Powerful Country a Coen Masterpiece
Potent, powerful, compelling, elegant, unnerving and undeniably emotionally turbulent, Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is a bona fide masterpiece. Easily the best film the brothers have made since 1996’s Oscar-winning Fargo, this disturbingly eloquent thriller provides so much food for thought I’ll be contemplating it for months, maybe even years. Of all the pictures I’ve seen in 2007 maybe only two, the musical drama Once and the procedural thriller Zodiac, could be remotely considered its equal, and when all is said and done this monumental achievement might someday be regarded as the finest of the sibling filmmakers’ entire spectacular career.
Josh Brolin is fighting for a new life in Miramax Films' No Country for Old Men
Out in the middle of the deserted nowhere, Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) has made a discovery. Amidst the chaos of bullet-riddled bodies and catastrophically damaged off-road vehicles he discovers a stash of heroin and a suitcase filled with $2-million in cash. Knowing it’s a bad idea, he takes the money back home to the trailer park imploring his sweetheart Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) not too ask too many questions because he still doesn’t have all the answers.
Pity, because unbeknownst to him an assassin with maniacally surgical skill and apparent love for the kill with the odd name of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is hot on his trail and ready to do him in. This man lives by his own code of ethics so unhinged and bizarre even others, men like the folksy Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), in his peculiar profession don’t have the first clue how to relate – let alone deal – with him.
With bodies mounting and grotesqueries around seemingly every corner, down-home Texas sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is starting to feel like this changing world is finally starting to get to him. But he keeps investigating, hoping he’ll be able to at least warm the beguiling Carla Jean of the unholy terror silently stalking her beau before it is horrifically too late.
There is not a false beat or note or move anywhere inside this majestically devastating motion picture. From the very first image of a shaggy-haired Chigurh being arrested in the middle of roadside nowhere I could just tell this was going to be something special. The Coens start crafting their wickedly devilish spell right from the get-go, cinematographer Roger Deakins (who, with this, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and In the Valley of Elah, is having a spectacular year with the camera) setting the tonal thermometer for the rest of the tale in just a scant few seconds.
Some will have problems with the picture, mostly with the abruptness of the ending. In a way, the filmmakers pull a bit of a Psycho-like twist at some point during the proceedings, and what viewers thought was the dramatic point of it all turns out to be only a catalyst driving another character’s stark realizations. If that is true, then I say they are missing the monumentally brilliant bigger picture, the inescapable meditatively corruptive horrors the story outlines only growing in majesty and genius as things progress.
Speaking of genius, I don’t know of any other word than that to describe Bardem and what it is he does here. This is a titanic portrait of evil right up there with Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs or Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter. He is eerily unforgettable, the performance seeping under my skin like an uncomforting nightmare and each time he appeared my heart stopped and my breath ran cold just at the thought of what he might do next.
Nearly equaling him are both Jones and Brolin. While that is not a surprise for the Oscar-winning veteran (almost assured of another nomination for his work in Elah), for the latter actor watching him in 2007 has been a magnificent revelation. Between the Robert Rodriguez section of Grindhouse, the aforementioned Elah and Ridley Scott’s American Gangster the man has suddenly cemented himself as singularly gifted talent almost beyond reproach.
As for his work here, Brolin is simply mesmerizing. He digs right into Moss body and soul, not afraid to bring out all sides of the man’s complex personality no matter how dark or dangerous those pieces might be. He’s both hero and antihero, sinner and saint, charitable and selfish, and watching his journey is as pulse-pounding and as inspired as any we’ve seen this year.
There is more I could say, not the least of which is the Coens’ refusal to allow audiences any moment or time for a bit of cathartic grief. For them, the way this world works there is no place for such emotion, no time for redemptive tears when times change and people of an older generation are faced with the new perplexities of the present. Indeed, within the framework of this film it truly is no country for old men, and as that harsh realization presents itself the only emotion left is a form of quietly overpowering devastation.
