No Country For Old Men - 07 Best Film?

[merkureal]

"No time for sheriffs" in world done gone to hell. Chalk up another one for the Coen brothers, in the vein of their great crime dramas "Miller's Crossing" and "Fargo." Taking nothing away from the latter, "No Country for Old Men" is also a masterpiece, but of a different sort. Based not on real events, like "Fargo," but—closely—on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, "No Country" lacks the other film's undercurrent of grim, black humor. Like last year's allegorical Western "Seraphim Falls," this film is structured as an almost breathless chase, a cat-and-mouse in which men of seemingly supernatural resourcefulness track and evade each other over the spoils of a drug deal gone bad.

Esquire magazine among others cites Javier Bardem's performance as creepily implacable killer Anton Chigurh as Oscar-worthy, but it seems to us it is the character that is so prepossessing, not that its portrayal is so stupendous. More demanding, it seems to us, is the role of his quarry, Llewelyn Moss, played by a perhaps under-appreciated Josh Brolin. Woody Harrelson provides a sliver of quasi comic relief, with his overconfident swagger. Kelly MacDonald surprises in her skilled, convincing "Texas trailer trash" (Carla Jean Moss) after notable stints as Peter Pan in "Finding Neverland" and as Evangeline in "Nanny McPhee." But it is Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Ed Tom Bell who provides the moral and narrative axis or at least center of the film. The weariness in his old lined face and the woeful humor in his voice offer a near-complete character study, and the dreams he relates before the sudden soundtrack-less appearance of the closing credits are perhaps less meaningful in their content than as the film's final framing—a bookend paired with his opening soliloquy about the seeming incomprehensibility of modern brutal criminality, the worst in human nature having taken some kind of quantum leap to much worse still.

Cinematically, Jones' visage seems organically part of the bleak, parched Texas landscape—but so do the mortality, blood, maimings that we see on the screen. There's nothing here like "Fargo's" garishly unreal, burgundy-colored blood spattering the pristine snow as Steve Buscemi is disposed of via wood-chipper. Bardem's character seems to represent, not a sinister force of nature, or the cosmos, in his bizarre sense of the fatalistic source of his actions, so much as a force of evil—where a corrupting, dominating malevolence has contorted the very landscape into grotesque barrenness (like in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy). In this world, he's a pestilence quite other than the chthonic (and thus still inherently Gaian, or Manichaean) evil represented by the motorcycle dude and the Snoats brothers in the Coen brothers' "cult" classic, "Raising Arizona." (Likewise, Jones' recounting of his dreams in "No Country" echoes the Nick Cage's final speech as the hapless H.I. McDunnough in "Arizona"—though kind of inversely: i.e., instead of "Maybe it was Utah ..." ... "Maybe it was Shëol ...")

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[Bartwald]

I saw this not so long ago, and thought it was boring and pretentious. And it's not the first time it happens to me as far as a Coen movie is concerned - The Man Who Wasn't There was even worse, in my opinion.

Bardem and Brolin were very good and some of the movie's suspense was truly delicious, but there were too many tedious moments for the rare sparks of cinematic greatness. And Tommy Lee Jones was wasted there, let me tell you that!

[Pulpmariachi]

Boring and pretentious?

Did you even watch the movie?

It's a tension film, meant to build on the things that slowly build up to that grand moment. It's not an action-adventure piece and there's never actually a dull moment. Every scene has been crafted meticulously, and you can tell, to push the story forward, to play with what you're thinking about, and to really just build up these characters. It's terrifying to look at it and if you closed your eyes and just listened, there's enough to keep you tense in your seat.

And I don't see how the movie thinks it's better than it is. It knows very well that it's a piece of pulp, and it has fun with itself because of that. (Unlike the novel.)

Truly a great movie.

I'm going to go off on why people who hate the ending are silly in a little bit but I just finished this huge paper and carpal tunnel doesn't suit me.

[Bartwald]

Pulp, sure I did see it. Do you think I started discussing movies without having watched them? Not me.

It was boring, yeah - I almost fell asleep during the last hour. And pretentious, yeah - because it was trying to be oh-so-artsy and poignant while it wasn't either of these. In my opinion, of course.

[Pulpmariachi]

Sorry, accidentally posted before I could reply.

And temporarily forgot this wasn't the IMDB discussion boards.

[Heineken Skywalker]

I thought it was great, not boring or pretentious. Sure it slowed down from time to time, but the tension was so thick at times that I kind of welcomed the little breaks.
Best movie I saw in 2007.

[ZapRowsdower]

To me, it was definitely ONE OF the best films of 2007, but I personally preferred There Will Be Blood.

It's not so much the "ending" that bothered me, it was that missing "piece" in the climax. I can't say I was ever bored by it... and pretentious? Absolutely not. The Coen bros. did a fantastic job building tension throughout the film.

Even those I talked to who were disappointed by the third act say the first two more than make up for it. I agree.

[Pulpmariachi]

We're talking about the ending, so there's bound to be SPOILERS.

May 6, 2008 22:55:01 GMT -5 ZapRowsdower said:

To me, it was definitely ONE OF the best films of 2007, but I personally preferred There Will Be Blood.

