After our class ended, David suggested we meet up twice a month to see movies and then review them. That's the ultimate reason I started this blog. No Country for Old Men was our first "assignment."
It's the silence that gets you.
Halfway into No Country for Old Men, the 12th directorial effort by Joel and Ethan Coen, Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is hiding out in a West Texas hotel with $2 million in a bag he snatched. That money, the remains of a drug deal gone bad, doesn't really belong to Moss. Nor does it belong to Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), but the sadistic Chigurh has been stalking the money - and Moss. In the darkened Room 213, Moss bolts awake, realizing how Chigurh has been trailing him. He sits and waits, Chigurh on the other side of the door, as light streams through a crack.
All this occurs with nary a bit of music. The only sound is the occasional creak of a floorboard until a first shot shatters the disconcerting quiet.
In adapting Cormac McCarthy's novel of choice and chance, the Coen brothers marry noir and Western to create the most gripping, unsettling release of the year. They immediately establish the film's uneasy tone, with only the wind and an occasional passing car breaking the stillness of the endless landscape. The minimalist music by longtime Coen collaborator Carter Burwell takes a back seat to the real score: the swirling breeze, the buzzing flies and the crunching sand under cowboy boots. The characters use words sparingly, leaving us to brood in fear of what's next. When death comes, it's often very sudden.
No Country for Old Men features a sight even more unnerving than Fargo's wood chipper: a pale man with a Dutch Boy haircut and something that looks like an oxygen tank. That would be Bardem's Chigurh, the most charismatically evil character this side of Hannibal Lecter, a man who takes off his boots to sneak up on his unsuspecting victims. But Chigurh's not a blustery, badass villain from a summer blockbuster. He's that old standby: (nearly) silent but deadly.
Chigurh, and Bardem, wouldn't be as interesting without a foil, and that would be the man with the bag, Moss. Brolin's mustachioed welder lives in a trailer park and just wants to improve life for himself and his wife. Of course, he's too taciturn to say that aloud - the film is set in 1980, not our emo-male present - and he doesn't always realize how dire his situation really is.
No Country for Old Men also showcases vivid characterizations by Tommy Lee Jones and Kelly MacDonald as a weathered sheriff and Moss' worried-but-brave wife. As Ed Tom Bell, Jones serves as the film's increasingly disillusioned ethical compass. A world where "kids have stopped saying 'sir' and 'ma'am'" has left Bell ready to retire; as he remarks casually on newspaper stories of crime, we wonder if he's funny, ineffective or simply drained. For Jones, it's his second wise and wearied performance of the year, following In the Valley of Elah.
The Scottish-born MacDonald, in her most prominent American role to date, shows courage as Carla Jean amid her own faceoff with Chigurh. Resigned - "I knew this wasn't over yet" - yet calm, Carla Jean stands tall in an almost otherworldly light, while her opponent hunches in a shadowy corner.
After the fluffy romps of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, the Coen brothers have delivered a tightly wound package of anticipation, action and ambiguity with No Country for Old Men. In doing so, they surpass themselves and even recall the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment