An unemployed Texan man named Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes across the remains of a drug deal gone wrong- several dead Mexican men, a truck-load of cocaine, and a suitcase containing $2 million. He makes off with the money, but soon comes to realise that a hitman named Chigurh (Javier Bardem) has been hired to kill him and recover the money. Their intense game of cat and mouse leads to some pretty horrific injuries and civilian deaths, prompting an older local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, to pursue both parties in the hope of reinstating order to his precinct.
Doug says...
I remember watching No Country for Old Men in the cinema and greatly enjoying it. While it hasn’t particularly aged badly, I did find this is a case of knowing the ending marred the overall enjoyment. This is a cat and mouse film, with the gutsy but naive Llewellyn Moss trying to evade the thoroughly unpleasant Chigurh.
There’s plenty of themes gushing through - it is a Coen brothers’ film after all - with the idea of evil going unpunished, good becoming susceptible to evil and the painting of the American West as a place where only the young can hope to survive. However, I’m not fascinated by it, partly because this is again a Macho Film. I’ve discovered through this project that these films that feature masculine characters doing masculine things just don’t pique my interest.
It’s no slight to the film - it’s very well made and a worthy winner - but I did find myself getting distracted constantly. There’s lots of beautiful cinematography - particularly around Chigurh’s increasingly brutal murder methods, and Javier Bardem rocks the world’s most terrifying haircut with aplomb. I’m actually half-convinced it was the haircut that actually won Best Supporting Actor, and if so it was a justified win.
Apart from that, I don’t have much to say. I don’t love or hate this as a film, but I do think that the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy is a far better representation of their creative, madcap and thoughtful capabilities. But with the critics panning that and loving this, I may be alone here. I will also admit that when I saw Woody Harrelson I had wistful thoughts of Three Billboards - which would have knocked this out of the park had they been in the same year. Oh well.
Highlight
Javier Bardem's hair
Lowlight
So many closeups of people extracting bullets from their legs or bone poking out of shoulders. Ew.
Mark
7/10
Paul says...
I’m not massively familiar with the work of the Coen Brothers. The only other film by them I have seen is Fargo, which is probably their most universally appreciated piece. Nonetheless, No Country for Old Men is, so far, their only work to take home the Best Picture Oscar (beating Juno, Atonement and There Will Be Blood), and it was a big critical and commercial hit in 2007. They also managed to nab Best Director and Best Screenplay, while Javier Bardem garnered the only acting nomination, and won Best Supporting Actor (more on him later).
And whilst it is by no means a bad film, it’s certainly no Fargo. It has all the tropes and tricks that makes a Coen Brothers film so recognisable: unpredictable storytelling; playful direction; intense and darkly comic dialogue; lashings of explicit violence; and just a dash of inconclusive philosophising on the nature of life. They work together to make what is effectively a mildly interesting musing on how it feels to be old in a world that is changing. In the mid-noughties, with the rise of social media, internet and video game access, concerns over the increasing violence amongst youth have very obviously fed into No Country. These have been pretty pertinent themes ever since the Jets and Sharks pirouetted their way into gang violence in West Side Story. The film also touches on the idea of living life by flipping a coin, or by making conscious and decent personal choices.
But here’s the problem- it’s Javier Bardem. He’s good. He’s really, really good. He plays a man who is so psychopathic he makes Hannibal Lector look like Florence Nightingale. In just the first 10 minutes, he tears apart a police officer’s jugular with a pair of handcuffs that he is wearing, and then shoots a man through the head with his favourite weapon- a captive bolt pistol. He is so robotically unfeeling and gains so much enjoyment out of intimidating and slaughtering others, that I wondered if the Coen Brothers and Bardem had taken inspiration from Yul Bryner’s performance in Westworld. It’s an astonishingly engaging and frightening performance, and it’s a well deserved win (yes, the haircut helped).
It’s so engaging, in fact, that the rambling and slightly unfocused themes become entirely overshadowed. So do the performances of Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Woody Harrelson, all excellent actors who contribute competently to the film, but without the momentousness of Bardem. The film starts strong with the simple but butt-clenchingly tense chase between Moss and Chigurh. But as it progresses, it seems to descend into a series of non-sequitur scenes that don’t seem to add up. The conclusion involves Chigurh’s eventual murder of Moss’s wife, a car crash in which he breaks his arm, a scene in which Bell visits his Uncle who tells stories of violence from Texas’ criminal past, and a final scene in which Bell discusses his dreams. These scenes didn’t connect for me at all, nor contribute to the themes of the film or even the storyline. I was pining for the first 20 minutes of the film in which an exciting battle between morally ambiguous blokes was set up, before it meandered off into making-it-up-as-we-go-along.
So yes, when Bardem is on the screen being terrifying, whether he’s using a coin to decide whether to murder a shopkeeper, or just walking slowly towards Moss’ hotel room, then the film comes alive. It’s a master-class in Hitchcockian suspense-building (the scene in which Chigurh’s shadow appears under Moss’ hotel door was an obvious tribute to Rear Window), but when it comes to coherent story-telling, the film faltered badly for me.
Highlight
The build-up to Chiguhr’s attack on Moss in a seedy hotel room in which he walks up to the hotel door, walks away, turns off the corridor light, and then silently comes back again, is nail-biting stuff.
Lowlight
The final half hour loses its way completely. I get that Coen Brothers’ films are meant to take you by surprise (and Fargo certainly does) but these random set pieces felt tedious.
Mark
5/10
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