No Country for Old Men: The Poll
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Sonic Youth
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OscarGuy
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I find this a rather amusing opinion. This is from Stephen Hunter.
I appreciate No Country for Old Men for the skill in the film craft. I understand No Country for Old Men for its penetrating disquisition on narrative conventions and its heroic will in subverting them. I admire No Country for Old Men for the way it tightens its grip as it progresses, taking us deeper and deeper into a hellish world. I just don't like it very much.
I appreciate No Country for Old Men for the skill in the film craft. I understand No Country for Old Men for its penetrating disquisition on narrative conventions and its heroic will in subverting them. I admire No Country for Old Men for the way it tightens its grip as it progresses, taking us deeper and deeper into a hellish world. I just don't like it very much.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
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Johnny Guitar
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Hmm. Well, Jonathan Rosenbaum is not a fan.
"Adapted from what is generally considered a minor Cormac McCarthy novel, No Country for Old Men is a very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse.
...
"I admire the creativity and storytelling craft of the Coen brothers, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what use they think they’re putting that creativity and craft to. As I left the screening in Toronto, all I could think was, “America sure loves its mass murderers.” That conclusion was ratified by a line in the New York film festival’s blurb for the movie: “Wearing an unforgettably frightening pageboy and toting a cattle stun gun that’ll haunt your nightmares, Javier Bardem is Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic assassin of the highest order whose detachment is as shocking as the carnage photographed so gorgeously by DP Roger Deakins.”
"I hasten to add there’s more to this grim, ambitious movie than a psychopathic assassin of the highest order whose carnage is gorgeously shot, though I seriously doubt it would be garnering so much enthusiasm without such perks."
"Adapted from what is generally considered a minor Cormac McCarthy novel, No Country for Old Men is a very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse.
...
"I admire the creativity and storytelling craft of the Coen brothers, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what use they think they’re putting that creativity and craft to. As I left the screening in Toronto, all I could think was, “America sure loves its mass murderers.” That conclusion was ratified by a line in the New York film festival’s blurb for the movie: “Wearing an unforgettably frightening pageboy and toting a cattle stun gun that’ll haunt your nightmares, Javier Bardem is Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic assassin of the highest order whose detachment is as shocking as the carnage photographed so gorgeously by DP Roger Deakins.”
"I hasten to add there’s more to this grim, ambitious movie than a psychopathic assassin of the highest order whose carnage is gorgeously shot, though I seriously doubt it would be garnering so much enthusiasm without such perks."
I'm not sure I'm ready for the responsibility of following you Jedi Master.Sonic Youth wrote:Akash wrote:who posted the most in one day (Sonic again),
Not anymore, Akash. Not since you showed up.
I've practically retired posting articles in the Politics Off Topic threads, thanks to your participation.
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Sonic Youth
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Three raves.
Lisa Schwarzbaum gives it an A-
Joel and Ethan Coen have never claimed to be no-frills filmmakers. But in the decades since they lassoed the genre conventions of gory Western violence for their own amusement, and ours, in Blood Simple, the Coens have gotten bloody fancy. And that hyper-controlling interest in clever cinematic style — attentiveness that turned The Lady Killers, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and The Man Who Wasn't There into finicky pieces that might as well be viewed under glass — has nearly stamped out any hope of feeling any actual feeling.
No Country for Old Men reverses that slide into arch pastiche, brilliantly. It's the Coens' first movie in ages that doesn't rely on snark as a backup source of energy, the first Coen script that respects its own characters wholeheartedly, without a wink. And it's no accident that this measured yet excitingly tense, violent yet maturely sorrowful thriller marks the first time the filmmakers have faithfully adapted somebody else's work to their own specifications and considerable strengths. Cormac McCarthy's marvelous, throat-gripping, best-selling 2005 novel of the same name describes a contemporary American West (the action is set in 1980) where drug trafficking dirties the parched, wide-open landscape that was once home to cattle rustling.
