The Coen's score another Americana masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (24 November 2007)

Sit back and follow various and sundry characters from the Coen story book as they careen and meander through Texas. There's Josh Brolin, flush with millions after coming across a drug deal gone bad - leaving him holding the bag - and as not the sharpest tool in the Coen wood shed he is soon chased after by Mexicans, a corporate hit man (Woody Harrelson), and a burnt out Texas Sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones; with a ten miles of bad road facial landscape), but most of all by the coolest, craziest, baddest sociopath to tread the Coen fantastic: Javier Bardem, sporting a nice Hispanic American accent, and an Oliverian Richard III hairstyle. Apt.
Many Directors have been down this worn path before. Peckinpah in "The Getaway"; John Flynn in "Rolling Thunder" (with a younger, less loquacious Tommy Lee); Jay Lee Thompson in "Cape Fear." And countless westerns. This movie is also a western; a modern one. Gone are the Cattle rustlers, the Bank robbers and in their stead the Drug runners. But this time there is no heroic Marshall to track them down. Just tired old Tommy Lee Jones who seems to see the end long before Josh Brolin does. He doesn't do much tracking, just coming on the scene of too many killings, and getting more and more philosophically confused by what he sees.
He waxes philosophical, and his metaphors are as subtle as Mickey Spillane's, just couched in a Texan drawl. Javier Bardem also waxes philosophical, only his are borrowed from the grim reaper, and grim he is. As Woody Harrelson's character says: "he lacks a sense of humor." His weapon of choice is an air drill, perhaps borrowed from an abattoir. He uses it to open doors and men's souls.
To watch the Coen's is to watch Americana crafted at it's finest. The dialog is the hub of the wheel. They use it to bring in characters straight from a Bruegelian America that we all have come in contact with when we wander away from our home turf of normalcy. No character in a Coen movie is allowed too much silence. Many of them seem to be people they met along the way and invited in for a spot in the movie, and they make the movies ring true, if quirky.
The only complaint I have is that the movie has all the air sucked out of it near the end, as the Coen's deliberately beg off the requisite mano a mano ending.
Tommy Lee is fantastic and yet he's a minor player to Brolin and Bardem who get the biggest scenes. Brolin as a trailer denizen, who seems smarter than he acts, is destined for minor stardom. Bardem is already there for those of us who have watched him cut his teeth with Almodovar and moved from character to character like a chameleon.