...the Coens sabotage their wonderfully understated style in No Country with the trivial substance of their narrative.
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In the following joint review, both John and Chris provide their takes on the movie, with John also writing up the Video, Audio, Extras, and Parting Shots.
The Movie According to John:
People have lavished high praise and numerous awards on "No Country for Old Men," including Oscars for 2007's Best Picture, Best Director (Joel and Ethan Coen), Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem), and Best Writing (Coens), and the movie deserves much of the acclaim. I, too, found things to enjoy in it, but somewhere just after the halfway point my enthusiasm began to wane, and by the end of the film I had soured on it considerably. Understand, most critics loved the movie, so mine is a minority report, a counterpoint to the flood of applause you'll hear from practically everyone else.
In 1980, 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 crooked business interests behind the drug transaction hire a professional assassin, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), to track down whoever took their money, and the assassin is very good at his job. Along the course of the chase, a local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), begins figuring things 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 "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 filmmakers' idea is to turn the conventional Western thriller on its head. So while the Coens intend for a lot of things to look familiar, expect the unexpected. Just don't figure on it being a typical Coen laugh-fest. "No Country" is more along the lines of a bizarre, nihilistic, noir Western. And they fashion it 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. Simultaneously, the Coens inject pithy, sometimes homespun, sometimes caustic homilies into the proceedings, apparently taking large chunks of dialogue directly from the book. All for the good. But after that, things go south.
The quiet, the solitude, the tension, the photography, and the wit are all up against what I view as the story's uncertain intent; largely stereotyped caricatures; lack of a central character; muddled themes; melodramatic, pulp-fiction action; and disappointing finish.
Let's start with film's intent, since that is the basis for most of my criticism. If this had been a straight-ahead thriller or even a gentle send-up of the action genre, 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 be 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 mean 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 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. Yet, 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 never actually affecting the story's events (although it is 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. Then there are 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 psychotic, automaton killer, Chigurh, as the only other candidate for main character. At first I thought he was really scary, especially when he starts playing games of chance with people. He's an archetypal demon, the personification of evil; and as performed by Bardem, he can be quite frightening. That lasted for about ten or fifteen minutes. Then Chigurh simply degenerates into another Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, or 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. Remember the line from "Halloween," where a character says "...you can't kill the bogeyman"? Same deal.
Ultimately, then, what we get here 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. This story leaves us with no one to root for and no one truly to care about, good or bad, not even a serious heavy.
Moving on, there is the matter of the message, the "meaning" I referred to earlier. Surely, there is one, for as I've said, the movie has "message" imprinted on every frame. But I was never sure what the message was. Is it that evil has always existed, that it goes on forever, and there is nothing anyone can do about it? The movie's characters strongly imply this. 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 bygone 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. However, there was as much evil abroad in the past as there is today, so 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 that anything new? Perhaps the movie is suggesting that we currently live in a hopeless, narcissistic, egotistical, self-consumed society? But is America any worse off in these regards than it ever was? Probably not, yet this alleged national ennui destroys some of the movie's characters, running them into the ground, forcing them to give up on life, to give up caring or trying to improve anything. As I see it, the movie is sending out conflicting messages, which would be fine if the movie had developed any of them, which it doesn't. For the viewer, it becomes an exercise in frustration.
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