March 4, 2008
In Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest film, "No Country for Old Men," there are approximately 30 corpses — including two canine, two implied and one debatable.
Such a death toll is extraordinary for a film not set during a world war (even for the Coen brothers, who cannot resist peppering even their most raucous comedies with a body or two), making "No Country for Old Men" an endless parade of murder, elegant in its execution.
The film is swelteringly set in southern Texas, an agonized, pulsating landscape teeming with animal bones and tense silences.
In the midst of this parched land, a man named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon the violent aftermath of a botched drug deal (right after committing his own act of violence, that of shooting an antelope)and also upon a case stuffed with $2 million.
Moss takes the money and runs, setting off a chain of events that leads to the film’s staggering body count.
Moss, while his plight is the center of the film, is no hero. But Brolin’s performance allows the viewer to sympathize with the desperation — if not the crimes — of a Vietnam vet living in the middle of a wasted nowhere, and his good-guy, or at least better-guy, status is firmly secured by the counterpresence of one of the most bone-chilling figures to ever stalk the screen.
Seemingly soulless Anton Chigurh, played by a dead-eyed Javier Bardem, sets out to find Moss and his case of millions.
Bardem plays Chigurh in an unsettlingly alien manner: When he speaks, it is as though he is dispatching from some dark corner of the underworld, perhaps as the mouthpiece of the Devil himself.
Even his weapon of choice, a captive-bolt pistol, is a frighteningly foreign bit of machinery. Chigurh infuses the film with a constant, creeping terror, intensified by the harshness of the Texas backdrop.
Tommy Lee Jones, as well, delivers an excellent performance as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell; his weathered, line-webbed face suits the role of a man who sees constant violence yet can only help so much of it.
Bell is the real hero here, and his story is the real story, one of quiet sadness over a lifetime of witnessing bloodshed and of acceptance of the future stretching before him.
With Bell’s sorrow added to Moss’s angst and Chigurh’s relentless evil, the film is an emotionally complex affair, digging at both the mind’s most skittish fears and also at the inevitable melancholy that comes from having lived but knowing life must end.
Stylistically, "No Country for Old Men" is rather similar to another Coen film, "Fargo," with its singularly Coenesque combination of nervous giggles and black dread; plenty of scenes in "No Country for Old Men" are as darkly funny as they are chilling.
But the new film feels as though it has dug deeper than "Fargo," reaching further into the core of human fallibility than the Coens have before.
This may be due to the fact that the Coens did not write this story, but rather adapted it from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name.
McCarthy is a master of angst and confusion, and the Coens have picked up his style rather well, translating his stark, sometimes alien prose into something a little more comprehendible but never conventional.
They have taken a great American novel and turned it into a great American film, sure to become a classic study in fear and isolation.
