Fine but no "Fargo"

Rating: 7/10 (17 March 2008)

"No Country for Old Men" has so much of what the Coen Brothers at their best are about -- minutely calibrated suspense, sudden jolting violence, an unerring eye for quirky Americana, every frame and sequence and sound effect precise and just right -- that it takes a while after the film is over to put your finger on what's missing: the Coens. They've been too doggedly faithful to Cormac McCarthy's vision, and it's a vision that is finally less interesting than their own.
McCarthy is, at bottom, a deeply conservative writer. In novel after novel he paints a man's world where a man's gotta be a man and walk through the valley of death and face Evil with a capital E. The bleak, biblical language and laconic dialog elevate what is essentially pulp, and the problem with "No Country..." as a novel is he seemed to realize this two thirds of the way through and trash a perfectly good thriller setup as if it were something beneath him. The Coens follow in his footsteps, and to their credit the final section of the film makes the best of the derailed story; it's beautifully crafted and even moving. But one wonders what they might have done with the material had they let the story play out as it should have -- i.e., not suddenly killing off the protagonist off screen and giving over to the Sheriff's elegiac musings (though Tommy Lee Jones gives them fine voice).
The Coens have also created more interesting baddies than Anton Chigurh, who in the end is a cipher, another of McCarthy's stilted Embodiments of Evil. Javier Bardem has an amazing physical presence, which the Coens exploit wonderfully, but his English has a ways to go before his delivery can be as expressive as his face. He's finally only scary in a bogeyman sort of way, without the human complexity of a really compelling baddie. The movie inherits from the book the need to mythologize him into an invincible force, but it doesn't wash; there doesn't seem to be any reason why Josh Brolin's character, or even Woody Harrelson's, shouldn't be able to contend with him.
Once upon a time the Coens made "Fargo", which was everything this film is and more. There, they followed their own vision and offset the greed and blood with human sweetness and stupidity. William H. Macy's descent into the underworld was as close to true tragedy as anything portrayed in American film, and it was funny, too. Cormac McCarthy could learn a thing or two from the Coens.