"No Country For Old Men"

It is always a mistake to make a snap judgement on a Coen Brothers movie. Case in point: Sure, everybody loves The Big Lebowski now, but I well remember the stupefaction with which a helluva lot of critics and much of the viewing public greeted it upon its release. Even with something like Ladykillers, their game is always much deeper than you first might think it is. (Okay, with Intolerable Cruelty, not so much.) So I hesitate before I offer that No Country For Old Men, which premiered tonight in competition at Cannes, is three-quarters of a masterpiece. (Personal to B.K.: there's that word again!)

Adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, the West-Texas-set movie kicks off with grisly tableaus and gruesome violence, as a mysterious psychopath with a novel way of blowing your brains out (Javier Bardem) breaks out of police custody in a scene that will have you gouging the stuffing out of your armrests, after which affable hunter Josh Brolin happens on the human-and-animal-corpse-strewn aftermath of a drug deal gone very bad. Sure enough—Brolin drawls a perfect "Yeah" as he makes the discovery—there's a satchel full of loot on the dusty scene, and Brolin makes off with it to his trailer park. Bardem, whose hobby of deciding whether or not to kill someone based on a coin flip is one of his lesser eccentricities (and who is made up to look rather like Lon Chaney in London After Midnight—no, really), is of course the man with a claim on the money. The often brutal cat-and-mouse game that ensues between the two characters affords the Coens the opportunity to create some of the most imaginative and excruciating suspense set pieces of their, or anybody else's, career. There's some mind-blowing stuff going on here. Tommy Lee Jones as a laconic (what else), frequently hilarious sheriff, Woody Harrelson as an investigator who fancies himself something of an expert on Bardem's psycho, and Kelly MacDonald as Brolin's sweet, trusting wife all add fantastic texture, and there's so much vintage Coen dialogue that I had to stop writing it down lest I cramp my hand. (One memorable exchange: "It's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?" "If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here." I haven't read McCarthy's book, but that bit sound pure Coen to me. Update: Reader stpetebeach informs us below that the exchange is in fact from McCarthy. Am now seeking out English-language bookstore...)

Throughout, the Coens modulate their tone—darkness with an extreme undercurrent of the absurd—perfectly, at least until MacDonald's show-hick mom enters the picture. She's soon gone though, but by that point the picture itself has changed. It turns ruminant, elides what some might consider major high points of the story, and goes for something more deeply elegiac than anything the filmmakers have ever attempted before. I wasn't the only one thrown by this shift, but I want to let it work over me a little more. Even as I'm chewing on it while typing this, I've got a feeling I may be calling Country a full-fledged masterpiece after I catch it a second time. Or maybe even before then.

Comments

[SB]

Ooo I cannot wait to see this.

[Aaron Aradillas]

I'm pretty sure The Big Lebowski would've found its audience if it had been released at a later date. People seem to forget it was released in the early part of '98. It was one of the many good films that got lost under the weight of Titanic. Other casualties include Zero Effect, Primary Colors, and Dark City. These might've been small-scale Spring successes if it weren't for Jack and Rose. Oh, well. A small price to pay for probably the last time when the world was united by a movie.

[stpetebeach]

I've read the novel twice, and the line you quote is pretty much lifted from it. And there are plenty of other great lines in the book that the Coens would have done well to simply lift. I recall one sequence in particular in which the dialogue evokes one of those clipped Dragnet-type exchanges. I can only imagine the suspense in the scene in which Bardem encounters Brolin's wife. This is a deeply pessimistic book, I believe, and it deserves a deeply pessimistic treatment. It sounds like they've done it.

[Koppelman]

As you well know, I'm quite comfortable with the word masterpiece when it comes to Joel and Ethan's films.
Man, am I looking forward to this one.
Koppelman