Here, where the value of honor has steadily declined, an average chump named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is out doing a bit of unsuccessful hunting when he happens upon a huge cash haul at the scrubby site of a drug deal gone bad. And it's here that Moss makes his first wrong wager: He thinks he can take the money and run. But a simple plan is never simple. Two others are tracking the whereabouts of the windfall, one the meditative lawman Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), worn out by what he has seen of the evil that men do, and the other a singularly psychopathic hitman named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), assigned to retrieve the loot. Chigurh's sense of honor is as twisted as his preferred method of murder — a cattle stun gun to the head, whooomp, dead. (His decision to kill or spare is sometimes decided by a coin toss.)
In Country, the hunters and the hunted are all haunted by an American malaise of emptiness that echoes through the novelist's tersely powerful prose like the constant rush of wind on the prairie. And the movie's biggest surprise may be the discipline with which the Coens convey that rattling, menacing despair. For all the compact intensity of Brolin's vivid turn as a common scrambling man who's not as smart as he thinks, for all Jones' pouchy authority when it comes to embodying Texas vernacular, and especially for all Bardem's thrilling ability to truly terrify (not just with his stun gun but with his glazed stare and baroque pageboy hairstyle), the leading character in this reverberating movie is silence, save for the sights and sounds of air and breath.
Silence deepens the horror of the drug-deal massacre that the lone hunter Moss first glimpses through his binoculars — he spies scuttled pickup trucks, sprawled bodies, even a slain and rotting dog. (More so than that of any of his none-too-blabby costars, most of Brolin's work is wordless.) Silence heightens the exquisite tension as Chigurh tracks Moss, on the run, from motel to motel. (Silence is broken by the beep on Chigurh's radar of a certain tracking transponder that chirps a warning of impending mayhem.) Silence accompanies the mournful sheriff as he drives his Texas highways, and silence is what hangs in the air after Chigurh raises his grotesque, sound-muffling weapon to snuff out one life and then another, cold as hell.
Poet-cinematographer Roger Deakins, who's the Coen Bros.' preferred DP, provides the visual music, the almost painfully gorgeous images of turf, sky, and blood. Sound editor Skip Lievsay and composer Carter Burwell fill the ear with suitable hush. McCarthy's own language, the strong speech rhythms that blow his pages forward so decisively, drives the pace of the adaptation, too, so that a familiar reader need not fear ornery big-screen ruination (despite the elimination of one memorable, secondary character — a hitchhiking girl), while the unfamiliar might well be spurred to pick up the book.
The breath of cinematic life, though, the sensibility, the energy, belong to Joel and Ethan Coen, and this is their stirring success. Such a dark epic is no country to be charted with old Coen tricks, and, rising to the material, they prove talented, wise enough men to know it.
...and one from Todd McCarthy of VARIETY.
A scorching blast of tense genre filmmaking shot through with rich veins of melancholy, down-home philosophy and dark, dark humor, "No Country for Old Men" reps a superior match of source material and filmmaking talent. Cormac McCarthy's bracing and brilliant novel is gold for the Coen brothers, who have handled it respectfully but not slavishly, using its built-in cinematic values while cutting for brevity and infusing it with their own touch. Result is one of the their very best films, a bloody classic of its type destined for acclaim and potentially robust B.O. returns upon release later in the year.
Reduced to its barest bones, the story, set in 1980, is a familiar one of a busted drug deal and the violent wages of one man's misguided attempt to make off with ill-gotten gains. But writing in marvelous Texas vernacular that injected surpassing terseness with gasping velocity, McCarthy created an indelible portrait of a quickly changing American West whose new surge of violence makes the land's 19th century legacy pale in comparison.
For their part, Joel and Ethan Coen, with both credited equally for writing and directing, are back on top of their game after some less than stellar outings. While brandishing the brothers' customary wit and impeccable craftsmanship, pic possess the vitality and invention of top-drawer 1970s American filmmaking, quite an accomplishment these days. It's also got one of cinema's most original and memorable villains in recent memory, never a bad thing in attracting an audience, especially as so audaciously played by Javier Bardem.
Set in rugged, parched West Texas (but filmed in New Mexico) and brilliantly shot by Roger Deakins in tones that resemble shafts of wheat examined in myriad different lights, yarn commences with several startling sequences: A crime suspect (Bardem) turns the tables on his arresting officer, strangles him with his handcuffs, then kills a driver for his car using a cattle stun gun ; in the middle of nowhere, a hunter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), stumbles across five trucks, several bullet-ridden corpses, a huge stash of drugs and $2 million in a briefcase, which he impulsively takes. When he returns to the scene of the crime that night, he's shot at by unknown men and chased into a nearby river by a fierce dog before getting away.
Central figures in this tale of pursuit are rounded out by Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the local county sheriff, who tours the truck crime scene on horseback and in short order gets Moss in his sights, although not as quickly as does Bardem's Anton Chigurh, who is able to tune in to a transponder in the moneybag the unsuspecting Moss has stashed in a heating duct in a local motel.
Death walks hand in hand with Chigurh wherever he goes, unless he decides otherwise. Clearly a killer by profession, the lucid, direct-talking man considers anyone else who crosses his path fair game; if everything you've done in your life has led you to him, he may explain to his about-to-be victims, your time might just have come. "You don't have to do this," the innocent invariably insist to a man whose murderous code dictates otherwise. Occasionally, however, he will allow someone to decide his own fate by coin toss, notably in a tense early scene in an old filling station marbled with nervous humor.
In addition to the pared down dialogue, pic is marked by silences, wind-inflected ones to be found naturally in the empty expanses of the West, as well as breathlessly suspenseful interior interludes, notably an ultra-Hitchcockian sequence in which Moss, aware that Chigurh has tracked him to an old hotel, listens and waits in his room as his hunter comes quietly to his door.
It's amazing how much carnage ensues given that the action essentially focuses upon three men playing cat-and-mouse across a beautiful and brutal landscape. Three guys in the wrong motel room at the wrong time get the treatment from Chigurh, and a cocky intermediary (Woody Harrelson) for the missing money's apparent rightful owner makes the mistake of getting in between the trigger-happy assassin and Moss. And they're far from the only victims in a story that disturbingly portrays the nature of the new violence stemming, in the view advanced here, from the combination of the drug trade and the disintegration of societal mores.
The manner in which the narrative advances is shocking and nearly impossible to predict; viewers who haven't read the best-seller will be gripped by the situations put onscreen and sometimes afraid to see what they fear will happen next. Those familiar with the story will be gratified to behold a terrific novel make the shift in medium managed, for once, with such smarts.
The Coens build a sense of foreboding from the outset without being heavy or pretentious about it. They have consistently worked in the crime genre, of course, beginning with their first film, "Blood Simple," whose seriousness perhaps mostly approximates the tone of this one, although there are overlaps as well with "Miller's Crossing" and "Fargo." But while they have eliminated one especially poignant character from the book in the interests of time, slashed Bell's distinctive philosophical ruminations and perhaps unduly hastened the ending, the brothers have honored McCarthy's serious themes, the integrity of his characters and his essential intentions.
They have also beefed up the laughs, the majority of which stem from the unlikely source of the cold-blooded Chigurh. From the outset, the powerful and commanding Bardem leaves no doubt that Chigurh would just as soon kill you as ask you the time of day. His conversation brooks no nonsense or evasion. But it is the character's utter lack of humor that Bardem and the Coens cleverly offer as the source of the character's humorousness, and the actor makes the most of this approach in a diabolically effective performance.
Jones would practically seem to have been born to play Cormac McCarthy roles, and he proves it here in a quintessential turn as a proud longtime sheriff dismayed by what he sees things coming to. Holding his own in distinguished company after long dwelling in TV and schlock, Brolin gives off young Nick Nolte vibes as an ordinary man who tries to outsmart some big boys in order to get away with the score of his life.
Scottish thesp Kelly Macdonald registers potently as Moss' country wife, while tasty supporting turns are delivered by Harrelson, Stephen Root as the latter character's employer, Rodger Boyce as a sheriff who commiserates with Bell, Barry Corbin as Bell's crusty old uncle, Ana Reeder as a swimming pool floozy who offers Moss some company and Gene Jones as the old fellow Chigurh makes call his own fate.
Deakins' stunning location work and precision framing is joined by Jess Gonchor's production design, the Coens' cutting under their usual pseudonym of Roderick Jaynes, Carter Burwell's discreet score and expert sound work to make "No Country for Old Men" a total visual and aural pleasure.
...and **** from Peter Travers.
Misguided souls will tell you that No Country for Old Men is out for blood, focused on vengeance and unconcerned with the larger world outside a standard-issue suspense plot. Those people, of course, are deaf, dumb and blind to anything that isn't spelled out between commercials on dying TV networks. Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best. Set in 1980 in West Texas, where the chase is on for stolen drug money, the film — a new career peak for the Coen brothers, who share writing and directing credits — is a literate meditation (scary words for the Transformers crowd) on America's bloodlust for the easy fix. It's also as entertaining as hell, which tends to rile up elitists. What do the criminal acts of losers in a flyover state have to do with the life of the mind?
Plenty, as it turns out. McCarthy reveals a soulless America that is no country for anyone, never mind old men. The so-called codger representing besieged law and order is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones with the kind of wit and assurance that reveals a master actor at the top of his game. On the page, the sheriff is a tad too folksy, dishing out cracker-barrel wisdom to his good wife, Loretta (Tess Harper), with a twinkle written into his homespun truths. As you already know by now (and In the Valley of Elah categorically proves it), Mr. Jones does not do twinkle. He's a hard-ass. And when he chews into a good line, you can see the bite marks. Here's the sheriff on how crime has gotten so out of hand: "It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Anytime you quit hearin' 'sir' and 'ma'am,' the end is pretty much in sight."
That unpretty end takes the form of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), an assassin who rivals Hannibal Lecter for dispatching his victims without breaking a sweat. Bardem, with pale skin and the world's worst haircut, is stupendous in the role, a monster for the ages. Beneath his dark eyes lies something darker, evil topped with the cherry of perverse humor. Chigurh carries around a bulky cattle gun. He'll politely ask a mark to get out of a car before he caps him in the head; that way the car won't get messy with gristle and brain matter. And he has this little game he plays. Staring at the human species like a visitor from another planet, Chigurh flips a coin. Your choice of heads or tails might just save your life. Only don't piss him off.
It's Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who comes down hard on Chigurh's bad side. Moss is a cowboy in a world with no more room for cowboys. He enjoys teasing his wife, Carla Jean (the excellent Kelly Macdonald), but you can feel his discontent. Then one day, when he's out hunting antelope, he gets his shot at the big score. Right out there in the desert are a half-dozen dead bodies drawing flies. One man, barely alive, sits in a truck and begs for water. It's a massacre. There's also a stash of heroin and $2 million in cash. Moss takes the cash and runs. Wouldn't you? That question sets up the film's moral dilemma and puts us in Moss' boots. This is Brolin's breakthrough — he rips into the role like a man possessed, giving Moss the human touch the part needs. Moss even returns to the scene that night with water for the dying man. Huge mistake. Shots ring out, and Moss, after packing his wife off to her folks, goes on the run with Chigurh on his tail and the sheriff tracking both of them.
That's all you'll hear from me about plot. The kick comes in watching all the gears mesh with thrilling exactitude. I've heard some carping about the ending, which stays tone-faithful to McCarthy instead of going for Hollywood pow. Hmm. I thought that'd be worth a cheer. No Country for Old Men offers an embarrassment of riches. Jones, Bardem and Brolin all give award-caliber performances. Roger Deakins again proves himself a poet of light and shadow as director of photography. Carter Burwell's insinuating score finds a way to nail every nuance without underlining a single one of them. Props are also due editor Roderick Jaynes, who no one's ever seen, since he's a pseudonym both Coen brothers hide behind.
OK, then. How does No Country for Old Men stack up against the best work of these artfully merry pranksters? Near the top, I'd say. There are echoes of Fargo when a deputy declares, "It's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?" and the sheriff answers, "If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here." And admirers of Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink and even The Big Lebowski will find tasty bits of bright and bleak to noodle on. But this landmark of a movie is fresh territory for the Coens, accused, often unfairly, of glib facility and lack of passionate purpose. Screw that. Not since Robert Altman merged with the short stories of Raymond Carver in Short Cuts have filmmakers and author fused with such devastating impact as the Coens and McCarthy. Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved. Recent movies about Iraq have pushed hard to show the growing dehumanization infecting our world. No Country doesn't have to preach or wave a flag — it carries in its bones the virus of what we've become. The Coens squeeze us without mercy in a vise of tension and suspense, but only to force us to look into an abyss of our own making.
Lisa Schwarzbaum gives it an A-
Joel and Ethan Coen have never claimed to be no-frills filmmakers. But in the decades since they lassoed the genre conventions of gory Western violence for their own amusement, and ours, in Blood Simple, the Coens have gotten bloody fancy. And that hyper-controlling interest in clever cinematic style — attentiveness that turned The Lady Killers, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and The Man Who Wasn't There into finicky pieces that might as well be viewed under glass — has nearly stamped out any hope of feeling any actual feeling.
No Country for Old Men reverses that slide into arch pastiche, brilliantly. It's the Coens' first movie in ages that doesn't rely on snark as a backup source of energy, the first Coen script that respects its own characters wholeheartedly, without a wink. And it's no accident that this measured yet excitingly tense, violent yet maturely sorrowful thriller marks the first time the filmmakers have faithfully adapted somebody else's work to their own specifications and considerable strengths. Cormac McCarthy's marvelous, throat-gripping, best-selling 2005 novel of the same name describes a contemporary American West (the action is set in 1980) where drug trafficking dirties the parched, wide-open landscape that was once home to cattle rustling.
Here, where the value of honor has steadily declined, an average chump named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is out doing a bit of unsuccessful hunting when he happens upon a huge cash haul at the scrubby site of a drug deal gone bad. And it's here that Moss makes his first wrong wager: He thinks he can take the money and run. But a simple plan is never simple. Two others are tracking the whereabouts of the windfall, one the meditative lawman Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), worn out by what he has seen of the evil that men do, and the other a singularly psychopathic hitman named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), assigned to retrieve the loot. Chigurh's sense of honor is as twisted as his preferred method of murder — a cattle stun gun to the head, whooomp, dead. (His decision to kill or spare is sometimes decided by a coin toss.)
In Country, the hunters and the hunted are all haunted by an American malaise of emptiness that echoes through the novelist's tersely powerful prose like the constant rush of wind on the prairie. And the movie's biggest surprise may be the discipline with which the Coens convey that rattling, menacing despair. For all the compact intensity of Brolin's vivid turn as a common scrambling man who's not as smart as he thinks, for all Jones' pouchy authority when it comes to embodying Texas vernacular, and especially for all Bardem's thrilling ability to truly terrify (not just with his stun gun but with his glazed stare and baroque pageboy hairstyle), the leading character in this reverberating movie is silence, save for the sights and sounds of air and breath.
Silence deepens the horror of the drug-deal massacre that the lone hunter Moss first glimpses through his binoculars — he spies scuttled pickup trucks, sprawled bodies, even a slain and rotting dog. (More so than that of any of his none-too-blabby costars, most of Brolin's work is wordless.) Silence heightens the exquisite tension as Chigurh tracks Moss, on the run, from motel to motel. (Silence is broken by the beep on Chigurh's radar of a certain tracking transponder that chirps a warning of impending mayhem.) Silence accompanies the mournful sheriff as he drives his Texas highways, and silence is what hangs in the air after Chigurh raises his grotesque, sound-muffling weapon to snuff out one life and then another, cold as hell.
Poet-cinematographer Roger Deakins, who's the Coen Bros.' preferred DP, provides the visual music, the almost painfully gorgeous images of turf, sky, and blood. Sound editor Skip Lievsay and composer Carter Burwell fill the ear with suitable hush. McCarthy's own language, the strong speech rhythms that blow his pages forward so decisively, drives the pace of the adaptation, too, so that a familiar reader need not fear ornery big-screen ruination (despite the elimination of one memorable, secondary character — a hitchhiking girl), while the unfamiliar might well be spurred to pick up the book.
The breath of cinematic life, though, the sensibility, the energy, belong to Joel and Ethan Coen, and this is their stirring success. Such a dark epic is no country to be charted with old Coen tricks, and, rising to the material, they prove talented, wise enough men to know it.
...and one from Todd McCarthy of VARIETY.
A scorching blast of tense genre filmmaking shot through with rich veins of melancholy, down-home philosophy and dark, dark humor, "No Country for Old Men" reps a superior match of source material and filmmaking talent. Cormac McCarthy's bracing and brilliant novel is gold for the Coen brothers, who have handled it respectfully but not slavishly, using its built-in cinematic values while cutting for brevity and infusing it with their own touch. Result is one of the their very best films, a bloody classic of its type destined for acclaim and potentially robust B.O. returns upon release later in the year.
Reduced to its barest bones, the story, set in 1980, is a familiar one of a busted drug deal and the violent wages of one man's misguided attempt to make off with ill-gotten gains. But writing in marvelous Texas vernacular that injected surpassing terseness with gasping velocity, McCarthy created an indelible portrait of a quickly changing American West whose new surge of violence makes the land's 19th century legacy pale in comparison.
For their part, Joel and Ethan Coen, with both credited equally for writing and directing, are back on top of their game after some less than stellar outings. While brandishing the brothers' customary wit and impeccable craftsmanship, pic possess the vitality and invention of top-drawer 1970s American filmmaking, quite an accomplishment these days. It's also got one of cinema's most original and memorable villains in recent memory, never a bad thing in attracting an audience, especially as so audaciously played by Javier Bardem.
Set in rugged, parched West Texas (but filmed in New Mexico) and brilliantly shot by Roger Deakins in tones that resemble shafts of wheat examined in myriad different lights, yarn commences with several startling sequences: A crime suspect (Bardem) turns the tables on his arresting officer, strangles him with his handcuffs, then kills a driver for his car using a cattle stun gun ; in the middle of nowhere, a hunter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), stumbles across five trucks, several bullet-ridden corpses, a huge stash of drugs and $2 million in a briefcase, which he impulsively takes. When he returns to the scene of the crime that night, he's shot at by unknown men and chased into a nearby river by a fierce dog before getting away.
Central figures in this tale of pursuit are rounded out by Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the local county sheriff, who tours the truck crime scene on horseback and in short order gets Moss in his sights, although not as quickly as does Bardem's Anton Chigurh, who is able to tune in to a transponder in the moneybag the unsuspecting Moss has stashed in a heating duct in a local motel.
Death walks hand in hand with Chigurh wherever he goes, unless he decides otherwise. Clearly a killer by profession, the lucid, direct-talking man considers anyone else who crosses his path fair game; if everything you've done in your life has led you to him, he may explain to his about-to-be victims, your time might just have come. "You don't have to do this," the innocent invariably insist to a man whose murderous code dictates otherwise. Occasionally, however, he will allow someone to decide his own fate by coin toss, notably in a tense early scene in an old filling station marbled with nervous humor.
In addition to the pared down dialogue, pic is marked by silences, wind-inflected ones to be found naturally in the empty expanses of the West, as well as breathlessly suspenseful interior interludes, notably an ultra-Hitchcockian sequence in which Moss, aware that Chigurh has tracked him to an old hotel, listens and waits in his room as his hunter comes quietly to his door.
It's amazing how much carnage ensues given that the action essentially focuses upon three men playing cat-and-mouse across a beautiful and brutal landscape. Three guys in the wrong motel room at the wrong time get the treatment from Chigurh, and a cocky intermediary (Woody Harrelson) for the missing money's apparent rightful owner makes the mistake of getting in between the trigger-happy assassin and Moss. And they're far from the only victims in a story that disturbingly portrays the nature of the new violence stemming, in the view advanced here, from the combination of the drug trade and the disintegration of societal mores.
The manner in which the narrative advances is shocking and nearly impossible to predict; viewers who haven't read the best-seller will be gripped by the situations put onscreen and sometimes afraid to see what they fear will happen next. Those familiar with the story will be gratified to behold a terrific novel make the shift in medium managed, for once, with such smarts.
The Coens build a sense of foreboding from the outset without being heavy or pretentious about it. They have consistently worked in the crime genre, of course, beginning with their first film, "Blood Simple," whose seriousness perhaps mostly approximates the tone of this one, although there are overlaps as well with "Miller's Crossing" and "Fargo." But while they have eliminated one especially poignant character from the book in the interests of time, slashed Bell's distinctive philosophical ruminations and perhaps unduly hastened the ending, the brothers have honored McCarthy's serious themes, the integrity of his characters and his essential intentions.
They have also beefed up the laughs, the majority of which stem from the unlikely source of the cold-blooded Chigurh. From the outset, the powerful and commanding Bardem leaves no doubt that Chigurh would just as soon kill you as ask you the time of day. His conversation brooks no nonsense or evasion. But it is the character's utter lack of humor that Bardem and the Coens cleverly offer as the source of the character's humorousness, and the actor makes the most of this approach in a diabolically effective performance.
Jones would practically seem to have been born to play Cormac McCarthy roles, and he proves it here in a quintessential turn as a proud longtime sheriff dismayed by what he sees things coming to. Holding his own in distinguished company after long dwelling in TV and schlock, Brolin gives off young Nick Nolte vibes as an ordinary man who tries to outsmart some big boys in order to get away with the score of his life.
Scottish thesp Kelly Macdonald registers potently as Moss' country wife, while tasty supporting turns are delivered by Harrelson, Stephen Root as the latter character's employer, Rodger Boyce as a sheriff who commiserates with Bell, Barry Corbin as Bell's crusty old uncle, Ana Reeder as a swimming pool floozy who offers Moss some company and Gene Jones as the old fellow Chigurh makes call his own fate.
Deakins' stunning location work and precision framing is joined by Jess Gonchor's production design, the Coens' cutting under their usual pseudonym of Roderick Jaynes, Carter Burwell's discreet score and expert sound work to make "No Country for Old Men" a total visual and aural pleasure.
...and **** from Peter Travers.
Misguided souls will tell you that No Country for Old Men is out for blood, focused on vengeance and unconcerned with the larger world outside a standard-issue suspense plot. Those people, of course, are deaf, dumb and blind to anything that isn't spelled out between commercials on dying TV networks. Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best. Set in 1980 in West Texas, where the chase is on for stolen drug money, the film — a new career peak for the Coen brothers, who share writing and directing credits — is a literate meditation (scary words for the Transformers crowd) on America's bloodlust for the easy fix. It's also as entertaining as hell, which tends to rile up elitists. What do the criminal acts of losers in a flyover state have to do with the life of the mind?
Plenty, as it turns out. McCarthy reveals a soulless America that is no country for anyone, never mind old men. The so-called codger representing besieged law and order is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones with the kind of wit and assurance that reveals a master actor at the top of his game. On the page, the sheriff is a tad too folksy, dishing out cracker-barrel wisdom to his good wife, Loretta (Tess Harper), with a twinkle written into his homespun truths. As you already know by now (and In the Valley of Elah categorically proves it), Mr. Jones does not do twinkle. He's a hard-ass. And when he chews into a good line, you can see the bite marks. Here's the sheriff on how crime has gotten so out of hand: "It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Anytime you quit hearin' 'sir' and 'ma'am,' the end is pretty much in sight."
That unpretty end takes the form of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), an assassin who rivals Hannibal Lecter for dispatching his victims without breaking a sweat. Bardem, with pale skin and the world's worst haircut, is stupendous in the role, a monster for the ages. Beneath his dark eyes lies something darker, evil topped with the cherry of perverse humor. Chigurh carries around a bulky cattle gun. He'll politely ask a mark to get out of a car before he caps him in the head; that way the car won't get messy with gristle and brain matter. And he has this little game he plays. Staring at the human species like a visitor from another planet, Chigurh flips a coin. Your choice of heads or tails might just save your life. Only don't piss him off.
It's Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who comes down hard on Chigurh's bad side. Moss is a cowboy in a world with no more room for cowboys. He enjoys teasing his wife, Carla Jean (the excellent Kelly Macdonald), but you can feel his discontent. Then one day, when he's out hunting antelope, he gets his shot at the big score. Right out there in the desert are a half-dozen dead bodies drawing flies. One man, barely alive, sits in a truck and begs for water. It's a massacre. There's also a stash of heroin and $2 million in cash. Moss takes the cash and runs. Wouldn't you? That question sets up the film's moral dilemma and puts us in Moss' boots. This is Brolin's breakthrough — he rips into the role like a man possessed, giving Moss the human touch the part needs. Moss even returns to the scene that night with water for the dying man. Huge mistake. Shots ring out, and Moss, after packing his wife off to her folks, goes on the run with Chigurh on his tail and the sheriff tracking both of them.
