No Country for Old Men

Date posted: Sun, 25/05/2008 - 9:25am

Year:	2007
Director:	Ethan & Joel Coen
Cast:	Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson and Kelly Macdonald
Rating:	A-
Reviewed by:	Matt Kendall

There’s something uniquely alluring about using the Texas landscape as the setting for a traditional Western shootout. For it’s the country where mankind retreats in the face of urban strain, where the sparse landscape lends its suitor a life of simplicity and pensiveness. It’s against this backdrop of pastoral comfort that the gun seems so horribly misplaced, an object of such exacting force, a killing machine used with an efficiency that seems horrifying and wholly unmatched to the stillness of all that grows under the melodies of gentle whistling winds and sun-soaked skies. And yet, as has been so often depicted in dark, twisted movies of past, the desert is one of the few environments that provides freedom from moral clutter, a setting so distant that any man holding a weapon can revel in the opportunity to calmly juggle fate in the palm of their hand, to shoot first and have the freedom to question later. The Texas desert bears a mark of bare innocence that after the first 10 or so minutes of No Country For Old Men, is tainted by two gun-wielding men, who use the power of their own brutality in ways that set off a chain reaction of violence, sparking a tale that has much to say about the alienation of the ever-intensifying American experience and its successive transformation from the days of good ‘ol cherry pie, to backstreet trade-offs and massacres left unsolved amidst vast swathes of desolate terrain.

No Country For Old Men presents a drug deal turned sour with Llewlyn Moss (Josh Brolin) as the seemingly tragic figure, the hard-working, traditional Southern man, caught up in a character-defining scenario, the type for which all his years of toil and adroitness are put to the test. By chancing upon a suitcase containing $2m worth of $100 bills and choosing to call it his own, Moss is coerced into a mad rush across Western Texas in a bid to keep hold of the loot and fend off the danger posed by his deranged and eager pursuant Chigur (Javier Bardem). Where other films could be so lazily gratuitous, No Country… utilises a mode of violence that is precise and hard-nosed, with an economy of both script and dialogue that gives each scene, however brutal, a sense of broadened meaning. Each violent turn is laden with remnants of all that is borne of a 20th century carnage, one altogether boundless, driven by a heady mix of quick-fire strategy that only the promise of monetary riches could inspire.

What sets this film apart from being nothing more than a standard Western is its bleak, hapless mood, a weary lament of the cold, callousness of an age where everything seemed to be turning on its head, where narcissistic pursuit held no regard for the value of human decency; a time when it appeared that morals were beginning to decompose into the hard-grained Texas sands. Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the man responsible for investigating the drug-related massacre, personifies this mood over the course of the film with a distant, beleaguered frown that chips away at years of masterly experience amassed as a long-serving Texan sheriff. Jones’ monotone drawl is fitting for a man working on autopilot, scrambling to make sense of a world around him seemingly out of control, a world where indiscriminate killing takes place with an exactitude that seems incomprehensible. It is Javier Bardem’s chilling depiction of Chigur; a mysterious, almost otherworldly psychopath, killing on the flip of a coin with the carefree attitude of a man numbed by the impassivity of society around him, that draws out this incredulity. The manic, adrenaline-surging gaze in the scene where he draws first blood, strangling a man whilst still in handcuffs, sets his character up as someone for whom dialogue is meaningless, for whom inflicting death is their sole sustenance. From then on, his presence, along with his spock-rock hair and the captive bolt pistol he carries by his side, makes every encounter with those he looks upon with pathetic disdain, unnerving to the point where it is impossible to predict any scene ending in anything but ruthless and bloody expulsion.

 

 

Josh Brolin as the whisky-soaked Texas war veteran is equally slick, gliding his way through the film with effortless cool, grappling with all the tribulations present in chancing upon a small fortune. His resourcefulness in concocting methods to outsmart a man who seems to be peering around every corner, who is constantly only a short breath away, chasing your tail with relentless vigour, is an allegory to the ways in which 1980s America was witnessing the stakes being raised and with it, the need for a new kind of criminal mastermind, one with an unflinching determination and flagrant disregard for consequence.

Along with the Coen brothers’ typical brooding style, it’s testament to the strength of both characters that the film succeeds in creating and sustaining edge-of-the-seat suspense. Both characters are rich in experience, bold in their willingness to face up to the consequences of chasing a coveted prize, shrewd in their knowledge that the greatest of victories is held in the most minor of details.

There are no enlightened answers to the most burning of questions posed in No Country, just a reminder that the world is fitted with the parameters to accommodate pure evil, that as man’s depravity is thrust into ever murkier depths, so the potential for a world in which traditional wholeness and stark barbarism exist side-by-side, becomes ever greater.