It Don't Do No Good To Be Fast on the Draw No More.

Rating: 8/10 (26 June 2008)

It's hard to know exactly what to make of this film because it doesn't follow the usual narrative structure. Bad things happen to people, whether they are good, bad, or indifferent. And the soft-spoken but menacing murdering man in black who simply kills anyone who gets in his way, and even a couple who don't, walks away into the sunset. And the hero, Tommy Lee Jones as the aging Texas sheriff, isn't on screen for very long and, in his climactic scene, merely relates to Tess Harper an unilluminating dream he had last night.
But, although I didn't always know what was going on, what OUGHT to come next, I will assume that the Coen brothers did and accept the film as projecting some kind of coherent philosophy about life -- even if that philosophy goes something like: "Chance, the fall of a coin, plays such an important role in life that any coherent philosophy about it is impossible." Very briefly, a young Texan (Josh Brolin) hunting deer stumbles on the aftermath of a drug double-cross. The ground is strewn with bodies. Ignoring the pleas of a wounded man for water, Brolin pokes around and finds a bag filled with half a million or so dollars and makes off with the satchel. He packs off his wife and mother-in-law to safety, but a transponder is concealed in the satchel, allowing Javier Bardem to follow him around and engage in the occasional shoot out. Bardem, with his incongruously saintly eyes, is one of those killers who is impossible to stop. He's like Schwarzenegger's robot in "Terminator" or any one of a dozen other stereotypes. Tommy Lee Jones is Tom Bell, the disillusioned sheriff who tracks Brolin in an attempt to save him, and fails. Barry Corbin makes a brief appearance as an ex-lawman with even less optimism than Jones, who lives in a dump even messier and more thoroughly debauched than my own.
There are other familiar faces in the cast (Tess Harper, Woody Harrelson) but what sticks in the mind are the bit parts -- the elderly Texan in the isolated gas station, for instance, whose life apparently depends on whether a tossed quarter falls heads up. He seems to have been plucked at random from the streets of Alpine. Or Brolin's mother-in-law, Beth Grant, a garrulous woman with terminal cancer. When a man offers to carry her luggage to the station, she comments, "Well, there's at least one gentleman left in west Texas." But then she adds, "You don't often see a Mexican wearing a suit." This is a darker story than the Coen's "Fargo." "Fargo" had one psychopath and one low-level thug, and the rest were ordinary characters with weaknesses. In this film, the greedy and murderous outnumber the good. But, I suppose, following the novel, the blame isn't pinned on regional character. One frazzled sheriff tells Jones that it's all the drug money and the kids with green hair. Jones replies with ambiguous insincerity that he gave up hope when kids stopped using "sir" and "ma'am" as terms of address. The story certainly STARTS with drug money but then it seems to move on inexorably from there, turning into a contest of wills mediated by accident. A flirtatious young woman at a motel pool asks Brolin why he's always looking out the window. "Oh, just to see what's comin'." And she says, "You never see what's comin'." How right she is. A car running a stop sign when you're not paying attention can ruin your life.
At any rate, the Coens have done for the values, people, and landscape of southwest Texas what they did for snowbound Minnesota in "Fargo." In Texas, if you want a gun you walk in and buy it. The majority of folks are given to categorical thinking but aren't unkind. And the landscape is raw and arid, no country for old men, not anymore.
It's a pretty good film. The Coens are among the most original writers and directors working today.