No Movie For the Squeamish: Coens Return to Their Blood Simple Roots

Rating: 9/10 (10 December 2007)

The Coens are back and at their primitive best. They've taken Cormac McCarthy's novel and changed it into a novel of details like the novels of Jim Thompson. Most of the film is without dialog. Characters don't get to talk much. They act, think, strategize, hide, enter and leave a dizzying array of motels and hotels and then leave them. There are more doors opened and closed in this slow character study than any film since Mr. Blanding Built His Dream House.
Josh Brolin is a new fixture in films to me. He reminds me of a younger, grittier Harrsion Ford. I first saw him in the one of the Tarantino-Rodriquez Grindhouse double feature B films in the spring playing a mad doctor. I think he may have played another role in the other film. Then he was even better in American Gangster as a wonderfully corrupt detective. In No Country, he surpasses himself. If he didn't have to share billing with Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones,he'd be up for best actor honors this Awards Season.
Tommy Lee Jones seems almost to be repeating himself in Missing and the Three Burials of Elquiedas Estrada. In each succeeding film he wears less makeup, the face is more lined, the acne scars more visible. His character is more like a commentator than the cop catching the bad guys of audience expectations. He is more like the Walter Matthau sheriff after Kirk Douglas in the 1960 film Lonely Are The Brave. Matthau mostly comments on the out of place cowpoke making critical remarks to his deputy rather than seriously chasing Douglas into the Mountains. Jones embodies the idea of a present too violent for 60 year old peace officers like himself to referee and regulate. Tommy Lee has conversations with two old character actors, one, Barry Corbin, who appears to be a fatherfigure. Jones' father and grandfather were lawmen, neither lived past 40, but all of them were tougher birds than he. Instead of seriously confronting the malign Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee's character mainly just tries to think along with the serial killer and hit-man and with Josh Brolin. He's not thinking too well either. He certainly should have offered police protection to Brolin's wife on the two occasions when he interviewed her.
The movie starts when Brolin, hunting antelope, wanders on the scene of a revenge shooting and massive drug buy, discovering five roll-barred trucks and dead men with Uzis and machine guns scattered all around. He finds bricks of cocaine among the strewn bodies, spent shells and weapons. There's a Mexican man still barely alive and wanting water, but Brolin has none. And in a valise, between $1 and $2 million in $100 dollar bills. Brolin takes off with the satchel, tells his wife nothing, then wakes up in the night feeling the need to get that still living Mexican the drink of water he craved, a fatal mistake for Brolin. Because it is when he returns to the scene that the panoply of bad guys led by malign monster Javier Bardem first get a line on him. If he hadn't returned he'd a gotten clean away.
Hype about the film suggest the Bardem character is a monster. But I was not convinced by the film itself since I had seen him a few years back playing a fearful and fleeing Cuban homosexual. Bardem weighs a few more pounds for Old Men, but he didn't scare me any. I thought he was pretty predictable. The Audience was pulling for Brolin against Bardem the collector of the lost loot. The film never did show who gets the valise with the money in it though it seems likely Bardem did.
Instead, three ironic scenes were shown as epilogue to the showdown over the money, the last featuring Tommy Lee talking to his wife about dreams he'd had the night before about his father and grandfather.
The film ends without the kind of easy moral of most thrillers and westerns of which this is both. If you want to see the Coens as they were in the beginning, this is the film.