No Country for Old Men
I’m late coming to appreciate the Coen Brother’s films. Sure I loved Fargo & Oh Brother Where Art Thou? but it took me awhile and some patience to just strap down and watch their other movies. Raising Arizona? Couldn’t stand it because of Nicholas Cage. The Big Lebowski? I had to watch it on three different occasions. My point being, going into No Country for Old Men, I had to be in the right frame of mind to watch it. Otherwise, it’d just be annoying. Spoilers after the jump.
No Country for Old Men based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel is shot almost like Fargo - instead of vast white expanse of snow, we see the rolling wilderness of Texas. It’s almost worth the price of admission just admiring the composition of the shots. But there’s a story in here somewhere and the vistas is just another character.
The movie is like a modern day western - an out of luck hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds some money from a drug deal gone awry. Moss is being chased by Anton Chigurh (a great Javier Bardem), a psychopathic killer who uses a cattle gun to finish off his victim. Trying to prevent more bloodshed is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones).
The plot seems simple but it is by no means a Quentin Tarantino crime drama. Luck, chance, destiny however you call it plays a lot in the character’s lives. It was by chance Moss finds a bagful of money while out hunting. It’s by chance Sheriff Bell took a few more seconds before entering the hotel room where Chigurh was lying in wait. It’s sheer coincidence Chigurh gets in a traffic accident. The Coens try to skillfully pull these off without becoming too much of an obvious deus ex machina.
It can also be seen as a meditation on evil. Why such things exists in the world & why it’s allowed to continue. There are no easy answers and the movie doesn’t try to offer one (which why one viewer in the theater left in a huff at the end, proclaiming loudly ‘that’s the worst movie I’ve seen in a long time’). Again, you have to be in that right frame of mind to watch a Coens movie.
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