No Country For Old Men
Thursday, January 24, 2008
No Country For Old Men
No Country for Old Men, the tile itself doesn't make a lot of sense at all. It doesn't make any sense, especially after reading the synopsis of the film that involves a stolen satchel of money and a hired henchman with a air pressure gun as his weapon of choice. It all reads like an ordinary thriller from the Coen Brothers, just another movie with an odd name to boot. But in truth, No Country for Old Men is anything but ordinary, which is a tradition for the Coen Brothers. Normalcy should never be expected from this directing brothers, because their perspectives and their movies are anything but. They are never conventional, never the kind of directors who like to follow anything the mainstream audience would generally appreciate and love. Ethan Coen and Joel Coen have crafted a film that surpasses all the standard genres that we already know. It's a western, but not really. It's a thriller, though not exactly. It's a comedy, but not completely. It's everything and none of it at the same time, which is what makes this film stands out from all the rest.
The story of No Country for Old Men follows the footsteps of three characters. The first, Llewelyn Moss, a retired welder, finds himself a satchel full of money in the middle of a desert amidst a mess of dead bodies, drugs, and a whole lot of bullet shells. He takes the money home with him, thinking that it was a clean getaway without leaving any tracks, until a man whom the money was supposed to go to, hires someone else to hunt him down. This man is Anton Chigurh, a professional killer without a heart to speak of. He kills everybody who stands in his way, even innocent people on the streets whom he decides to steal a car from. He is armed with his air pressured rifle that penetrates almost anything without leaving any evidences behind, and he is a person you wouldn't want to be following you on your tail. Then there's Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, whose main purpose in this film is to track down the killers behind the mess left behind in the desert, since it happened in his territory and on his guard.
When it comes to the pacing of a film, the Coen Brothers do know a trick or two indeed. This film has a pacing that is so tight, that is becomes hard to breathe even as an audience seated comfortable at home. With the unexpected twists and turns throughout the film, the Coen Brothers not only injects a sense of unpredictability, but also a sense of danger around every corner. Javier Bardem plays the perfect cold-blooded killer here. His expressionless face has the ability to creep out any member of the audience just by staring into the camera for a long enough time. He is probably one of the most creepy villain to ever appear on screen, next to Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lector, to be honest. Only, the latter is still a little more formidable, since he likes to bite off the tongue of his enemy and bake human brains for dinner. Javier's character, however, does it so easily on screen that he is the perfect villain for this film. He is crazy enough to be deciding the life or death of innocent people by a coin toss, much like Two Face in the Batman franchise. But scarier than Two Face, this man is smarter and more real than ever.
Other members of the cast give Oscar worthy performances themselves. Josh Brolin does a great job as the protagonist of the story, always trying to remain a step ahead of the killer, trying to run away whenever he catches up. Tommy Lee Jones provides the dark and dry humor that is almost a signature to the Coen Brothers films. Even in a film as dense and heavy as this one, the directors never failed to insert their trademark humor into the story line, and most of them came from Tommy Lee Jones' character and his dry laconic wit. Woody Harrelson makes a brief appearance as the killer after Anton Chigurh. Though he has limited number of lines, he still shines in every scene he appears in, and certainly provided a significant amount of twists to the story itself.
Here is where the movie might piss a lot of audiences off. The movie does not end the way an ordinary movie should end. While this is a Coen Brothers movie where conventionality should not be observed, even such films should have a proper and satisfying ending. At least to most people, movies should never end the way this movie did, and the decision to end it like that would turn a lot of viewers off for sure. However, I feel that the ending not only remained faithful to the book which it was adapted from(Every line spoken by the character in the last scene is exactly the same as the last lines of the book), but it also amplified the impact of the story itself. It gave sense to the title of the film, the whole arch of the story and the underlying interpretations as a whole. When you come right down to it, you realize that the opening prologue and the ending epilogue are words that summarizes the film in under two minutes. Those two minutes are the reasons why this film is so different, and it is definitely more than just the abrupt ending.
Not everything needs to be said and shown to the light of day in movies, not every movie needs to treat its audience as passive viewers. This film, while not nearly as vague and pointless as the recent Cloverfield, is vague enough at the very end to make the audience scratch their heads in constant wonder. Yet, there is also a sense of closure and utter realism to it all that you cannot deny. The depth of this film runs deep, and it goes to show the degradation of our society as a whole, how crimes will never be stopped no matter how many good men try to stop them from happening. They just keep happening, and some countries just become unfit for old men to remain in forever. It becomes a vanity as a character tells another in a bar, and that is certainly the truth. This film is more than a cat and mouse chase, but rather a film that talks about the degradation of our society as a whole, and how helpless we are in the ugliness of it all.
Anyway, a great film and a great cast. This is definitely worth its Oscar nomination for Best Picture this year, a worthy competitor to its other competitions. Other reviews to come up soon enough, and that is a promise to you and myself, this year at the Oscars.
9/10
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