Mr. 'Old Men,' you're no 'Fargo'

Rating: 3/10 (3 December 2007)

What if the Terminator was real but this time took the form of an infallibly clever, spaced-out-looking Mexican cat hell bent on retrieving the $2 million he lost in a drug deal gone bad? In 'No Country for Old Men,' the Coen Brothers follow up the engaging meditation on evil depicted in their groundbreaking 1996 film, 'Fargo.' In a hyper-real bleak-scape of rural Texas circa 1980 we variously follow the adventures of parallel protagonists as they quest either for the lost loot, the whereabouts of the Mexican, or an escape from the latter with the former.
Along the way we are treated most notably to heart-breaking murder scenes in which Javier Bardem's spaced-out Mexican, Anton Chigurh, slowly drains innocents of their dignity and then pitilessly snuffs out their lives in that winkingly ironic fashion so popular in modern American film-making. It's a real laugh-factory.
Additionally, we get long-winded, mind-numbing soliloquies from Tommy Lee Jones's Sheriff Ed Tom Bell about very little having to do with the actual plot. These speeches might have had a home in a film that connected them to anything going on in the story, but they seem variously lost and smug in this picture.
Gluing it all together is a dreary and nihilist sensibility that loses all authenticity in its attempt at super-authenticity, not to mention story-telling that too often forgets its audience.
Granted, the violence is visceral, mostly consequential and each scene in which it occurs is effective. It's not let-you-off-the-hook A-Team violence. It's all frightening and real. But you know what? So's my tax bill -- what else ya' got? Just because you've larded it up with ultra-realistic violence does not mean you've made an important film. Fargo wasn't great because the violence was real, Fargo was great because everything else was, too. No matter his methods, anyone leaving a trail of bodies this long would have inspired a dragnet of epic proportions -- especially in Texas. And especially considering Chigurh's first victim was a policeman.
And for the coup de grace, we land on an infuriating, art-film ending that will leave you wishing upon the Coen brothers the same kind of pitiless death they'd portrayed throughout. Granted, there's some poetic logic that comes into focus at the end, but be assured it will render cold, cold comfort.
The Coen boys were clearly trying to make something more than your average thriller, but it comes off like a snuff film pretending to be a parable.
This movie review by Erik Gloor