No Country For Old Men (2007)

Director: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
Writer: Cormac McCarthy (novel), Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (screenplay)

Set in 1980, a West Texas hunter stumbles upon the aftermath of a botched heroin deal. He attempts to run off with a satchel containing two million dollars while pursued by a homicidal murderer and local sheriff.

I've been a fan of the Coen Brothers' work for a long time. The first film class I took as an undergrad was all about the Coens and their style. Though I've purposely missed their last three pictures, The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), Intolerable Cruelty (2003), and 2004's The Ladykillers (nothing can top the original Ealing Studios film with Alec Guinness), I was excited to hear about their most recent project: No Country For Old Men. I missed it in theaters and I'm really sad I did but seeing it at home was just as wonderful. No Country has the most fully realized feel of a film the Coen Brothers have made since Blood Simple (1984) or Raising Arizona (1987). It's an especially dark, existential, and nihilistic experience deriving from its lighting, tone, and desert locations. The three male leads, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Bolin), Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), are all magnificent pursuing each other. Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald (who I adored in Robert Altman's Gosford Park [2001]), Woody Harrelson, and Stephen Root are perfect in their supporting roles.

The film has come up twice in my film theory class due in part to its sheer lack of music (there's something like 15 minutes of music in the whole film including the five minutes of end credits) and specific narrative techniques the Coen Brothers implement.

The film opens with Sheriff Bell's voiceover about how his father and grandfather were also Texas sheriffs and how the "old-timers" never used or even carried guns. At first, the speech seems incongruous but it really informs the viewer about one of the film's overarching themes. As prominent as the chase between Moss and Chigurh is, this is Sheriff Bell's story. An older man right at the edge of retirement, he consistently notes how much his county has changed since was first a lawman. The failed drug deal, Chigurh's brand of emotionless violence, and Moss' take-the-money-and-run idea are all symptomatic of the social change the country in general and this county in particular have undergone. As the title suggests Bell is out of place in the Texas of 1980, he is nearly obsolete and always two steps behind Chigurh and Moss.

I said earlier that No Country For Old Men is a fully realized feeling film and by that I mean it has the tone of a Coen Brothers movie without the emptiness that hangs over most of their work. The Coen Brothers truly know their craft but from a postmodern, film-buff standpoint. Many of their films are set in very specific genres with an eye on references and parallels. No Country pulls from a variety of genres but is not overtly self-conscious of its filmness. I've read and agree that the Coen Brothers’ movies often lack the heart and soul of most films. Their attention to narrative and extra-narrative details sucks the life out of their movies, making them seem artificial. This is a fantastic exception. The references, though present, are heavily muted. One example is the setting: the American/Mexican border town recalls the setting of Touch of Evil (1958). As another example, Llewlyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran, is introduced hunting with a high-powered rifle. There is a close-up of him picking up a discharged shell and putting it in his shirt's breast pocket. This references an early scene in The Deer Hunter (1978) in which Robert De Niro's character Michael holds up a similar bullet and proclaims to his hunting friends, before they ship off to Vietnam, "This is this. It ain’t something else. This is this." Like the characters in No Country, Michael is an existentialist, believing that he wields no control over the course of his life. While Moss might think he can change his and his wife's lives by running off with the drug money, he cannot. Moss even knows that his attempt at changing his life's path is an error when, in the middle of the night as he prepares to revisit the crime scene, his wife Carla Jean asks, "And what’re you gonna do?" he replies, "I'm fixing to do something dumber than hell, but I'm going anyways." Like Michael of The Dear Hunter, it's not in Moss to half-ass anything.

For all its emphasis on the meaninglessness of men's journey through life and the overall dark tone, No Country For Old Men is a spectacular cinematic experience. As sparse as the film is, it's full of thought-provoking ideas and powerful images. I think the Coen Brothers have matured as filmmakers and I hope this is a sign of things to come.