(The Coen Brothers 2007)
This is a powerful and violent film, adapted from the novel of the same name by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy, who has written several novels in the Southern Gothic, Western and Post-Apocalyptic genres.
The film was written, directed, and produced by Joel and Ethan Coen and features Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, and Javier Bardem. The main characters are finely supported by a well-cast group of contributing players, who add to the tension and contrasts of the film. The story remains faithful to the book, drawing heavily on McCarthy’s themes of chance and fate. These themes, along with others such as time and the archetypical force of unstoppable evil, are consistent preoccupations from the Coens’ previous work.
The film’s opening scenes pan the desolate, wide-open country of West Texas in June 1980. In a voiceover, the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Jones), now a stranger on his own turf, mourns the changing times as the region becomes increasingly violent. The antagonist, Anton Chigurh (Bardem), is then murderously introduced. Meanwhile, Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), out hunting near the Rio Grande, stumbles upon several corpses and one dying Mexican: the aftermath of a drug deal gone awry. After surveying the scene, he finds two million dollars in a case a short distance from the massacre. He removes the money and hides it in the decidedly vulnerable trailer home that he shares with his wife.
Later that night, spurred by his conscience and almost inviting the brutality to his doorstep, Moss recklessly returns to the scene to bring water to the dying man. And indeed, he sets off a series of sometimes horrendous encounters, in which the hunter and hunted – including himself, a gang of Mexicans, Chigurh, Bell, and a bounty hunter (Woody Harrelson) – frequently switch roles as they chase each other and the money across the Texas and Mexico landscapes. The paths of the main protagonists eventually all converge in a run-down hotel in El Paso.
The film contains much of the best of the Coen Brothers films: excellent pace and direction, masterful cinematography, striking characterization, and the embodiment of archetypal forces, particularly of something otherworldly and evil. Notably absent here, however, are the irony and lunacy that have become the Coens’ stock in trade, and which often serve to take the edge off an undercurrent of doom that runs through their films. We are offered no out from Chigurh’s personification of random violence and death.
Although this film has been highly praised by many critics, I left it disappointed, in part because I expected too much from the usually bold and inventive Coen duo. I also felt that it stuck too faithfully to the novel, which sinks downward into confused nihilism. The anticipated meeting of the three central characters is never realised, and the film is left hanging, the story unfinished. It may be that McCarthy was unable to round out the tale and was left, as is the viewer, pondering the fundamental questions of life – good and evil, accident and fate, justice.
At the end of the screening the audience was quiet, and I found myself recalling Jiddu Krisnamurti’s statement: “Evil exists but you know nothing about it”.
With some reservations, I recommend No Country For Old Men. It offers a stark view of the dark, violent, ruthless side of the illegal drug trade and the havoc that it is causing along the United States-Mexico border.