Black Humor amongst Texan Mayhem.

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 2007)

One interesting facet of your kids growing up, is that it broadens the definition of what might be considered Family Entertainment. Gone are the days of anodyne kiddie films for my guys.
So it was, that my entire family decamped to the Santa Cruz Del Mar Theatre the day after Thanksgiving (my favourite movie house in the whole world with its exquisite Art Deco interior) to see No Country for Old Men. Mum, dad, son, daughter and daughter's boyfriend, complete with mini van and popcorn. It may not be Disney, but my family were definitely entertained (but broke  do you know how much it costs to take 5 people to the movies? Whew!) Welcome to the brave new world of grown up family entertainment; murder, violence, sex and swearing. And the only one cowering under the seat during this movie, was my husband, gentle soul that he is.
This is the Coen brothers' film of the Cormac McCarthy novel, and whilst I've read and enjoyed several of his novels, I haven't yet read No Country for Old Men, so I'm not going to comment on the relation of the movie to the book, but consider it solely as a movie. The plot is not complicated. It's 1980. A guy out deer hunting (Llewelyn Moss played by Josh Brolin) stumbles by accident on the scene of a drug related massacre. Amongst the shot up cars, bodies, dead dogs and drugs, he finds a briefcase containing $2 million. He keeps it, packs his wife off to her mom's, and then tries to dodge the psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) who is sent to get the money back. Also on the trail is Sheriff Bell close to retirement, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who has patrolled this rough border country for decades but is having trouble coming to terms with the degree of violence that drug smuggling has brought into his world (hence the title) and, briefly, an over confident bounty hunter Woody Harrelson's Carson Wells.
Describing Bardem's Chigurh as psychopathic is being nice to the guy. Early in the movie he strangles a sheriff's deputy with his hand cuffs, and it goes downhill from there. He has a novel method of killing  compressed air. He blows neat holes through his victim's head. The canister he totes also comes in useful for taking out door locks, and he appears to be immune to pain and utterly without remorse. This is not a nice guy. Bardem plays him wonderfully, and I found him convincingly chilling. Tommy Lee Jones is suitably grizzled as the sheriff, and brings a certain resigned irony to the part. Has the world always been quite this bad. he wonders? There is a degree of black humor to the movie which stops it taking itself too seriously, which I hadn't expected, and there is, thank god, very little "Look  here comes the bad guy" type music. Brolin's wife is played by Kelly Macdonald, an actress seen far too little on the cinema screen here in the USA. She shone in Gosford Park, but I first noticed her in Trainspotting. She is excellent.
The movie rolls along nicely for the first two thirds, but then rather loses impetus after the hero, Moss, is abruptly killed. I felt it really lost focus at that point, because up until then, the audience was rooting for Moss to succeed in evading the killer Chigurh. After that, it was merely a question of when Chigurh would get the wife, and whether Tommy Lee Jones would give up and choose early retirement. I guess the moral is "don't pick up strange women at hotel pools", but killing off the hero too soon was a big mistake, even if it was true to the book. And everyone in my family party felt the same. The last third of the movie let it down.
I think we may celebrate the Christmas season together with the murderous barber of Fleetstreet. Violence, song and Johnny Depp. Perfect family fun!