Not a bad movie, but not one of the Coens' best

Rating: 6/10 (16 March 2008)

The last time the Coen Brothers got serious attention from the Academy, it was for "Fargo", a mid-western rehash of their first feature "Blood Simple." Now they've gotten a lot of attention from various awards for doing another psycho-murder film in Texas, equally inferior to "Blood Simple" as well as many of their intervening films including "Barton Fink", "The Big Lebowski", and "The Man Who Wasn't There." It's not that it's a bad movie in and of itself, and it's better than the other recent Coen Brothers movies I've seen, but it seems strange that these guys only seem to get the correct amount of attention when they make a relatively meaningless crime movie as opposed to their satirical masterpieces.
At any rate, I read a few reviews before seeing the movie (skipping past the plot summary because I didn't want it to be spoiled) and some of the reviewers said that the Coen Brothers had finally "grown up" in this movie. The reviewer for "Newsweek" (David Ansen?) commented on how the film had seemed to drop the Coens' reliance on humor even in their "serious" films. I didn't see this at all. The best parts of the movie for me were the typically off-beat and morbid humor scenes, like Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) drinking the killer's (Javier Bardem) milk and telling his clueless deputy that drinking milk isn't a sufficient description of a suspect to put out an APB on. I like the vernacular of the script, and I like Jones' and Josh Brolin's performances very much. But I didn't quite see what the fuss was all about Javier Bardem's performance, it was pretty simple work I thought compared to what Brolin had to do. He just had the juicier role, that's all.
The story here is pretty gripping, but ultimately goes nowhere. Probably the thing that impressed the critics the most and made them say the Coens "grew up" (as if this movie compares on an intellectual level to their best films, which as far as I can tell on a first viewing it does not) was that the film had an ambiguous ending. But it's not ambiguous in an interesting way like "Barton Fink", it's just ambiguous as if they didn't know how else to end it. There's no real idea here to justify the violence. The violence is done in a very exaggerated way to make Bardem's character more impressive. It's not much more subtle than your average action movie if truth be told. I guess we're just supposed to walk away remembering the scene with Jones and the older man, we're supposed to think about how Jones feels like he's over-matched by the criminals but it's actually the same kind of thing that people had to deal with back in the old west days. That's hardly a good idea to pin a whole movie on.
Another problem I had with the movie is a whole host of uninteresting characters. The Woody Harrelson character has nothing important to do and seems to be here just a a link between the killer and his corporate employers. He does a half-assed version of the same character M. Emmett Walsh played much better in "Blood Simple." Poor Kelly McDonald seems like a good actress but had absolutely nothing to work with until her final scene with Bardem. You can see the seams of the plotting of the story showing through. Some of the scenarios are just ridiculous. The bag of money is supposed to have this tracking device in it, one that makes a loud beeping noise when it's taken out of the bag and which is quite large but which for some reason Brolin never hears or thinks to look for until he's already been tracked down twice. If the movie wasn't so well made technically speaking, these things could just be dismissed as action movie conventions, but this film should be so much better.
I can't rate the film as a bad film because the suspense is pretty gripping and the action scenes are well done. Josh Brolin's character is very well done. I really liked the early parts of the film, Deakins' photography of the animals on the plains, the suspense of Brolin encountering the scene of the drug battle. The movie starts going downhill immediately when he goes back to try to give the guy water, a boneheaded move that pushes the movie into ridiculous territory almost right away. It's not a bad thrill ride but I think people are reading things into it that aren't there.