Most audiences will look at No Country for Old Men and see only the simple plot of a fugitive and his two pursuers, but there is more being said and more being asked within the wide open spaces of the film.
The Coens have left all their tricks and ironic jokery behind and the resulting film feels deeper and more personally felt than anything they have done before. The mood is darker and quieter than other projects the two brothers have worked on. It’s not a slap yourself on the knee comedy like The Big Lebowski, it’s not a true crime mobster suspense like Miller’s Crossing, and though there are dashes of black humor dispersed throughout the feature, it’s not remotely as frequent or forcibly placed as exhibited in Fargo. Again Coen fans, this movie is not like Fargo.
The story follows Llewlyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin), a Vietnam veteran who stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong in the west Texas desert while hunting. The only survivors of the botched transaction are a truck load of heroine, and a briefcase with over $2 million. Electing to take the money and run, Brolin’s character is pursued by bounty hunter Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). During the chase, police Sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), attempts to track down Brolin, a man in too deep, to assist him in escaping the enclosing grasp of aggression and mayhem.
Javier Bardem steals the show as perhaps the most unnerving screen villain of the year, a sociopath monster who ups the ante in terms of tension by holding a cattle gun to his victims' heads while often flipping a coin to determine who lives and who dies. In one of his final murders, he gives a long speech about causality and fate to his victim. This scene requires the audience to take a second look at what they have been watching. All of a sudden, the film is not just a violent chase film. The film is violence. Each character is a representation of an extreme that creates a trinity of temptation, cynicism and pure, dark, evil.
Tom Long of the Detroit News hails the film as “a cold, rough look at the dissolution of just about everything. It will bother you afterward. It should.” When stepping out the movie theatre, audiences are silent. Each frame is mesmerizing, no character is trivial, and in this day and age, violence survives.
The Coens have left all their tricks and ironic jokery behind and the resulting film feels deeper and more personally felt than anything they have done before. The mood is darker and quieter than other projects the two brothers have worked on. It’s not a slap yourself on the knee comedy like The Big Lebowski, it’s not a true crime mobster suspense like Miller’s Crossing, and though there are dashes of black humor dispersed throughout the feature, it’s not remotely as frequent or forcibly placed as exhibited in Fargo. Again Coen fans, this movie is not like Fargo.
The story follows Llewlyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin), a Vietnam veteran who stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong in the west Texas desert while hunting. The only survivors of the botched transaction are a truck load of heroine, and a briefcase with over $2 million. Electing to take the money and run, Brolin’s character is pursued by bounty hunter Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). During the chase, police Sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), attempts to track down Brolin, a man in too deep, to assist him in escaping the enclosing grasp of aggression and mayhem.
Javier Bardem steals the show as perhaps the most unnerving screen villain of the year, a sociopath monster who ups the ante in terms of tension by holding a cattle gun to his victims' heads while often flipping a coin to determine who lives and who dies. In one of his final murders, he gives a long speech about causality and fate to his victim. This scene requires the audience to take a second look at what they have been watching. All of a sudden, the film is not just a violent chase film. The film is violence. Each character is a representation of an extreme that creates a trinity of temptation, cynicism and pure, dark, evil.
Tom Long of the Detroit News hails the film as “a cold, rough look at the dissolution of just about everything. It will bother you afterward. It should.” When stepping out the movie theatre, audiences are silent. Each frame is mesmerizing, no character is trivial, and in this day and age, violence survives.
