The Third Draft

No Country For Old Men (2007)               Back to Reviews
by Coach Patton
©D. Patton, All Rights Reserved

Written & Directed by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
Based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy

Running Time: 2:02   Rated: R for strong graphic violence and some language.
PLOT: Set in West Texas, a man on the run with a suitcase full of money is pursued by a number of individuals.
CAST: Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, Tess Harper

The Bros. Coen’s No Country For Old Men opens with a series of shots of the West Texas landscape. Cinematographer Roger Deakins fills the screen, primarily, with the land, leaving very little visible sky, signaling to the audience that the story you’re about to see is not one of heavenly redemption but one of earthly sin, a story set in a violence-ridden world devoid of any divine interaction, let alone intervention. From frame one, the directors make it clear that whatever’s about to happen, it’s not going to end well.

If there's one thing that can always be said of a Coen Brothers film, it's that conventional rules and expectations can be jettisoned. They can make anything, absolutely anything, intensely profound and deeply weird -- and weirdly deep -- and cruelly magnificent all at the same time. Skip back past their recent fluff -- not that Intolerable Cruelty and especially O Brother, Where Art Thou? are not as sublime as fluff gets. Just recall how Fargo and Miller’s Crossing and Blood Simple simply Blew. Your. Mind. with the unfathomable depths of their indifferent visual beauty and the wide-open expanses of their psychological intuition.

That's certainly the case here, with a Western that's not a Western, a crime thriller that's not a crime thriller, and a comedy that's not a comedy. Like Fargo, the movie delights in making viewers scratch their scalps. And, while the ending may be a sore point for some, it will have others chuckling and nodding their heads appreciatively (albeit perhaps after a brief "WTF?" as the end credits begin to roll). That's what good cinema is expected to do, and the success in this area of No Country for Old Men puts it among 2007's motion picture elite.

It’s all so simple, really: a simple story simply told. It’s in the how that the Coens show their mastery as perhaps the finest pure storytellers working in film today. Give this same script to, oh, John McTiernan or Michael Mann, and you’d get a stylish action movie out of it.

In the hands of the Coens, it is a literary masterpiece about the flips sides of perseverance, and about a cultural shift that’s barely noticed until it’s past. The year is 1980, at the beginning of the “war on drugs,” when the dealers and the smugglers started getting desperate and even more dangerous, and saw no reason not to raise the stakes as high as they could go: Chigurh (Javier Bardem: The Sea Inside) is their weapon.

And while he doesn’t know it as the film opens, Sherriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommie Lee Jones: In the Valley of Elah) is the old man this country is no longer for -- we meet him through a stunningly effective voiceover at the beginning of the movie in which he shakes his head in wonder at the “old-timer” sheriffs of Texas who refuse to even carry a gun, but he is already as obsolete, temperamentally if not strategically, as those relics from a era lost and never to be re-found.

The man Chigurh is after is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin: American Gangster), not the brightest bulb but far from the dimmest, too: he can’t resist the lure of all that money, which he stumbled across purely by accident, but neither can he resist the call of his conscience to do something he should have done before he left the scene of the crime (his own and others’), which is what allows Chigurh to pick up his tail. So now Moss is on the run, trying to draw Chigurh away from his wife (Kelly Macdonald: Finding Neverland); two steps behind is county sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who’s appalled by all the death and destruction he’s seeing in the wake of whomever it is he’s chasing.

No Country for Old Men is an action movie both measured and grave, opening as a Jim Thompson-esque crime saga set on the Texan sand-lands, but as it moves along the film acquires an allegorical depth, raising questions about the state of American culture and morality as it follows a steady stream of blood that’s all been spilled over a few million dollars. “It’s all gawddam money,” an El Paso sheriff notes.

The Coens take McCarthy’s grumpy “red-state gripes,” like the one about kids with green hair, with a grain of salt, but nevertheless stay true to his overarching theme: the violence that Jones is seeing, that causes him to declare, “I feel overwhelmed”, isn’t novel—it may be a bit gruesome, as Bardem kills people as though they’re cows, for Pete’s sake, but certainly not more so than the violence of McCarthy’s book Blood Meridian—just another iteration of the frontier violence that harkens back to the old days of Indian battles. (And, if you follow the logic, all the way back to the American Revolution.)

“What you got ain’t nothing new,” Jones’ uncle, Barry Corbin, tells him. “This country’s hard on people.” America is a country founded on violence that has never stopped fighting, whether against the elements or, as is more common, one another.

Expecting normalcy from a Coen Brothers production is a pointless endeavor, but anticipating brilliance isn't outlandish. Their latest feature, which actually has about zero box office potential, provides plenty of the latter and a little of the former. It’s mostly an off-kilter road trip that accomplishes what the Coens do best - seamlessly merging drama, violence, and quirky humor into a whole. They also accomplish something many would have believed to be impossible: providing a coherent and reasonably faithful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel. (Many would place McCarthy in the "unadaptable" category. (For example see All the Pretty Horses, 2000).

However, following their own nonstandard trail, Joel and Ethan -- following McCarthy's lead -- decide that just because a story is worth telling, it doesn’t demand a clean ending. This is a decision that will infuriate some members of the audience. Done right, I have always believed open ended conclusions can be assets, and I think that's the case here. Nevertheless, those who openly hissed at John Sayles' *Limbo*(1999) or declared the finale of The Sopranos to be a tease will not be pleased by how No Country for Old Men elects to wrap up its diverse storylines. Or at least that’s How It Seemed from Where I Sat.

What’s it worth?     
For guy film buffs -- the price of the evening shows
For the average guy viewer --- matinee price at your local cinema.
Alas, there is not much here to appeal to our women friends . . .

ROLL CREDITS:
Directors: Joel & Ethan Coen
Screenplay: Joel & Ethan Coen,
Based on the novel by: Cormac McCarthy
Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Music: Carter Burwell
CAST
Tommy Lee Jones--Sheriff Ed Tom Bell
Javier Bardem--Anton Chigurh
Josh Brolin--Llewellyn Moss
Woody Harrelson--Carson Wells
Kelly Macdonald--Carla Jean Moss
Tess Harper--Loretta Bell

FADE TO BLACK
In The Name Of Truth, Justice and In the Service of A Higher Good, I Remain Your Friend, Movie Reviewer and Spiritual Advisor, Coach Patton

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