On Film: No Country for Old Men

Directed By: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin

Another masterpiece from auteurs Joel and Ethan Coen. I have been looking forward to this movie since I first heard about it. I can't really call myself a huge fan of the Coen brothers as I have only seen about half of their films, but they have never left me down. I had big expectations for this movie. I was expecting to be blown away. That's often a recipe for disaster but I had complete confidence in the Coen brother's storytelling ability. I was not disappointed.

The Movie

The story starts with Llewelyn Moss played by Josh Brolin lining up a shot on a big buck out in the middle of West Texas back country. Using his boot as a makeshift sandbag, he cranks in a little more elevation on his scope and squeezes the trigger. The image in the scope jumps up from the recoil and then returns to the point of aim, but all of the deer have scattered. Llewelyn puts his boot back on, pockets the spent cartridge and hoofs it out to see if he hit anything. When he gets to the spot the deer were he notices a blood trail, but it's not leading off in the direction the deer ran. He looks in the direction of the blood trail and sees a black pit bull limping away. He then starts off in the direction the pit bull would have come from. He comes across a group of trucks parked out in the middle of a field. There are dead men and a couple more dead pit bulls scattered around the trucks. He deduces that there must have been a “last man standing” and figures “would have gone out the way he came in”. He follows the tracks of the trucks out and finds the “last man standing” leaning up against a shade tree, dead,  with a case full of money. Llewelyn takes the money.

Llewelyn is not a fool he knows that whoever lost the money is going to be looking for it but he's basically a nice guy and one act of compassion ends up leading the bad guys straight to him. The rest of the movie is basically a chase, the bad guys after Llewelyn, but as you would figure from a Coen brothers film it's not that simple.

The main bad guy, more of an uber bad guy is Anton Chigurh played masterfully by Javier Bardem. Bardem's Chigurh is an elemental force, only human in his peculiarities. He has a game he likes to play, he flips a coin and makes his victim choose heads or tails, life or death. He somehow believes that that absolves him from their death. That he's just executing fate's will. Most of the time he doesn't really seem to think about the morality of what he's dong at all. His total ignorance of morality gives him the ability to seemingly go anywhere and do anything with no real consequences, besides the odd broken limb or gunshot wound.

Kind of threading his way in and out of the story is Sheriff Tom Ed Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones.  Usually showing up after the fact and providing commentary. He's a tired old man whose beginning to feel out of place, confessing at one point that these day's he feels “outgunned”. Another important thread of the story is Carla Jean Moss, Llewelyn's wife, played by Kelly Macdonald who seems to exist for most of the story as just a complication in the plot, but is in some ways the most important person in the story. Other memorable but short performances are turned in by Woody Harrelson and Stephen Root.

All the acting was great. Everybody seemed to inhabit their characters like a second skin but Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem still managed to stand out. Tommy Lee Jones just seems so tired. His Sheriff Bell is a good competent man who feels that now it's all he can do just to survive. Tommy Lee Jones face just exudes loss and sadness. He feels that he's out of his element trying to fight the evil that's crept into his world, even though as an old buddy reminds him evil has been there from the beginning, even in the “good ole days”. By the end of the movie he just doesn't have the strength to go out and face his mortality day after day. Bardem's Chigurh on the other hand seems to always be out of his element. Not that he shows any discomfort. It's as if he's from another dimension and left his soul behind. Bardem has created one of the creepiest malevolent presences I've ever seen on the big screen.

I don't know how much of the story came from the novel by Cormac McCarthy and how much of it came from the Coen brothers, I plan to rectify that this week, but the dialog and story construction is top notch. The story is told completely linearly, but the pacing and flow is consistent throughout the film. This is a violent movie, but not gratuitous, much of it happens off screen which seems to give it an even greater impact.   The Coen brothers are masters at using the camera to  tell the story. I had a Freshman Composition teacher that always preached “show, don't tell” the Coen brothers must either know this by instinct or have had it drummed into their heads at some point. It always amazes me how many filmmakers break that rule in a visual media, but the Coen brothers always show. I recommend this movie unconditionally.

10/10

-Mike Young