Oct 28, 2011

No Country For Old Men - 2007

If you're familiar with "Fargo" there's little in the Coen brother's "No Country For Old Men" that will surprise or shock you. Like that earlier effort it's violent as hell, quirky as you'd expect, and full of great actors giving understated performances. What is lacking almost entirely is a sense of humor. On the rare occasion when the characters are allowed a moment of levity it feels like they're just breaking the tension before the noose is fastened around their neck.

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a down on his luck guy out hunting in the Texas back country when he stumbles upon the scene of a drug deal gone wrong. Under a nearby tree he finds a man who had managed to escape the carnage before dying of his wounds. Near him lies a satchel containing 2 million dollars. Moss knows exactly what's happened and knows that somebody will soon arrive looking for the money. But he takes it anyway. And we are thereby launched on a character odyssey, one far more interested in what happens when mostly ordinary folks encounter someone who sees them the same way Moss sees a deer through his rifle scope then in who winds up with the cash.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is the pivotal character in the narrative, the moral center of a film about amorality run amok. Played to world weary perfection by Tommy Lee Jones he's a man who thought he'd seen it all until he gets pulled into the quagmire created by Moss when he ran off with the drug money. As the only one of the principal characters with a strong moral center he's the only one able to recognize what everyone involved is up against.

Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh is what they're up against. A human terminator who will stop at nothing to retrieve his 2 million dollars. A black hole moving through society sucking in and destroying everything in his path. He's the embodiment of a kind of person that seems to be popping up these days with alarming regularity. If you have any doubts about this read some of the reports coming out of the drug wars in northern Mexico, the same area that spawns Chigurh in the story.

The good guys in the film though they inhabit different places on the morality scale are nonetheless on the scale somewhere. Chigurh is not. When he is forced to interact with other people he's capable of drumming up a pretense of civility if he feels this will serve his purpose. But most of the time he doesn't see the point. Give me what i want or die. Or better yet, I'll just kill you and take what I want. It's in those moments when Chigurh feels it necessary to act nice in order to facilitate an extermination that Bardem's portrayal takes on its most textured and menacing air. Anyone can walk around a set emotionless, Bardem makes you believe that stone face by demonstrating beyond doubt how difficult it is for this guy to say please.

As I mentioned all the characters exhibit some level of moral development and Moss is no exception. Though he stole 2 million dollars he can't help but go back to the scene that night to bring water to the one man he encountered who had survived, although he was severely wounded and unable to move from the cab of the pickup where Moss found him. In one of the most extreme examples of the saying "no good deed goes unpunished" agents of one half of the soured drug deal arrive and Moss barely escapes with his life down a riverbed. He knows though that those men now have his license plate number which means he is f***ed in big bold capital letters.

From here events spiral out of control with Sheriff Bell hovering just behind, off to the side of and generally around the various participants, never quite able to slap the cuffs on anyone and bring the affair to an end. Woody Harrelson plays a large part in the movie's second hour as a bounty hunter hired by one of the soured deal's investors. His job is to get the money before Chigurh does but he knows that won't be easy by any definition.

The movie's open ended ending is, I suppose, necessary in order to dispel any notion that this is a "good triumphs over evil" story. The closest we come to something good coming out of all the heinous events depicted here is a somber family reunion of sorts that maybe, just maybe, marks some kind of turning point for one of the main characters. But even then any comfort to be taken from this reunion is wrapped firmly in a block of ice.

No Country For Old Men is a brutal, beautifully crafted, wonderfully acted character study in which the characters don't take kindly to being studied. I'm not sure it's a film we needed, but it's not one you are ever likely to forget.


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