A Study in Frontier Logic

Rating: 10/10 (25 February 2008)

No Country For Old Men is a film that is carefully, meticulously constructed to linger, which it does. It's a film that, despite its cold, ominous eccentricity, is very down-to-earth, pessimistic, and wise. It's imagined so precisely that many details will not dawn on you till later, the appearance of a limping dog early in the film for instance. The film progresses naturally, untouched by any sort of convention, vogue or standards, and moves by way of its deep-rooted outlooks and views.
Visually, No Country For Old Men is of the highest cinematic order. The camera moves so deliberately and many images extract so many microcosms in life, a translucent reflection in a blown-out keyhole for example. Many shots rely more on a dooming presence in the out-of-focus background than in the unsuspecting foreground. Violence is portrayed on and offscreen as genuinely as this ungoverned yet restrained film possibly could. It's a standard-setting work of cinema, if that isn't shamelessly extreme in complement. It's so solid, you feel like you could go to Google Earth and rove around its settings finding no boundaries that divide the film set and the real external world. What I found to be outstanding, a strenuous thing to be in a film the sets the bar so high, is its use of sound, which very much opened my mind to the potential effects of the design of such in the movies. The film never uses music. Each scene is given seamless, faultless attention to ambient noises. In a hotel room, for instance, we hear that humming that we can never really locate. Also, there are at least two scenes where your heart is in your throat on account of the simple discerning of a transponder.
In his third appearance in an incredible movie in 2007, following Grindhouse and Amerian Gangster, Josh Brolin gives the best performance I've ever seen from him. He completely embodies a sort that is very relatable and likely to do some of the questionable things that he does in the story, a shrewd pragmatist that is resourceful and invariably stubborn, intractible, and changelessly intent. He speaks few words, he's dry as desert sand, and does not think for one second about the consequences or alternate outcomes of his dangerous choices in the film. Hindsight and deliberation don't exist in his fixed and steadfast world. The chase that ensues as he sees practical possibilities as practical inevitability written in stone in taking $2 million from the site of a gruesomely fated heroin deal is to him something he must staunchly work through with a stone face.
Javier Bardem, in the first film I have ever seen him in, is a presence to be reckoned with. He bears a knowing perception that telegraphs such a deeply dangerous villain. He's beyond the distance between audience and screen. He is so aware, precise, analytical, and thoughtful that he almost sees us peripherally. Pursuing the money that the narrowly engrossed Brolin has taken liberty of, he is what human beings have never faced or understood about fate. He has a mysterious philosophy that carries him serenely through a non-participating life of casual murder, perhaps that he somehow has reached an absolute certainty that there is no afterlife, that life is ultimately meaningless, and that his understanding of that existentialist conclusion admits him the privilege of controlling the fate of those he comes into contact with. How much of a match is Brolin against Bardem? The resourcefulness of the two men is transcendentally absorbingly suspenseful.
Serving as the film's actual hero is perhaps Tommy Lee Jones, who plays a creaky, weathered small town sheriff who avoids the federal investigation of the incidental heroin deal to protectively pursue Brolin. His manner puts off the audience, yes. All of us who have seen this film in theaters will agree. But the key to his philosophies, idiosyncracies, and pontifications are in how he also puts off other characters. Jones, an actor who is often very deterring in how glacial and inexcitable he can be, is really the only actor I can fully and seriously imagine playing the sheriff. The beauty in the film's dooming, melancholy realism begins and ends with him, as someone who has preoccupied doubts, conscious inquiries, and learned understanding that he does not communicate. When he talks, he's saying things that make sense to his views but never his actual views. To those who he shares the screen with, as well as to us, he's an old man whose mind wanders, as he humbly admits in one scene.
The three very incompatible key men never share a frame with one another, except for once very lucidly late in the film. How disconcerting, how painfully obstructing and displeasing. This is the ambiguous epitome of the film's consuming achievement. We are left wondering, pondering, and even if we don't, it lingers still. Images, lines, characters, scenes, they make our own minds wander the next day and the day after.
Kelly MacDonald, the beautiful Scottish actress from Trainspotting and Gosford Park, has a authentically basic and second-class role, which a woman would in her character's place, as Brolin's wife who, despite having severe misgivings about her husband's steel-engraved plans to secure the money, she still cooperates. She is gently endearing in her performance. There is a scene where she does something that I normally can't stand in another person, which is making lip sounds. However, to my indescribable insatiability during that moment, she feels so tenderly real and pitiful and the scene takes a turn of my newfound investment in her.
Despite the Coen brothers' trademark quirky character embellishments, everyone in the film is screamingly real. And that is why this film is so haunting. It may be dryly funny, off- putting, and subjective with the mindset and behavior of its West Texas characters, but it's all a part of the film's nitpicking at the frightening what-ifs of reality, of life on earth.