**** (out of ****)
Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald, Garrett Dillahunt, Tess Harper, and Barry Corbin
Directed & written for the screen by Joel & Ethan Coen, from the novel by Cormac McCarthy
2007
122 min R
The Coen Brothers make two kinds of movies. The first are delightfully ornamental and showy comedies like “The Big Lebowski” and “Raising Arizona.” The second are films noir that range from efficient to downright brutal, beginning with “Blood Simple,” moving to “Fargo,” and reaching its latest zenith with their merciless adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men.”
The kills are quick, the editing is precise, the dialogue is terse, and harsh Texas vistas (actually New Mexico) are unforgiving. Instead of music, wind howls over the plain, air conditioners hum in cheap motels, and engines grumbled as cars drive through the empty midnight. Late in the film, a grizzled old deputy tells of how a frontier wife didn’t just have to watch her husband get gunned down on their porch, but had to dig him a grave in hard Texas ground. “No Country for Old Men” is structured like a noir, visualized like a Western, and feels like a horror movie.
A resourceful deer hunter (Josh Brolin) finds $2 million in drug money at what’s left of a shoot-out in the middle of nowhere. He takes the money and a cross-country chases ensues, in cheap motels and backcountry roads. All hell follows him, including drug dealers from both sides of a border, an aging sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), and, most importantly, a fanatical, insane assassin named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, a real piece of work).
Critical debates are raging whether Chigurh – with his unpronounceable name and accent from nowhere – is even a real character participating in the action, or if he’s Death out of “The Seventh Seal,” whose enigmatic interrogation of the doomed are like externalized versions of what we ask ourselves in those moments before we leave this world. He uses a silenced shotgun and totes an oxygen tank hooked up to a cattle stunner.
On one level “No Country” is a mesmerizing clockwork thriller. Fun filmmakers like John Woo and his Hollywood knock-offs have gotten us used to heroes who can gun down scores of faceless bad guys, villains who can appear out of thin air, and electronic surveillance that we can never comprehend. It’s refreshing for ingenuity to replace technology. It’s refreshing to follow a protagonist who knows better than to get into a shoot-out with even one adversary.
For once the hype about an actor’s performance is right – I read all the praise regarding Tommy Lee’s sheriff and assumed it would be so much “Acting!” but it’s barely any discernable acting at all, just his worn face and a musician’s mastery of how and when his voice should rise and fall.
SPOILERS.
On its second level, “No Country” grapples with God and the universe and life and death; the God of McCarthy’s universe is the God of the Book of Job and the God of Malick’s “The Thin Red Line,” so far above us that our concepts of right and wrong are not even applicable. There’s a line in McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” or one of his other books describing a desolate land as “the place where God sits to plan how He will destroy that which He has created;” one of the best readings of “The Thin Red Line” I’ve come across sums up the movie as being neither anti- nor pro-war, nor even about war at all, but about how the universe continually creates itself through cycles of destruction and rebirth.
And so the larger-than-life figures of McCarthy’s novels wax about how the world is destroyed every night and created anew every morning, about whether our pasts really exist or it is our present that is a fantasy. (Shocker! McCarthy loves Malick’s “Days of Heaven!”) And so when we near the end of “No Country,” after everything has gone massively, deeply wrong, Tommy Lee Jones’s sheriff bemoans how the evil in the world has left him behind. But his wheelchair uncle tells him about the woman and the dead husband on the porch and burying him in that hard ground. Evil “is nothing new,” he says, and that the world “aint waitin on you – thats vanity.” The evil has always been there but the old man can no longer fathom it.
And then Tommy Lee waxes on how he hoped God would have come into his life by now – and that night he dreams a beautifully-told dream in which he and his dead father are passing through the cold blackness on horseback, their blankets around them, and his father is carrying fire in a horn, and his father rides past him, ahead of him, carrying fire out “into all that dark.” “And then,” says Tommy Lee, “I woke up.”
Is it a hopeful vision, of how the efforts of earlier generations, riding into the untamed wild of violence and hard ground, are spreading light, are building civilization slowly but patiently? Or is it more intimate? Has Tommy Lee’s prayer been answered? Has he been sent a vision of his father clearing a space for him in the next world, out in all that dark? Or is the next world only a dream – “I woke up” – with nothing but death at the end, and should we, as Chigurh / Death recommends, “admit the reality of [our] situation – it would have more dignity”?
Out in all that dark.
Finished Friday, December 14th, 2007
Copyright © 2007 Friday & Saturday Night