If you’ve seen Lions for Lambs or Fred Claus, you may wonder when it became acceptable for movies to lack visual conception. Blame it on cheaper viewing habits: Neither film would lose much downloaded to your cell phone. This doesn’t ensure a place for the Coen Brothers, but No Country For Old Men continues their stunning legacy of creating movies that are both a joy to look at and listen to.
This meditation on killing is the season’s most fulfilling release—alternating comedy, terror and sadness with a thematic consistency that’s profound. In adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel, the Coens combine an arid and remorseless vision of rural Texas with1980s’ greed. The wasteland of bodies that opens the film is in plain view in the desert. When married man Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) approaches the wreck, he steals a suitcase holding $2 million and then returns that night to bring a dying man some water. The Coens paint their movie in shades of immorality—going beyond the sped-up shadows moving over desert cliffs in U-Turn, and even the unaccountable problems of crime in their own Blood Simple and Fargo—by giving every character a unique ethical stand.
Llewelyn struggles with his morality, but he’s a saint next to Anton (Javier Bardem), the purebred psychopath on his trail. Local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) longs for a time of simplicity and kindness. But the Coens don’t ignore that the 1950s he longs for was a white repressive ideal of America. A black driver lectures Llewelyn that a nice man should know better than to hitchhike.
All of this would be merely a solid basis if the Coens didn’t structure their scenes with such eyes-on-the-screen immediacy. No recent movie rivals a midpoint sequence, set around a motel room, for intensity. Anton is a terrifying villain, but it’s his constraints—he’s both humourless and incapable of being reasoned with—that make him so funny.
In their soon-to-be classic, it isn’t just change claiming lives, it’s the pride one can’t look past.
Add Palermo to the naughty list at palermo@thecoast.ca.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2007.