If you want a
gritty look at crime in America, look no further than the work of the Coen
Brothers. From Blood Simple to Fargo they depict crime and murder as
horrible things, but that takes place in the real world and usually performed
by actual human beings. No Country for
Old Men (2007), their most uncompromising work so far, has a lot of
violence and a villain so terrifying he is compared to the Bubonic Plague. The
scariest thing is we eventually see he is just as human as the rest of us.
When first
released in the fall of 2007 the movie justifiably received a lot of hype and
eventually went on to receive many awards come awards season. Being a fan of
the Coen Brother’s work, I got in line for a ticket on opening weekend, which
was during my days at the University of Sherbrooke. Unfortunately that meant
watching a version dubbed in French, which I hate because I wanted to listen to
the original actors’ voices, but I didn’t feel like waiting for the DVD
release. Like most audience members, I was taken by surprise. Based on what I
had seen in the trailer I was expecting something akin to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with the good eventually
triumphing. It turns out that is the very last thing you should expect when
watching a movie based on a book by Cormac McCarthy.
In my mind The
Ugly of the movie was obviously Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) a killer hired by
an unspecified criminal enterprise to retrieve a bag filled with $2 million
after a drug deal went wrong. Despite his humorous hair cut reminiscent of Moe
from The Three Stooges Chigurh is one of the most dangerous men in Texas where
the action is set. Throughout his search for the money he leaves many dead
bodies in his wake, some because they got in his way, others for reason only he
can fathom. Sometimes he will flip a coin to give his victims what he sees as a
fair chance. If they lose they are mostly likely killed with some sort of
portable air pump that leaves a small hole their foreheads making the
authorities wonder if he shot them and dug out the bullet with a knife.
The man he hunts
is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) a welder and Vietnam War veteran who found the
drug money after stumbling on the scene of the massacre. Moss is a very smart
man who comes up with ingenious ways to hide the money in crummy motel rooms.
While staring at the ceiling in one such room, he thinks about his situation
and realizes the reason so many people are having such an easy time tracking
him down is because there is a tracker in the moneybag. As soon as he has his
brain wave he hears a sound coming from down the hallway and he reaches for his
shotgun in anticipation.
Finally we have
The Good, sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who wants to find Moss before
either one of the criminal gangs get to him. Following the trail of bodies left
by Chigurgh, Bell begins to feel overwhelmed by both the horrors he sees in
real life and the ones he reads in the newspaper over his morning coffee.
Reading a particularly horrifying story about a California couple who killed senior citizens for the pension checks and bury them in their backyard, he
elicits a nervous laughter from his deputy (Garret Dillahund). It’s all right,
Bell tells him. Sometimes he laughs as well since it is just about the only
thing you can do.
My expectations,
and I assume many audience members felt the same, was for the sheriff to track
down the bad guy, maybe have a duel in the street, and for Moss to fly away
somewhere with his money and his wife (Kelly MacDonald). Not quite.
Much like on some
of today’s best TV shows, in the realistic world of No Country for Old Men it doesn’t matter if you are good or bad,
smart or stupid, either way you can die a horrible death. Chigurh himself is
not invincible, as at one point he suffers an open fracture from a random car
accident. Like Woody Harrelson’s cocky character says, “he’s a psychopathic
killer but so what? There are plenty of them around.” Read enough news stories
and you are bound to find some truth in that statement.
The dialogue is
crackling throughout, the performances from the three leads are mesmerizing,
and beneath the bloody violence there is a good layer of dark humour. It may
not be a crowd-pleaser in the typical sense of the word, but this is one of the
Coen Brothers’ best movies.
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