Huge on atmosphere, shock and style ... but at times lightweight on the details

Rating: 8/10 (28 August 2018)

The Coen Brothers' 2007 movie, based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, is first and foremost an atmospheric take on life in Texas - as a state bordering Mexico - in 1980 (for some not especially clear reason). In this sense, it is is a bit disappointing that much of the filming is done in New Mexico. Nevertheless, the scenes of wilderness here are amazing, and we are left in no doubt that this is indeed a wild place - beautiful in the natural sense, but hideous and primitive in the sense of what man here is prepared to do to fellow man (or woman).
This is a hard, gory, merciless piece of work, and a show absolutely stolen by its hardest and most merciless character - a sadistic, psychopathic contract killer called Anton Chigurh played with verve by Javier Bardem. He's cold, calculating, clever, literal, polite, dutiful (as he sees it) and more than ready to play games to make his potential or actual victims sweat. He's also got at least two weapons of choice, and that's another of his hallmarks.
Obviously, there's no joy in this Bardem performance, but there is a great deal of brilliance.
Now the absolutely astronomical body count that Chigurh builds up is shocking, but also increasingly unrealistic-looking, and this is is a surprise in such a gritty movie. Likewise, when Llewelyn Moss - a bit of a cardboard-cutout character played by Josh Brolin - first comes across the deadly drug-gang shootout that has the potential to make him fabulously rich if he's got the guts for it - he has no water to offer a rapidly-succumbing but still surviving Mexican victim. He's an experienced hunter and tracker out on foot in tractless Texan desert with no water?
Come off it !
He then wakes up in the night hours later - and sets off with a huge container of said water out of some feeling of guilt or misplaced sense of duty...
COME OFF IT !!!!
Similarly, the larger-than-life Carson Wells - another character superbly and attractively played by Woody Harrelson - though apparently another experienced and slick killer who mainly differs from Chigurh in having a sense of humour and being rather more merciful - ends up far out of his depth in a way that is surprising ... and thus refreshing in a movie, but also profoundly unlikely. And since the tough-as-old-boots Moss also loses his life when lapsing momentarily into an interest in beer and a woman who is prepared to supply it to him, the merciless and also casual disposal of characters who do or do not put up a fight is a major (interesting and telling) feature of this film, and that's heartless and shocking (and hence good film-making), but maybe not QUITE authentic...
Coming to this a second time now, I was also surprised that the "Tommy Lee Jones" movie of my memory actually features the actor playing (VERY well) a rather ineffectual role as Sherrif Ed Tom Bell. He's here to make it clear how everything in the crime prevention and detection world has gone to the dogs - presumably he is one of the Old Men for which this is now no country, and when he says he just does not understand criminal motives any more, we entirely understand him. Interestingly, one of his colleagues tries to persuade him that early 20th-century Texas was just as random and lawless, and we're frankly not convinced by that thesis, even if we recognise that there must have been a period - in the '50s say - when these frontier parts reached a peak of civilisation. But, bright and experienced (and unintentionally funny) though he is, Ed Tom regularly cuts himself out of possibilities for investigation, fails to save key characters, and ends up in docile retirement having either messed up or been passive.
I do really like "No Country for Old Men" as a stunning, chilling piece of moviemaking; but it is a kind of an impressionist vision of manmade hell amidst stunning natural beauty. And, like any work of Impressionist art, it's actually just a load of old disordered splodges if looked at from too close up...