WE CLAMBER THROUGH THE MINUTES of No Country for Old Men, Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest neo-noir, the way we clamber through the Cormac McCarthy novel on which it’s based, full of furtive energy and basic need. The plot propels us forward through its animalistic focus on the hunt and the chase, and we want more. But it’s a journey to nowhere across dusty, barren plains, passionless save for the violence of man. In other words, it’s all exteriors and, thus, despite a few life-giving raindrops, the film is as dead as its setting and many corpses, maintaining our interest only by virtue of its breathlessness.
McCarthy’s sparse language and refusal to explore his characters’ interior lives, along with their oblique utterances on his Major Theme –fate — render his novel ambitious pulp. His breakneck speed and slimmed-down prose make it an attractive property for surface dwellers like the Coens to adopt. Their films — especially their acclaimed debut, Blood Simple — are generally nothing more than outlines colored in by dingbats and gore. So, precisely because McCarthy’s novel is all talk and movement, it seduces the Coens with its apparent ease of adaptation. It’s a trap from which they never emerge.
Set in 1980 in the badlands of the Texas-Mexico border, where the Indian wars of the Old West have been replaced by the drug wars of the New Capitalism, No Country begins promisingly with a series of classically framed shots of stretches of hardscrabble emptiness overlaid with the weary musings of Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The images and voice-over generate a compelling mood, and the feeling the contemplative combination of the two evokes is one of infinite mystery. However, this sensation, along with all others remotely warm-blooded, quickly disappears, leaving us as cold as Texas is hot.
Assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) — the man Jones’ ornery hound dog is after — brings little more than shadow and ice with him, as he is subhuman in the way all movie villains are; Bardem plays him as the Spanish Terminator. Sporting a Brother Friar hair-do and carrying a pressurized cattle-gun he uses to open locks and empty skulls, Chigurh is dispatched by unknown forces to the lone prairie, where three trucks surrounded by heroin, money and bullet-riddled bodies decay under the awful sun. Earlier, trailer trash local yokel Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) spied the grizzly scene through his rifle scope while hunting, and stupidly decided to snag a briefcase full of greenbacks from it. Now he’s wanted. Now begins all there is: the pursuit.
By careening from one crime scene to another, one shootout to the next, plus the brief insertion of another hitman (Woody Harrelson) in pursuit of the money, the Coens keep our engines running, even if we’re just idling while the world burns. Thankfully, they — mostly — refrain from lampooning Texans the way they did North Dakotans in Fargo. For that they deserve praise, especially when it comes to Llewelyn’s girl Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), the one spark of humanity in the film besides Bell. Taken together, the little we care about any of them is due to this restraint, though, ultimately, the characters aren’t differentiated by their personalities but by their degree of vulnerability to premature death.
Other than chasing each other around, the characters express the theme: inexorable destiny. Bell is informed by a wheelchairbound friend, “You can’t stop what’s comin’.” Chigurh advises one of his victims, “I do know to a certainty.” And Bell drops an ironic addition to all the accumulated evidence of predestination when he explains to Carla Jean, “Even in the contest between man and steer, the contest is not certain.” Thus, the Coens suffer their own inevitability as the prisoners of a novel that’s a country hospitable to no one, old men or otherwise.
No Country for Old Men
Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Woody Harrelson. Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen.
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