The Best Picture, Reviewed
by Nathan Cone

If you are reading this, by now, you probably know that No Country for Old Men, directed by Joel & Ethan Coen, won the Academy Award® for Best Picture 2007.  You may have even seen it already.  With so many well-written and glowing critical reviews, what more can I hope to add?  Still, I liked the movie, and so if you haven’t yet put this one in your queue, here’s why you should.

No Country for Old Men is the story of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones.  Which is interesting, since he doesn’t even appear until well over 30 minutes have elapsed of the film’s two-hour running time.  Instead, the movie opens with Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a straight guy who stumbles upon a grisly scene in the desert of West Texas.  It’s the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad.  That same grisly scene happens to contain a satchel stuffed with two million dollars, and Moss, deciding this must be the opportunity of a lifetime, takes the money, setting into motion a cat-and-mouse chase involving Sheriff Bell, who mostly just wants to see Moss get out of this mess alive, and criminal Anton Chigurh (Oscar®-winner Javier Bardem), who wants that money, damn anyone who gets in his way.

Anton’s a peculiar fellow who’s a bit like a killer cockroach.  Nothing stops this guy, not a car crash, an impacted bone fracture, nada.  He carries a kind of pressurized air gun (I looked it up on Wikipedia, it’s a captive bolt pistol) to dispatch of everything from door locks to inconvenient witnesses.  His single-mindedness is fascinating, and he has a code of ethics all his own.  “You don’t have to do this,” a character pleads with him at one point.  “Ah, but I do,” he responds.  He made a promise to someone, you see, and the killing of an innocent person would fulfill that promise indirectly.  But instead of taking on the moral weight of deciding to kill an innocent, Chigurh asks his potential victims to call a coin toss for their life.  In doing so, he’s washing his hands of the matter.  Schluffing off the morality of his kills to fate or luck is just another way Chigurh manages to be a survivor in the dangerous world he inhabits.

And here’s where Shefiff Bell (Jones) comes in.  He’s come a long way from the days when the only trouble seen in his sparsely populated county might have been stolen cattle, or a drunk that started a bar fight, or maybe, just once a blue moon, a shooting.  No Country for Old Men is set in West Texas circa 1980, just as cross-border drug violence was beginning to get really, really nasty.  There’s no mafia code of honor here, just mass slaughter.  Bell, who’s already on the cusp of retirement, sees this world and knows it’s not his anymore.  He realizes he can’t keep up with this newer brand of criminal.  Bell is one of the “old men” the film’s title refers to.  It’s his narration that opens, and then closes the film, in one of the boldest endings in recent memory that ultimately seals the picture as belonging to Bell, despite his limited presence in the story.

I loved the way this movie was put together. The wide frame of the film is filled with the vast nothingness of the West Texas landscape in and around Marfa, where the movie was filmed.  The visuals are matched by the stark soundtrack – which is to say there’s hardly any soundtrack to speak of, despite composer Carter Burwell’s name being listed in the credits.  Maybe there was some music, but I didn’t notice any until the final credits rolled.  The movie is also edited in a more leisurely pace, befitting its Southwestern setting.

The DVD of No Country for Old Men includes three short featurettes that are a little better than the standard Electronic Press Kit (EPK) talking heads features that normally come on DVDs these days.  There’s a bit more serious discussion about the film and its themes rather than just glowing praise for everyone who worked on the film.

Speaking of the filmmakers... as for the Coen brothers, who took home the Best Directing prize at this year’s Oscars, “No Country for Old Men” does seem to fit in with most of their oeuvre, with its look into the darker side of the human element, but unlike “Fargo,” there’s little humor to be found in “No Country for Old Men.”  This is a deadly serious story, and also a deeply satisfying one.

NOTE: “No Country for Old Men” is available in two versions on home video: A standard DVD edition, and the Blu-Ray edition, in high definition for use only with a Blu-Ray player.

04/16/08

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