Sunday, 9 March 2008
No Country for Anyone
No Country for Old Men is the latest Coen brothers film and was recently awarded four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Film. Set in rural Texas, a hunter discovers a drugs deal gone wrong and rather than hand the money over to the police, makes off with it himself pursued by the psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Chigurh is cool, calculating, and frighteningly evil, and mechanically dispatches his victims one after the other with a tank of compressed air and a hose. The innocent, the friendly, the helpful and the bystander are all shot, often at the toss of a coin. The film is bleak and unremittingly hopeless. We sympathise most with Police Chief Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who is powerless and despairing in the face of Chigurh's violence. "This country's hard on people, you can't stop what's coming." And although we long for God to intervene he never does. "I always figured when I got older, God would sorta come into my life somehow. And he didn't. I don't blame him." Either God could intervene and doesn't, or he is powerless. Like many before it, this film raises questions about evil: who are we waiting for? Is there anyone who can save us from this apocalyptic onslaught? If God exists, why doesn't he do something? Perhaps most hauntingly, this film reminds us of the limitations of human justice in the face of gratuitous evil.
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On a cinematic level, I consider this to be the best film I have ever come across. Javier Bardem puts in one of the great acting performances. As always the Coen brothers use landscape as one of the main characters, juxtaposing the unrelentless bleakness of the geography with the unrelentless bleakness of the world the characters inhabit. The non-existent music is ironically one of the best film scores I've come across, adding to the themes of desolation, fear and pointlessness. The film contains some of the wittiest moments I've come across in a Coen movie (see dog and man in river, hapless deputy sheriff, scenes on the Mexican border crossing) and some of the most poignant (see two extended dialogues involving Tommy Lee Jones at the end of the film). Some of the dialogue is superbly written. As in all Coen films there are small clues/themes that keep popping up throughout the film. Ones in this film include shoes/feet, and dead dogs. When you follow the connections through the film takes on awhole new interest level. Myself and Ros sat in the car after the film for over an hour simply trying to digest what we'd see. Awesome.
However, and this is a big however, the film is not for everyone. It should certainly not be the first Coen Brothers film you see (start with Fargo or The Man Who Wasn't There). I had to restrain myself from speaking to a guy behind us in the cinema who at the close shouted out that it was one of the worst films he'd ever seen. I suspect he was expecting something very different. The film is desperately bleak, and very violent in places, not graphically so (much), but morally so.
There is no room for God in the film. As John says, the characters, similarly to Fargo, inhabit a world with no justice whatsoever. Ruthlessness tends to win the day. Lives are decided by chance. The only moral values that exist are 1.) shown by the Javier Bardem character, who will hunt down and kill an innocent person just because he said he would, and 2.) a tradional sense of right and wrong shown by the Tommy Lee Jones character. In this latter respect it is very similar to Fargo (good cop inhabiting a sane world struggles to understand the insanity of the criminal underworld) but this time there is no redemption of 'good' at the end. The bad guy wins, if indeed anyione does, for there can be no winner and loser in a such a pointless and vacuous universe as presented in this film.
Overall, a superb film - but prepare yourself wisely.
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