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No Country for Old Men
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: November 24, 2007

Wry mythmaking, spectral narrators, angels of death, evocative landscapes, images that insinuate, snappy dialogue, poetic overtones, and characters loomed over and bent by their environments—these ingredients have appeared at least once, if not several times before throughout the Coen Brothers’ cinematic canon, which includes crime sagas like Miller’s Crossing and Fargo, screwball comedies like Raising Arizona and Intolerable Cruelty, and far-out fairy tales like Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? At times (many times) their beautiful technique and sardonic detachment has drawn criticism, a now tiresome, party-line, bulls-eye-missing accusation of “soullessness” and/or “snarkiness” which the brothers have yet to dignify with any kind of cinematic capitulation. At other times, notably when their erstwhile coup-de-grace Fargo hit the screen, their God’s-eye view of the human species has convinced even the naysayers that a “heartfelt” approach isn’t always the appropriate one.

Now the Coens deliver No Country for Old Men, a film that wrangles and re-invests all their favorite devices with such perfection it makes their previous masterpieces look like a series of trial runs. For the first 90 minutes, this film is a stark, funny, scary, and unbearably suspenseful confection of pulp simplicity. Then, in a magic trick reminiscent of nothing except maybe David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the film evolves mercilessly into something else—in this case an apocalyptic meditation on the momentum and trajectory of the collective human soul. The message dawns like a doomsday sunrise.

The plot is almost incidental. A hunter finds $2 million in drug money in the Texas desert and tries to keep it. A deeply anti-social murdering psychopath sets after him. And an aging, world-weary, overmatched lawman tries in vain to stop the bloodshed. The three characters share roughly equal screen time, and ultimately serve as archetypes in a one-sided battle between good an evil. The hunter, portrayed by Josh Brolin, is an everyman—gutsy, resourceful, and fatally susceptible to temptation. The killer, portrayed by Javier Bardem, is essentially inhuman, an unstoppable force leaving countless dead bodies strewn behind him in pursuit of a debt that will not go un-collected. And the sheriff, portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones, is decency incarnate, descended from a family and tradition of lawmen, and slowly going extinct as the will to fight a losing cause abandons him.

If it all sounds a bit bleak, you might consider looking at it another way: urgent. It is not pessimistic so much as 100% accurate to suggest that there is something enormous at stake as we make our decisions and conduct our lives. Meanwhile, as with every single Coen Brothers film, there is simply great pleasure to be taken in the wit and craftsmanship onscreen. No Country for Old Men does indeed have a superb screenplay, but the Coens have much more in mind than simply rolling cameras on great actors speaking brilliant dialogue. Like all cinemaphile filmmakers, they use images to impart information. They do it because they know that movies, like no other medium, can express a logistical truth that drives its philosophical and spiritual truths home. So when Javier Bardem rolls his pick-up truck alongside a row of motel room windows as a beeping transponder brings him closer to his prey, or when an attack dog pursues a man into a river and their two un-submerged heads drift downstream in tandem, you can feel the forces of fate in motion, even while no dialogue is spoken.

Folks, this is the essence of cinema, and something precious few directors fully understand. No Country for Old Men is metaphysics embedded in physics. It’s poetry couched in prose. It’s science and religion locked in mutual non-refutation. And it serves a truth that cannot be spoken. All movies, even bad ones, provide this experience on some level. And then great movies come around and redeem them all. So go to the movies, folks—this one in particular. And hey… behave yourselves.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld