No Country for Old Men

From the first time I saw the trailer for this movie I was hooked. This is the movie film fans have been clamoring after since the Coen's finished O Brother where art thou. After dabbling in nonsense bad comedic tales for a few years- Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers- it looked like the Coens were ready to come back over the dark side. Taking on a book that many claimed was unfilmable, the Coens were after blood. I had not anticipated going into a non summer movie this much since The Lord of The Rings Trilogy hits us. This was going to be the movie that blew everything else out of the water. Needless to say this movie had a lot to live up to. And how did it do?

Llewelyn Moss(Josh Brolin) is a poor hunter in a little town in Texas and while he is out hunting he comes across a bleeding dog. Instead of going towards the dog, he goes towards where the dog had just been. When he does that he stumbles onto a massacre. There are bodies , shotgun shells and guns everywhere. Moss is a smarter than he looks though as he is able to discover someone had to get away from this mess and he uses his hunting skills to find a dead body grasping onto a satchel. He rips the satchel away, opens it and finds stacks and stacks of money. It seems simple enough, get the money and thinking everyone involved is dead, escape Scot free. If only life were so simple. Anton Chigurh(Javier Bardem) is one bad ass killer and he wants his money. We see him strangle a cop to death and basically orgasm during it and we see him kill people using an oxygen tank and a rifle that has a massive silencer attached to it. He also determines the fate of people with a coin toss. He is soulless and vicious and he is looking for Moss. The game of cat and mouse weaves through the story as Moss continues to prove he is not nearly as stupid as people think he is and Chigurh every bit as crazy as he looks. Trying to solve the multiple murders and put a stop to the madness is town sheriff Ed Tom Bell(Tommy Lee Jones). He is a laconic man but what few words he uses have either a profound meaning or a very clever funny meaning. He is a man painfully aware of his own mortality and he knows he is on the edge of being pushed aside. The world has become more violent and he laments in the opening of the film "When my dad was sheriff they didn't even wear guns."

This movie is akin to telling someone to punch you in the face and closing your eyes and waiting for the punch. You know it is coming, but you are never sure when it will happen. This movie builds so much tension your joints tighten and your head starts to pound and so often it gives a false sense of release that you never get to fully relax because you are still left waiting for the punch to connect to your jaw. There is a noticeable lack of score that really accents the tense nature of each and every scene. So often we hear nothing but breathing, wind, tires and guns. There are even entire scenes with no dialogue, but they are still so intense I needed a nap when the movie was over. There are shots in this movie that you wish you could take home put on your walls and admire forever, but they so often lead to another amazing shot that you have to forgive them moving on. Each individual scene is so perfectly flawless that you can't help but sit in amazement that something like this could be crafted. The Coen brothers have truly outdone themselves in crafting a movie that leaves you feeling like you just went through the rigors of a natural disaster and somehow survived to tell about it. Never has watching a man sitting at the edge of a bed waiting felt so all consuming that you need a timeout, but the second you think nothing is about to happen you are finally punched, but the punch is not with a fist but with a semi truck. And the semi has hit you and knocked you into a brick wall and on top of that brick wall was the Statue of Liberty and it also come crashing down on top of you.

Beyond the intensity though are some incredible performances as well. Tommy Lee Jones gives life to a character that has been in a ton of movies, but has never moved beyond single dimensions before. His face, as sadly expressive as ever, really lends itself to the role. Josh Brolin ends his breakout year with a role so layered, so multi dimensional that you cheer for him and call him stupid, sometimes at the same time. He looks perfect for the part and his good ole boy charm is off set by an inner thought process that gives the character credibility at being smarter than he looks. But the real winner here is Javier Bardem. With the world's gnarliest hair cut and some of the most bad ass weapons for an assassin, Bardem has created a villain that should live on in the hearts of film goers for a long time. Like Hannibal Lector and Keyser Sose before him, he is ultimately human, but in the movie he feels other worldly. Woody Harrelson shows up for two scenes as another hitman type of character and he is the best he has been in many many years and Kelly MacDonald plays Moss' wife and she really shines in one scene toward the end of the movie.

There are copious complaints about how the movie ends and I don't want to give it away, I just want to comment that I left entirely satisfied. I would have flipped the last two scenes personally but I understand the point of the movie is mortality, not about a chase, so it works. Plus, why would anyone expect conventionality from the Coen Brothers? Whether you see movie as a movie about the consequences of our choices, or a movie about what we are capable of when faced with death, or as a movie about what happens when we get too old to remember the innocent days of youth, this movie just works. The violence is not overwhelming or gratuitous but it gets the point across that the world is a dangerous place, especially where greed is involved. It is a movie that could be discussed and devoured until the end of time and people will always go back and forth about final 20 minutes or so, but that is one of the main aspects that I love about it. This is the kind of movie I want to discuss with people who have watched it to help enrich my understanding and appreciation of it. I believe this is the kind of movie that grows with each viewing and a movie I know I can love forever. It is a masterpiece, a truly telling, timeless work of art that deserves to be praised, cherished, debated and loved.