No Country for Old Men, 2007
January 15th, 2010No Country for Old Men
Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen
Rated R
2007
Warning: Possible spoilers. I’m trying to be oblique, but I might be giving some things away.
This review has taken me forever to write. I sat down and watched No Country for Old Men, and a week later, words still eluded me. Then I got the DVD for my birthday, and I’ve seen it a couple times since, but I feel like I’m still sitting stunned, with my mouth hanging open. The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, are geniuses with such a sense of a story’s deepest truths that the story weaves its way into the viewer’s thoughts and feelings and doesn’t let go. They always do this; all their movies are so enduring, so rooted in the human condition, that they are unquestionably among those few that will last past their own generation.
The story follows three men. Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is the Sheriff of a Texas border county, and while he has a small-town sense of ownership over his territory, he also has the sense to know that his desert county is a major stop in drug trafficking between Mexico and the US. Josh Brolin plays Llewellyn Moss, a good old boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but tries to make it work to his advantage. Finally, Javier Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, a ruthless, creepy, and unstoppable assassin who is determined to take care of unfinished business—namely, Llewellyn Moss.
Javier Bardem as the unstoppable Anton Chigurh
One thing the Coens have always done well is the casting of their films. True, they do have some stock players (John Goodman and Steve Buscemi come to mind), but every movie is perfectly, exquisitely cast. Jones, Brolin, and Bardem offer the kinds of performances in these roles that don’t even require dialogue or action; the most intense, riveting scenes are the ones in which no one says anything and nothing seems to happen, and yet the tension mounts second by second (at one point, my son, playing computer games in the other room, shouted, “I don’t like this movie, it scares me!” We shouted back, “How can it scare you, nothing is happening!” But it was in fact extremely scary right at that moment). Only the most gifted actors can pull that off, and only the most insightful directors know enough to let them.
Nothing in this movie works out the way the viewer expects it to. It doesn’t matter; we can’t look away. And in the end, we really, really wish it had ended differently, but we also know that this was inevitable. We might wish it was different, but we also recognize that this was how it had to be. It was inevitable.
Josh Brolin as Llewellyn Moss
There are still pieces of this movie I don’t understand. What was with all the animals, especially the black ones? Who won in the end? Where did the Mexicans come from? Why didn’t Carson Wells just turn and shoot Chigurh, or run from him? Why didn’t Bell find Chicurgh, and why didn’t Chigurh kill Bell? What did Bell’s dreams mean?
As Ed Tom Bell might say, probably I don’t understand. I like things to fit together, for all the pieces to fall into place by the end, and this movie stubbornly resists that. That might be deliberate; life just doesn’t tie together that easily. And while fiction isn’t life, it does remind one that even if the loose ends still dangle, there are enough reasons to come back again and again and again. I’ve seen this several times now, and it never gets old, and I never, ever feel like I’ve experienced everything it has to offer.
Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell