NO COUNTRY FOR
There’s no telling where the next great Coen Brothers movie is going to come from. Their own fevered imaginations, as with Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing or Raising Arizona? Tabloid fodder torn from real life, as with Fargo? One thing’s for sure: that next great movie is here now, and it has its roots in a so-so book by Cormac McCarthy. In the hands of the Coens, though, No Country for Old Men becomes a tightly-wound story of suspense with a philosophical backbone that holds up, but doesn’t impede, the action.
While out hunting one day, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin, looking and acting like a real Texas shit-kicker), following the blood trail of a wounded antelope, comes across a scene of eerily silent, still carnage. He finds dead men (and pit bulls) littered around a knot of bullet-riddled trucks. A load of heroin sits in the bed of one vehicle; a critically wounded man slumps behind the wheel, pleading for water. Reasoning that there must be a bundle of cash involved and seeing that it is not at the scene of the showdown, Moss determines that a wounded survivor has walked away with the money. Tracking the man, he hits the jackpot, collecting a cool $2 million.
But the drug-runners’ backers are not content to write off the loss as the cost of doing business and dispatch a professional assassin to recover the loot. His name is Anton Chiguhr (a terrifically understated Javier Bardem), and his style is vintage Grim Reaper: dressed in black and armed with a compressed-air weapon, Chiguhr stalks Moss from trailer to motel to across the border, with Moss staying one slight step ahead.
Other characters swarm at the film’s periphery, including Woody Harrelson as a second professional killer sent to track and reign in Chiguhr; rather than slow the film down or dilute its force, they add to its momentum and shed light on its darker corners. This is a crucial element, because Moss and Chiguhr play out an existential conundrum; step by step their silent argument boils down to a contest between human will and inexorable destiny. While their battle of wits and will rages, leaving a trail of bodies in its wake, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), surveys the wreckage they leave behind while musing about the state of the world. Bell’s concerns are prescient: the story is set right around 1980, and in Bell’s puzzlement you can hear an already-plaintive and wistful regret that the world has tipped so far off course. His voice, of course, is a way for us to her our own anger and sense of betrayal at the way the world has left ordinary folks behind while everything that used to constitute community has grown increasingly commercialized – even good old-fashioned crime.
Other directors might have made this into a parable or a screed, but the Coen Brothers, always game for a tight-wire act, strike a surefooted balance, maintaining a visceral engagement to offset the film’s cool, sometimes caustic, cerebral qualities. As ever, of course, there’s a healthy dose of bleak comedy: the human condition, as seen through their lens, is appalling, but never without its gutsy, determined charms.••• –Kilian Melloy
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.