Oh dear, another pointless film from the Coens.

Rating: 4/10 (8 March 2008)

Oh lord, yesterday I made a grave error, having gone months without watching a film that irked me enough to rant on IMDb I went and watched 2 Oscar winning stinkers in one fateful night - No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood. I still can't decide which one was worse. I do still have a faint hope that the supposed great white 'saviours' of American cinema, the brothers Coen and PT Anderson, will one day create a film that has a point and will therefor finally elevate their work above the level of stylish, pseudo intellectual nihilism, however that slim hope is dying fast, much like the cast in the sorry excuse for a film that presented itself to me last night.
So, here we have NCFOM (for short) an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, set in the (beautifully captured) dusty deserts of Texas. I have never seen such a pointless waste of film since I saw yawner flick Factotum at Christmas :)
So what's the deal? Well we have a drugs deal that got a little messy and a sad loser (Brolin) stumbles upon said mess and eventually a satchel full of cash under the arm of a dead Mexican, so he takes it home. Great. Then, after struggling to get to sleep that night, he goes back to the scene to give water to some thirsty drug baddie he heartlessly left on death's door earlier in the day. Much to his surprise there is someone there looking for their missing millions! Why on earth did he go back to the scene of the crime you ask? Pah, don't go looking for logic here, this is a metaphorical piece.
So Mr.Loser now has the angry baddies on his case, after a chase scene involving a river and a pit bull (which of course he dispatches right at the last possible moment) he makes it back to his trailer and tells his wife (Mcdonald) he is in trouble and she should get her purty little ass to her mother's and wait until it all blows over. Here begins the cat and mouse game, a rapidly downward spiral which runs out of tension just after the hour mark. Our loser soon has the baddest bad ass of all on his trail in the form of Anton Chigurh (Bardem), the very personification of relentless evil who is on the war path and looking for the stolen cash to keep all to himself (he shoots the guys who hired him). Added to this we have a world weary old cop (Tommy Lee Jones) musing about the hopeless state of the world, his dreary monologues (which may require subtitles for those outside the U.S) act as the commentary for this crazy caper. So you get the drift, it's a story about greed, human weakness and chance. As one character states, 'you can't stop what's coming'. How very profound...
From the start Bardem's maniac killer, admittedly played to perfection by a great actor, just blasts his way through whoever is in front of him, at times even deciding their fate on the flip of a coin (great use of symbolism, eh?). So what does this monster represent? Death, fate, evil itself? Who really cares. By the end of the first half hour I knew fine well where this film was heading and that this emotionless cipher would indeed prove to be unstoppable. It's a depressingly predictable film, perhaps that was part of the 'point', even if that is the case it doesn't make the film any better. That is the big problem with No Country For Old Men, it's so uninspired and worn out, we've seen it all before. It's nothing new, clever, bold or even entertaining. The themes it tries to examine might be relevant to the times we live in but when presented in the form of a one note package like NCFOM does it make an interesting nights viewing? Not in my book, not even close.
Technically it is well executed of course but who really wants to watch a guy clean his bloody wounds or blast nameless characters in the head with a bolt gun? Or is this what people consider great cinema now? The Coen's are nothing but spiritually empty show offs and this film is the perfect illustration of that fact. They don't have much to express worth seeing or hearing. I don't have a problem with show offs if they can back up their extravagance with substance. Take James Joyce for example, he was also an unapologetic show off but his work was more than just a showcase for his technical brilliance with prose, it offered entertaining and humorous insights into the nature of humanity and existence. That is something the Coens and many other so called 'artists' can only ever dream of achieving. It is what separates the true artists from the wannabes.
So to sum up, for some viewers No Country For Old Men may be a gripping tale of the ascension of evil over good, for me it's nothing more than a rather uninspired example of the ascension of style over substance. 2 Stars for Bardem's disturbing turn, 1 star for a few moments of early tension and 1 for photography, 0 for the script.