The Coen Brothers Masterpiece: A Perfect Fusion of High Art and Modern Film Noir

Rating: 10/10 (28 February 2015)

For going on four decades, the Coen Brothers have produced films which lie slightly outside mainstream American films. Their offerings are more akin to the lower-budget film noir of the 1930s' to 1950's than the higher-budget franchise films financed by the larger corporations. Coen Brothers' trademarks include amoral, immoral and fringe-of-society characters, less-than-ideal settings, moody atmosphere, and of course violence. You could never imagine someone like Steven Spielberg directing any of the subjects chosen by the Coen Brothers. For many years, their films were generally dismissed by the Hollywood mainstream establishment as being low budget fair only for shock value, until they made "Fargo" whose female lead won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Ten years later, they made their modern noir masterpiece: "No Country for Old Men" based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
The artistic fusion of a Cormac McCarthy novel with the filmmaking of the Coen Brothers was a perfect match. McCarthy is an unconventional novelist whose books simultaneously straddle and challenge conventional genre fiction and high literature. Like the Coen Brothers, McCarthy subjects are not for the feint-of-heart: drug rings, the slaughter of Native Americans, and other un-Disney-type subjects. "No Country for Old Men" may be McCarthy's best use of genre fiction conventions in a literary novel. Since the Coen Brothers style is similar to McCarthy, both adhering to and breaking genre conventions, the natural pairing of these parties almost seems a bit late! However, the novel was published in 2005, and the film was released in 2007. No question, this was the perfect novel for the Coen's to produce.
"No Country for Old Men" is a combination modern western, film noir, and suspense thriller. The story unfolds rather non-linearly. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) decides to do some game hunting in an isolated area of West Texas. While pursuing pronghorn (a kind of deer-like animal), he happens upon the remains of a massacre. Dead bodies and debris are everywhere. Like a detective, he examines the remains, the cars, the bullet-holes, and the debris. This was some kind of illegal drug transaction gone awry. He also finds a Mexican dying of thirst and wounds in a pick-up truck and a case full of millions in cash. He returns that night only to find the Mexican dead and some out-for-blood baddies after him. They seem to know he took the money.
After a long chase, he finally returns home. But soon he realizes he's being stalked by perhaps the most ruthless and monstrous baddie in film history: Anton Chigurh, played with understated menace by Javier Bardem in an Academy Award-winning performance. Chigurh makes the likes of the Joker, Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter seem closer to cultured gentlemen. What makes Chigurh and his performance by Bardem so simultaneously compelling and terrifying is his calculated coolness. He even politely asks his victims to do seeming mundane things in order to do them in. Occasionally he offers his victims a 50-50 chance of surviving with the toss of a coin. Sometimes they live, more often they die. The film becomes a terrifying cat-and-mouse game, where Chigurh is more like a serial killer cat and Moss is a mouse with millions of dollars but not the know-how to evade Chigurh. Investigating the case is Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who finds bits and pieces of the puzzle, trying desperately to put it all together.
A masterpiece of modern film noir but definitely not for all tastes. In true Coen Brothers/McCarthy style, nothing is as it seems. Just when you believe all may be right with the world, the story throws a curve, and you're on another cinematic wild goose chase. You can tell the story is moving to a cataclysmic end.