No Country for Old Men

Rating: 10/10 (22 March 2008)

How many times can you reinvent a genre? I'm guessing Joel and Ethan Coen would answer "a lot". From their first movie, Blood Simple, they've been grabbing the essentials of film noir and tweaking them in unexpected ways, making the same old material feel fresh. What's more striking is that they've usually taken their inspiration not from the endless noir classics filmed between 1941-58, but from the literary beginnings of the style - the Dashiell Hammet gang wars in Miller's Crossing, the "detective" myth created by Raymond Chandler in The Big Lebowski, which replaced Philip Marlowe with an aging hippie nicknamed The Dude, and the ironic James M. Cain dramas where the plot is moved forward by criss-crossing plans motivated by greed in The Man who wasn't There. And this without mentioning Fargo, an anti-noir set in a scenario that's completely white. Now, with their Oscar-winning No Country, for the first time they've adapted a novel and confessed to doing so instead of being "inspired by", and reportedly (I haven't read the Cormac McCarthy original) they've been extremely faithful to their source, while still directing a true Coen Bros. movie.
The story is a three-way conflict. There's Lewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a blender living in a trailer park who finds 20 million in unmarked cash abandoned in the afternath of a gang shooting in the middle of the desert. Then there's Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a soulless hit-man with a bizarro haircut and a silent cow-stunning gun, who's charged with retrieving the money, following Moss around. Following them both is aging Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), an intelligent, laconic man with one foot on retirement already. These characters rarely share screen time together, and when they do, they don't talk, since one of them is crouching behind a hiding place, shotgun in hand, or stalking each other from the distance. Like many noirs, this western-themed one is not about the resolution of the crime. That's a red herring planted by the writers so that we want to get to the end of the story, which is actually about a bleak, cynical world without any redemption on sight.
The verbal exchanges between Coen characters range from hysterical to cryptic, alluring and mysterious. They've always had a great ear for accents, which they've incorporated as part of the comedy in each of their movies, which always feature a different U.S.-based setting. In this movie, everyone is a Texas reject, and so they ramble on, sometimes not making much sense, but always pleasing the ear. The actors all do an incredible job, and Bardem really had that Oscar coming. His geeky look paired with his deadpan performance are the heart of the film and its most recognizable symbol. Unusually for the Coens, there's almost no music that can be heard throughout the film. There are subtle chords here and there, but until the end credits there isn't anything resembling a musical theme. The editing is crisp and the pacing leisurely. In suspense scenes, the ambiance sound and the deliberate slowness of the characters movements are seriously unnerving. There are a couple such scenes that are truly deserving of being called Hitchcockian.
Where the movie is far from Hitchcock ground is on its moral palette, which is uniquely grey. We root for Lewellyn because his crime is understandable - he finds money which seemingly belongs to none, and he wants it for himself. Yet the ironic truth is that he could've gotten away with it hadn't he decided to compensate his thievery with an act of kindness, aiding the dying "agua" man in the truck. True story here. When I left the cinema and went to have a leak, there were two senior moviegoers (no country for them) heatedly arguing about the morals of the movie. One of them said it was inadmisible that the bad guy walked away at the end, having killed many innocent people, while the other said over and over that the movie was prophetic. I decided to say something while I finished my duty, pointing out that movies have no obligation to be better than real life. At this, the angry oldster said I was the reason why corrupt politicians won re-elections and that youth was generally lost. I left the bathroom on the run, looking for some kind of weapon to bludgeon him to death.
Seriously, though, it's not that Old Pants hadn't understood the movie, it's that he was unable to deal with the grimness of its message. On other Coen movies which were equally unapologetic with the greed and generally worthlessness of human life, there was at least one redeeming character. Fargo had a sort of heroine in Sheriff Gunderson. Sheriff Bell, on the other hand, is a survivor. He has no intentions of getting himself killed and, though he wants justice, he suddenly realizes there is nothing to be gained from looking for it and a lot to be lost. For all the dark humor that goes on through the movie, the ending is stone-faced serious and humane, with the old couple quietly talking about dreams, a wall clock ticking on in the background. Anyone who claimed the Coens were all style and no substance stands to be proved wrong with this incredible movie. Poetic and inspired, it's a great comeback from the brothers after two stinkers in a row (Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers) did nothing but harm to their reputations as great storytellers with one of the most unique and literate comedy styles. Like always, great comedians are the ones that create the best tragedies.