That's all you'll hear from me about plot. The kick comes in watching all the gears mesh with thrilling exactitude. I've heard some carping about the ending, which stays tone-faithful to McCarthy instead of going for Hollywood pow. Hmm. I thought that'd be worth a cheer. No Country for Old Men offers an embarrassment of riches. Jones, Bardem and Brolin all give award-caliber performances. Roger Deakins again proves himself a poet of light and shadow as director of photography. Carter Burwell's insinuating score finds a way to nail every nuance without underlining a single one of them. Props are also due editor Roderick Jaynes, who no one's ever seen, since he's a pseudonym both Coen brothers hide behind.
OK, then. How does No Country for Old Men stack up against the best work of these artfully merry pranksters? Near the top, I'd say. There are echoes of Fargo when a deputy declares, "It's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?" and the sheriff answers, "If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here." And admirers of Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink and even The Big Lebowski will find tasty bits of bright and bleak to noodle on. But this landmark of a movie is fresh territory for the Coens, accused, often unfairly, of glib facility and lack of passionate purpose. Screw that. Not since Robert Altman merged with the short stories of Raymond Carver in Short Cuts have filmmakers and author fused with such devastating impact as the Coens and McCarthy. Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved. Recent movies about Iraq have pushed hard to show the growing dehumanization infecting our world. No Country doesn't have to preach or wave a flag — it carries in its bones the virus of what we've become. The Coens squeeze us without mercy in a vise of tension and suspense, but only to force us to look into an abyss of our own making.
"How's the despair?"
But then no one will vote for you to win in the finals if you do it that way. Which means I'm taking you with me.OscarGuy wrote:I don't have to win any either, Akash.The sheer fact that I control everyone's posting fate should be enough to carry me to the winner's circle.
What the heck was this thread originally about again?
Oh my god, who needs physical? There are SO many other competitions we could have: Movie trivia (Damien or Big Magilla would probably win here), current events trivia (looking at you Sonic) who posted the most in one day (Sonic again), whose comeback was the bitchiest (Eric? Sabin? Italiano? I see a tie-breaker finish).OscarGuy wrote:That wouldn't be fair, Akash, we don't have the physical capacity do do "physical" challenges...
I didn't name myself for any of these because I plan to throw all the competitions and "float" to the end.
Ooh, a scuffle! How did I miss this one?
I think this board would be far more interesting if we voted someone out each week. Think about it -- the first week would be a no-brainer, free week for everyone: Criddic, you have been voted off.
Sorry. I've been watching too much Survivor.
Edited By Akash on 1194371121
I think this board would be far more interesting if we voted someone out each week. Think about it -- the first week would be a no-brainer, free week for everyone: Criddic, you have been voted off.
Sorry. I've been watching too much Survivor.
Edited By Akash on 1194371121
Adversarial relationship? With few outside exceptions pertaining to one of us 'A.I.' more than the other, I'd say this 'No Country for Old Men' scuffle is just an exception to ten years of peaceful correspondence and I don't think it needs to be so blown out of proportion; so much so that I've been elevated to the residential Coen Brothers apologist despite the fact that I only whole-heartedly embrace some Coen Brothers films.
I've been away most of the day but Jesus Christ! Why are we validating this Board's existence! We are spending our time prognosticating the Oscars and discussing liberal ideology. We pat ourselves on the back far too much as it is to make a day of it solely on the basis that I don't think Wes is crediting the Coen Brothers with enough foothold in this year's Oscar race.
Edited By Sabin on 1194333821
I've been away most of the day but Jesus Christ! Why are we validating this Board's existence! We are spending our time prognosticating the Oscars and discussing liberal ideology. We pat ourselves on the back far too much as it is to make a day of it solely on the basis that I don't think Wes is crediting the Coen Brothers with enough foothold in this year's Oscar race.
Edited By Sabin on 1194333821
"How's the despair?"