The Story
"No Country for Old Men" Reviewed
"No Country for Old Men", in theaters. Courtesy of Miramax Films.
Rarely does a movie have you white-knuckled, gripping the edge of your seat while watching it and then pondering its meaning long after the last image has faded from the screen. The Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” is high art, a cinematic masterpiece on par with Greek tragedy. Acting, directing and cinematography all work in flawless harmony to tell a story bleakly riveting and tragically realistic. It transcends the particular to become a parable of the modern American West.
When Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, finds $2 million of drug money in the desert, you know it’s a bad idea for him to take it. He’s just missed his mark while hunting, and we have seen enough movies to know what crime lords do to people who get in their way. He is outmatched by a stationary target; there is no way he can take on drug kingpins.
Yet when Moss chooses to take the money, it is a heroic act. He does not shy away from the insurmountable task of protecting what his good fortune has bestowed on him. He risks everything for an extraordinary opportunity and continues to affirm his decision throughout the film. This inexhaustible struggle of man against his inevitable fate is what makes the film profoundly philosophical while we enjoy explosions and gunfights.
Moss is a tragic figure in the classic sense of the word. Hubris, reinvented as the American ideal of self-reliance, drives him to strive for greatness even as he struggles against his fate. Anton Chigurh, the stone-cold killer played by Javier Bardem, embodies this destructive fate. His methodical pursuit of Moss lends a double-entendre to the word fatalism.
Chigurh is the inevitable bringer of death, a chilling figure following nihilistic principles that place no value on human life. Bardem’s performance is pitch-perfect. A razor intelligence flickers behind cold eyes that frighten much like Hannibal Lecter does; the difference is a lack of subtlety in Chigurh’s violence. The immanence of death hovers palpably whenever Chigurh is onscreen as we expect him to commit acts of violence at any moment. Awaiting the death of Chigurh’s next victim, we are thrown against the reality of our own mortality.
Tommy Lee Jones is deadpan as Sheriff Ed Bell, whose role could be cut from the movie without losing any plot but adds symbolic significance. Unlike the detectives in most crime movies, Bell is never on the heels of any of the outlaws in the movie. As he admits himself at the end of the film, he is overmatched.
Instead of driving the plot, Bell provides perspective on it. Jones’ matter-of-fact voice-overs have the deep soul of a cowboy blues song. We hear an older generation floundering, unable to keep up with the breakneck pace of the violence going on around them.
In a sense, Jones represents society struggling to understand how we came to a place where extreme violence and the threat of death are as ingrained in society as television and owning a car. Watching the friendly citizens of 1980 Texas obligingly play into Chigurh’s hands lends terrifying significance to the pneumatic air gun he uses, a tool ordinarily employed to slaughter cattle. The rugged individualism of the West has come to its darkest logical conclusion, where impersonal, self-serving violence threatens to devour the basic values of friendly, “Andy Griffith” America.
Describing the three lead characters in such symbolic terms is only possible because the characterizations by the lead actors are so carefully and particularly fleshed out. Their reality is tangibly written in their physicality and subtle body language. The trio let actions speak louder than words, lending a physical poetry to their performances. Bardem and Jones have already been nominated for Academy Awards, but all three should receive serious discussion before Academy Award nominations are released.
The cinematography, panning across the desolate dessert skyline, creates a somber, unforgiving atmosphere for the film. Intense focus lends the film a gritty feeling, with open wounds and crusted sand thrust at the audience with disquieting reality. There is no place to run from the film’s violence, which is brought home in human terms.
The Coen bothers have proved themselves again as master storytellers, using multiple perspectives to build rich swells of suspense and action balanced against slow scenes of storytelling and anticipation. The ending, though faithful to the Cormac McCarthy novel on which the film was based, is unsatisfying. Yet there is something that rings true in it; the lack of easy solutions suits the realism of the piece.
“No Country for Old Men” is intelligent, unsettling filmmaking. It will easily be a Coen bothers classic, ranked with “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski.” The real question is if it will become a cinema classic ranked with “The Godfather” films and Martin Scorcese’s best work.