No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers’ undisputed career masterpiece evokes the feeling that everything they’ve achieved prior to this has simply been larks. They were biding their time, practicing, waiting for just the right cosmic alignment of mood and material to unleash their true potential upon an unsuspecting audience lulled into a false sense of quirky security by the likes of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers.
For sure this is the Coen Bros of old and No Country feels like a distilled amalgamation of their classic work, sharpened and pointed into a needle of sheer cinematic genius. It has the cold, stark simplicity of Blood Simple, the dark cynicism of Miller’s Crossing, and the incompressible humor of Fargo (we defy you to identify anyone else that can craft a sidesplitting throwaway exchange about welding).
An adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy’s bleak 1980 set crime thriller, it’s essentially a chase whereby opportunistic hunter Llewelyn Moss (Brolin) stumbles across the bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone bad in the middle of the desert and attempts to make off with a suitcase full of money. Equal parts western and noir, peppered with dark Coen comedy, No Country is a shockingly violent portrait of a swiftly changing time laced with heady meditations on the moral bankruptcy of man.
The idea of the relentless pursuer, brought forth from a kind Jungian mind’s eye, has been a regular staple of the Brothers’ output (think The Lone Biker of The Apocalypse in Raising Arizona, or Daniel Von Bargen’s dark and nameless bloodhound handler in O Brother). But where it was typically an ironic comedy counterpoint here it’s a fully fleshed incarnation of pure visceral, walking, talking nightmare, in the form of Javier Bardem’s almost poetically named Anton Chigurh. A denim-suited psycho, who fetishes chance, his drummer-boy hairdo, piercing brown eyes and dry Spanish inflection lend him an otherworldly air that renders the simple gesture of crumpling an empty seed packet utterly nerve-shredding.
Book-ending the central spine of the story is Tommy Lee Jones, a man whose withered face, which looks to have been fashioned by the very gravel under his boot, lends the role of the old time sheriff a certain stillness. The proverbial old man of the title confronted by a new frontier of violence he feels ill equipped to deal with, he contemplates his place in the world with a soft sense of melancholy. Quietly shattered he drifts, bereft of understanding, and is pulled along the trail of dead like tumbleweed caught in a storm.
Set deep amidst the West Texas brush, beautifully lensed by Coen’s mainstay Roger Deakins, the landscape becomes a character in its own right, with the parched sands and expansive, looming horizon offering no sanctuary, projecting down a pervasive sense of impending doom on the unfortunate souls that dwell beneath it. And what souls, for not since Sergio Leone has a filmmaker, in this case two, displayed such an open fascination for posture and the intricacies of the human face. From the rotund gas station clerk, to the sugarplum fairy trailer park secretary, to the rakish hotelier, these meticulously crafted parts – purely functional roles in the hands of almost anyone else – are each given pride of place on the screen. It’s the human face as a piece of design and its use is simply astonishing.
Of course like all things proclaimed a masterpiece it has its inevitable detractors – some going so far as to accuse its openly ambiguous conclusion of cheating the viewer out of something more dramatically satisfying. But to do so is to sorely miss the point, as the central crux of the story is a figuratively impotent man out of his time, powerless to prevent the inevitable. A tragic and entirely righteous man who sums up his whole time on Earth only to say: “I always figured when I got older, God would sorta come into my life somehow. And he didn’t.” Not dramatically satisfying? Please…
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Accompanying this fine film is an absolute plethora of featurettes and press coverage. "Working With the Coens" is your typical director love fest from the cast and crew, but rather than the typically tedious professional courtesy you get the odd feeling that these people really do mean what they’re saying. "Diary of a Country Sheriff" is a brief but detailed dissection of the Sheriff Bell character.
Josh Brolin’s Video Diary is oddly compelling because it’s essentially a series of batshit crazy informal interviews where you can never quite tell where the line between candid confessions and out and out piss-taking is at any given time. "The Making of No Country for Old Men" is an in depth featurette detailing the project from conception to completion covering everything from location scouting to thematic musing.
Also on hand is the imaginatively constructed "Press Timeline" which chronicles the massive critical swooning with an extensive series of press events, dated and presented in order, which took place from October 2007 to February 2008.
"No Country for Old Men" is on sale April 7, 2009 and is rated R. Drama. Directed by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Written by Cormac McCarthy (Novel), Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (Screenplay). Starring JK Simmons, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly MacDonald, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson.