It's not so much the "ending" that bothered me, it was that missing "piece" in the climax. I can't say I was ever bored by it... and pretentious? Absolutely not. The Coen bros. did a fantastic job building tension throughout the film.

Even those I talked to who were disappointed by the third act say the first two more than make up for it. I agree.

Oh man, Zap, I thought of all people, you would be one to understand and take home the meaning of the ending. I thought you would've been able to see that the story doesn't belong to Moss or Chigurh.

It's Sheriff Bell's story the entire way through: his realization that he's in over his head, that times have changed so badly that he can't comprehend or handle it much anymore. There was no "missing piece" in the climax because the climax really occured when he saw the failure of his endeavours and spoke to his father or uncle or whoever it was about his inability to handle the situation or get over the fact that he failed. He doesn't need a major shoot-out with Chigurh to illustrate this (then there's how much he actually fears Chigurh that weighs heavily in his mind). And the fact that he's only focusing on the Chigurh/Moss angle throws him for a loop when the Mexican mercenaries do Brolin in.

So he gets out when he can, when he knows he can't handle the situation, can't see all the sides coming in, all the angles pointing towards this one man, and then he has to cope with that disappointment (at himself mostly), which comes out in the last 10 minutes of the movie, and in that dream sequence.

It's really annoying how many people complain that there's stuff "missing" or that it just "ends", because it doesn't. You have to pay attention and you have to think; the Coens aren't just handing you meaning like oh so many action pictures (which is another reason why it's so brilliant).

But by now these arguments have been thrown out so often so many times over the Internet and beyond that if anyone still doesn't grasp that, it's difficult to say anything.

That's the terrible thing about pieces like The DaVinci Code: it's dumbed down story and character and meaning and subtley so much that everyone just wants it fed to them rather than reflecting on it longer or thinking about something. You're in, you're out, you're done, wasn't that a cool shoot-out? Can you believe the ending?

[Pulpmariachi]

Or, and this is an interpretation I just encountered (and it even goes along with what you're saying Zap, about the "missing scene", though it's not justifying or agreeing with you): Sherriff Bell and Chigurh did encounter each other in that motel room in El Paso. And when Bell went in, he found Chigurh (now, there's a previous scene where Anton shoots the Stephen Root character and the accountant asks him if he's going to kill him as well and Chigurh asks, "That depends. Did you see me?"). The same question may've been posed to Ed Tom Bell (this is apparently clearer in the screenplay) and he lets Chigurh go away.

So then the rest of the movie, on top of that whole in over-his-head interpretation and disappointment in his ability to handle it, also concerns his inability to really confront Chigurh, that he let his truly wicked man escape from him to go off and continue his evilness.

In that case, yes, there might be a scene missing, one where we can witness it firsthand, but again, it's told more throughout the dreams and discussions with other characters; not handed to us at all.

It's still a great ending.

[ZapRowsdower]

I did think about that. In the back of my mind, I had that feeling that Bell was supposed to be the lead character, although it's very difficult to tell in a movie like this. I've heard that in the book there is no one protagonist, and no one's story is no more important than anyone else's. But in the movie, despite his screentime in relativity to the other two characters, it would seem Bell was the only character to have that complete arc. So I see where you're coming from there.

But it just seemed like Moss was supposed to be the protagonist. Just the amount of screentime that was given to him, we follow him through his journey... we're focused on him, because he gets pretty damn close to having a complete character arc only to have the climax robbed from him.

And I didn't have a problem with the ending. Especially if this is supposed to be Bell's story, it was very well-made.

Seriously, what bothered me most about the missing shoot-out was the abrupt cutting of it. I guess the Coens meant to do it like that, but the first time I saw it I thought the projectionist left out one of the reels.

I should mention this film gets a 9/10 from me. I loved it, but I preferred Fargo.

[Pulpmariachi]

Oh, I'm not saying that this is their (Coens') best work at all because I still do prefer Fargo. I'm just defending it.

Bell is still the main character in the book, but the book is the most underwhelming Cormac McCarthy that I've read so far, so I'd let the movie speak for it.

[slayrrr666]

Another one, like The Departed, that I knew would be a centerpiece for this month's viewing, and upon first viewing, not sure how I feel about it.

I see both sides of the coin here in regards to how you guys feel here: Bart's right in that the pace to this does drag on forever, especially in the first half when it's not focussing on the killer or the chase and the everyday lives of the people in the town interacting with each other just don't really keep my interest all that much. There's a lot of boredom watching the town go about their business and that just didn't sit well with me in here. Then, the subplot halfway through to bring in Woody Harrelson simply reeked of stretching out time with the introduction of a useless character for no reason other than time-stretching. The scenes with him weren't that exciting and I wasn't entertained with them.

However, the fact that there's some really nice suspensework to this (the motel shootout is a classic in my eyes, really impressive) and the highway scenes early on are really cool because the cat-and-mouse work, showing the killer as being that far ahead of the cops in tracking him that he can get away with leaving tons of evidence against him and still escape capture I think works.

Going through this reading what you guys thought of the ending, I'll have to go back in again and see if it makes sense, since I couldn't figure it out at all and some of your comments did make some sense from what I could remember, but off-hand I couldn't remember all of it so I'll have to do that again.

It is somewhat fun, but the sluggish pace it has does lower it somewhat for me. I'll say an 8/10.