"If it ain't a mess, it'll do till the mess gets here"

Rating: 6/10 (30 August 2011)

2007 will go down in history as the year when two major contenders for the "Best Picture" Oscar were both in the Western tradition. (The other one, of course, was "There Will Be Blood"). Despite being set as recently as 1980, "No Country for Old Men"- a title borrowed from W B Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium"- is essentially a modern-day Western, both in its setting (the desert landscape of West Texas) and in its themes.
Llewelyn Moss, a hunter, comes across several dead bodies in the desert, together with two million dollars in a satchel; a drug deal has gone wrong, leading to a shoot-out. Moss decides to keep the cash and takes it to his trailer home, but by doing so he puts himself in great danger. A hit-man named Anton Chigurh has been hired to recover the money, and can trace its whereabouts through a transponder hidden inside the satchel. Chigurh is a ruthless man, lacking in any conscience, and would have no compunction about murdering Moss or anyone else who gets in his way. Other important characters are Moss's wife Carla Jean, local sheriff Ed Tom Bell and Carson Wells, a rival hit-man who offers to protect Moss from Chigurh in exchange for the money.
Apart from "Fargo", which I greatly admired, I have not always agreed with the critics about the Coen brothers. I have, for example, never been a great fan of the highly-praised "Miller's Crossing", seeing it as just another variation on the overused gangster theme. On the other hand, I loved "Intolerable Cruelty", even though most of the critics seemed to regard it as one of their lesser works. So it is with "No Country for Old Men". It was widely praised by the critics and won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Yet it has never been a particular favourite of mine, and I certainly would not have awarded it Best Picture ahead of "There Will Be Blood", one of the greatest films of the present century.
"No Country for Old Men" certainly has its good points, notably the contribution of Tommy Lee Jones. A few years ago I wrote in one of my reviews that I felt his career was stuck in a rut, after seeing him in disappointing films from the early 2000s like "The Hunted" and "The Missing". "No Country for Old Men" is the film which convinced me that I was wrong on that point, as Jones delivers one of his best performances. His Sheriff Bell is an ageing man, close to retirement and disillusioned by rising levels of crime and violence, but who nevertheless retains a certain humanity and decency beneath a laconic exterior. There is some striking photography of the desolate West Texan landscapes, which are used as a symbol reflecting the pitiless cruelty of some of the characters. There are some other good performances, especially from Woody Harrelson as Wells, and some effective dialogue. (Sheriff Bell, surveying the carnage after the shoot-out between the drug dealers, and hearing it described as a "mess", laconically replies ""If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here").
I was less taken with the performance of Javier Bardem as Chigurh, even though it won him a "Best Supporting Actor" award. It was a very one-dimensional wooden-faced performance, more a personification of some abstract quality like "Death" or "Evil" than a recognisable human being. Bardem's Chigurh had a robotic quality about him which put me unhappily in mind of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator, even though the Coens said that this was a comparison they were anxious to avoid, or even of Frankenstein's monster.
John Patterson, critic for "The Guardian" praised the film on account of the Coens' "feel for a landscape-based Western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah". I would to some extent agree with this quotation, although I felt that in this film the Coens never match the depth of characterisation and character development achieved by Mann in his best films like "The Naked Spur". Both Mann and Peckinpah, however, frequently portrayed the Old West as a violent, amoral place, and the Coens here portray the modern West in very similar terms. (Peckinpah also frequently set his films in the deserts of the South-West).
Nevertheless, if the film shares some of Peckinpah's good qualities, it also has some of his weaknesses. Patterson's use of the word "classicism" was an apt one, as the Classical style of architecture, although well-suited to grand, monumental buildings, could also be cold and impersonal. "No Country for Old Men, although it is (like some of Peckinpah's) a grand, monumental film, is also a rather impersonal one, with the emotional temperature turned down too low. In this it contrasts sharply with the passion and intensity of "There Will Be Blood". Jones's performance is a fine one, but even it is not in the same league as truly magnificent one from Daniel Day-Lewis in the other film. In 2007 both the Coens and Paul Thomas Anderson made films about murder and bloodshed, but Anderson, unlike the Coens, also made one about the human passions and emotions which lead to murder and bloodshed. 6/10