"No Country" is No Country for the Unallegorical

Rating: 9/10 (28 November 2007)

Americans watch American movies expecting to see tried-and-true American themes of criminality punished by good ol' American violence, our overwhelming preference for solving all of the world's ill, even when it usually doesn't. So along comes this faithful (so I'm told) adaptation of the McCarthy book by the same title, which on the surface doesn't seem to have anything to do with the film (the title comes for a poem called "Sailing to Byzantium.") But if one looks at the movie as the ancient Greek philosophers would have, then maybe everything makes a great deal more sense. Take the title. The movie starts with a voice-over narration by the Tommy Lee Jones character, an old school lawman in West Texas, who tells us he comes from a long lineage of Lone Star justice enforcers. He lets us know quickly that the new breed of criminal, motivated by drug-fueled greed and remorseless mayhem, bewilders him. This New Country is No Country for this Old Man. He is an outsider looking in, and throughout the whole movie he is always a step behind the main protagonists, the younger generation personified by Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem. These are men for whom the 1980s Reaganite mantra of money at any cost will be drowned out by the drug wars, the contra wars, and the Greed is Good ethos of an unrestrained and predatory Wall Street. Brolin, a white trailer trash welder, finds himself the only man standing amidst a scene of drug sale gone bad carnage. He callously ignores a dying Mexican's request for water while searching for the cash he suspects motivated this desert shootout. When he finds it, he returns home, and that, in the real world, would be that. He and his cute country girl wife would party lifelong in Tahiti with their sudden wealth. But no, this is a Greek story, and the Greeks would make man do things for the pleasure of the Gods, like get up in the middle of the night, pierced with guilt, to take water to that now long dead Mexican who he wouldn't give the time of day to just hours ago. In any case, that questionable decision sets off a chain of events that should have been the segue for introducing the Bardem character, the chilling menace of Anton Chuigich, who must join the ranks of Hollywood's all time great villains. But we meet Anton in the first scenes of the movie, before Brolin's discovery, being arrested by some highway patrolman who confidently trots him to jail, only to be strangled like some country chicken on the waxed floors of the police station. We see that Anton likes killing, indeed, it seems to be the only time he's really alive. He kills the people who hire him to find the stolen cash simply because they hired him, and must be worthy of extinction for that reason alone. Others he gives a fighting chance. He asks a gas station attendant to call a coin toss, without telling him that his life depends on the call. The symbolism seems clear to me. Chuigich's concern for money only devolves around that small piece of metallic coin, and he tells that attendant his whole life has come to this random chance meeting and this random chance coin flip, a cosmic convergence around an otherwise meaningless medium of monetary exchange. When the attendant makes the life saving call, Antion urges him to keep that coin separate from the other coins, lest it revert to what it was and is, useless lifeless money. And he understands that God is a Random deity, at least from a a mortal's perspective; everyone's going to die anyway. Does it matter if that's decided by a coin toss or a traffic accident? He murders bad people without the lottery of gravity tugged metal because their end was predetermined by their knowledge of him. Probably most disappointing to many was the ending, which did not have Chuigich being arch typically killed by lawman Tommy Lee. The last scene shows Tommy Lee recounting a dream he had of his father, who tries to impart some wisdom to his son before this No Country for Old Men reality interrupts. There is no bloodbath, no retribution, no hail of bullets with a blonde hanging off his arm. Tommy Lee is alone and he knows it, alone in a random world where justice appears like a black wrath with a bad haircut that no one really wants to stop. Is this a great film? No, I can't rate it that highly, though Bardem's performance is riveting and certainly in the Anthony Hopkins-Hannibal Lector ranking of malevolencies on screen. But the direction was taut, the photography gripping and the story, if one divests themselves of American prejudices of what film-making should be, a morality tale worthy of Olympus. But I would liked to have had more focus on these themes, actually a longer film to be honest, and more of the Harrelson character involved instead of making a brief appearance and then getting killed. Still, it's one of the better films down the pike for a while.