (and the movie) until his encounter with the gas station clerk. There's just something about the way Bardem says "Friend-o" that makes me want to laugh rather than cringe.

The film does offer some imaginative and potent sequences, especially in the game. Moss's desperate run from the hound of hell showcases the Coens at their very best. I mostly liked the ending, too, particularly the way that the would-be protagonist (Jones, who is advertised as the film's star) has absolutely no impact on the resolution of the narrative. He might as well not have been there. I find that very sad, and not in a cheap or manipulative way. Still, it wasn't enough to sell me on the movie.

There's no need to intellectualize. In fact, it's pretty straightforward. I just didn't "buy" Chigurh. He doesn't work for me. At all. I couldn't get past that.

Chris's film rating: 5/10

---

---

---