Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/25/07
I've often said on this site
that I'd always rather be one of those people that thinks a movie is awesome
than the one that thinks it sucks. I know some people take joy in
being the one folding their arms and saying “You lemmings can have your
Titanic,
but I happen to know it is nothing but syrupy dreck”. But in my case,
nothing pisses me off more than watching the rest of the country hold its'
“This Movie Rocks!” parade while I must stay home and ruminate on what
it is they're smoking. Alas... No Country For Old Men, Joel
& Ethan Coen's return to their blood-drenched ironic noir origins,
has been steadily building a tsunami of hype ever since its' premiere at
Cannes this past May, allegedly falling somewhere between the Best Coen
Brothers Movie Ever and the Best Movie of Any Kind Ever. But I sit
here hours after seeing it, able to admire the quality of its' performances,
some great scenes, really nifty dialog and thrilling, suspenseful direction,
but forced to admit that the movie as a whole simply left me cold.
Retired welder Llewelyn Moss
(Josh Brolin) is out hunting near his Texas trailer park home one day when
he comes upon a strange scene: five vehicles parked in the middle
of the desert surrounded by dead bodies. One man is still alive,
but he's on the way out. Llewelyn follows tracks away from the scene
to find another dead body seated against a tree with a bag holding 2 million
dollars next to him. What's a man to do? He takes it back to
the trailer he shares with his indifferent wife Carla (Kelly MacDonald).
But, of course, when money like that gets lost, there are plenty of people
looking for it, and chief among them is psychotic Anton Chigurh (Javier
Bardem), who kills just about everyone who crosses his path, often with
a freaky air gun hooked up to a tank he drags around with him. Llewelyn
quickly realizes he's got to run and does so, while Chigurh's superiors
bring in the far more professional Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) to clean
up the mess and weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) follows the
trail of bodies.
Up to this point, so far
so good. Oh, I'll grant you, No Country For Old Men will never
do in a minute what it can do in 5, and at times my attention wandered,
but for the first two-thirds, its' strengths far outweigh its' weaknesses.
They start with a really strong cast. Tommy Lee Jones is the poster
child for avoiding plastic surgery as a movie star: his road map
features now seem to wear all the world's sorrows upon them, and the way
his Sheriff Bell is barely able to engage the ever-rising tide of evil
he meets on a daily basis is quite compelling. At the same time,
he gives the movie's sadistic plot a homespun grounding much the same way
Frances McDormand's Marge did in Fargo. Brolin, enjoying a
major breakthrough year, is terrific as the no-nonsense Llewelyn, whose
experience as a Vietnam vet (the movie is set in 1980) and construction
worker combine to make him a near-equal to the lethal Chigurh. And
Javier Bardem is sensational as that embodiment of random violence.
It would be easy to take the role all the way over the top, but instead
he is simply, quietly insane, making ever moment another character must
share on-screen with him wonderfully scary. The Coens' skillful action
direction makes the most of his shockingly random murders and a great mid-movie
showdown between he and Llewelyn (there's also a show-stopping chase scene
early on where Moss desperately flees a dog swimming across a river).
Harrelson, who's refined his screen presence so well over the years, is
also great as a man who proves to be too urbane for these circumstances.
Alas, at this point, the
wheels come off and it becomes all too clear that we're watching the film
version of a beloved book (by Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy).
Certainly anyone who does any amount of reading knows that the movies and
novels are two entirely different kinds of storytelling and you cannot
simply “film” a book. The lurching jumps in time, the tendency of
people to stop and tell stories, for things to happen that we're not present
for, it all works on the page because we must visualize all events for
ourselves whether the author describes them as happening in the present
tense or allows another character to tell us about them. But in a
movie, we need to be there when stuff happens, whether in the present tense,
in a flashback, or in a really, REALLY well-staged monologue. It's
just not good enough to have people show up after the scenes the entire
story has been building to have occurred off-screen with no witnesses.
Once a novel's action ends, it's all well and good to keep following the
characters for another 50 pages and three generations, but if a movie's
going to linger on after the story is over, it better have a really good
reason for it. No Country For Old Men never really has what
I'd call momentum, but for a while, it does have a plot, and then that
plot just sputters out and yet the movie keeps going. It's a supremely
unsatisfying ending (although the final scene is quite well crafted).
I've never read the book, but I know in my gut that excessive faithfulness
to its' structure is No Country For Old Men's fatal flaw.
I think some of this has
to do with another key difference between novels and movies. Symbolism,
the whole “The Oboe will now represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”
thing, can work on the page, although I must admit I'm not that fond of
it. But movies are about metaphor, not symbolism, and No Country
For Old Men is at least three degrees more symbolic than any good movie
can get away with being. As wonderful a character as Chigurh is,
the film is not content to simply let him be a force of hellish random
violence, to show us the kind of evil that's making it increasingly difficult
for Bell to get out of bed, let alone do his job. No, Chigurh must
be EVERYTHING, he must symbolize Fate through an underdeveloped device
of having him once in a while flip a coin to determine if his potential
victims will live or die. Trust me on this, nothing Two-Face did
in Batman Forever can carry the kind of weight No Country wishes
to place upon this action. But at least I get where all this is headed,
even if I don't think that the open-ended outcome of his final coin toss
can compare with the unsolved mystery of what lies in John Goodman's box
in Barton Fink to which it aspires. On the other hand, Chigurh's
final scene and what it's supposed to mean to me, is an utter mystery.
I know it MEANS something, but on the non-symbolic plane of plot on which
all movies must first function in order to enjoy a second level of metaphorical
meaning, it is a pointless cop-out.
I know, I know, I'm a philistine,
I'm a loser, and I gave DOA: Dead or
Alive four stars. But none of this changes the fact that as well-made
and skillfully performed as No Country For Old Men is, it simply
doesn't work. So go have your fun, hand out your awards, and I'll
be over here in the corner sulking. |
