Beautiful but barren...

Rating: 7/10 (10 November 2007)

I'm maybe not the best person to review No Country for Old Men. I long ago became tired of movies about assassins, drugs, shootings, and suitcases full of money. I feel as though Hollywood has been recycling the same seedy crime material for years - and so have the Coen brothers. Movies like this one, Fargo, Blood Simple, Sin City, Pulp Fiction, and Smokin' Aces all seem to come from the same mold, and that mold is getting mighty overused, in my opinion.
On the plus side, I think the Coen brothers are uniquely gifted at presenting this kind of material. Indeed, No Country for Old Men is, in many ways, one of the most beautiful and suspenseful films that I've seen in a long time. It's full of striking images of the desert, interesting point-of-view shots, and incredibly intimate close-ups of actors with fascinating faces. Even the sound effects are great; they're loud, vivid and realistic, and they genuinely enhance the action.
But beyond all that surface glitz, what is the movie about? I never really understood or cared for any of the characters. The protagonist is unsympathetic from the beginning, for instance. Tommy Lee Jones, meanwhile, gives a good performance but seems to be virtually trapped in a subplot. Furthermore, his "deep" dialog did very little for me - "mock profundity" is perhaps an apt description. The villain is great, I suppose, but once you've seen him kill twelve people, there's not much point in seeing him kill a thirteenth, is there?
I don't want to bury this movie, because it's very well done. But I'm annoyed that, at usual, film critics and students are heaping an avalanche of praise on a movie that's really violent, really strange, and really alienating. Yeah, sure, it plays with narrative conventions in interesting ways. But it doesn't take true genius to frustrate an audience's expectations, and storytelling gimmicks alone can't save a story that's so barren. I suppose you could hunt for deeper meaning - as people tend to do on message boards - but I don't think there's much to find. The movie is a beautiful toy, and not too much more.