No Country for Old Men

Review By: Shawn Hazelett
ShawnHazelett@TheCinemaSource.com

It might seem simple, but Joel and Ethan Coen produce their best work when they create compassion for their characters. The Coen brothers’ signature heavy stylization divides Cinephiles: are their films masterpieces or does style merely compensate for a lack of substance? Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are particularly vulnerable: while most everyone had some sort of admiration for these films, be it the idiosyncratic characters or (more likely) the beautiful music and landscapes, many nonetheless feel the heavy stylization to be too superficial and are therefore left asking, “So what?” This was not the case with Fargo, a masterpiece that made us care about its central characters and gave importance to its story. No Country for Old Men does the same.

Set in 1980 Texas, the story begins with rugged hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) tracking antelope in the desert only to stumble upon remnants of a massive drug deal gone awry. The scene is littered with corpses, and Moss finds the lone escapee a few hundred yards away dead beneath a tree. But cradled in his arms is a satchel containing nearly two-million dollars in drug money, and Moss, seeing no potential ramifications, takes the money. And this simple act throws Moss into a game of cat-and-mouse with one of cinema’s most haunting villains in recent memory, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). And that’s just the first act.

To mention the ways Chigurh tracks Moss would spoil the fine storytelling exhibited by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. This is one of the few movies in which I am anxious to read the book, if only to understand where credit should be given. From what I’ve heard, it seems the Coens stayed faithful to the novel. But I wonder if that’s in terms of the novel’s thematic aspects (more on that later). What about their natural set-ups and satisfying pay-offs? What about the detailed action sequences structured like two boxers trying to gain an upper hand? What about the uncanny dialogue or the contrasting humor or the ingenious logic behind the actions of each character?

But if the film was only about the pursuit of the money, it would merely be a chase movie (albeit a great chase movie). Aging Sheriff Ed Tom Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones is the center of this film, much like Frances McDormand was in Fargo. In narration, he tells us when he started as a Sheriff several decades ago he didn’t even carry a revolver. Now, he recounts sending a twenty year old kid to the electric chair for killing a fourteen year old girl simply because he wanted to kill someone. As Bell scans the corpses from the foiled drug deal, a deputy asks him, “It’s is a mess, eh Sheriff?” “If it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here.” Literally, Bell foresees the logistical ramifications that will result in ...