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Printer-Friendly ModeNo Country perfects genre
December 3, 2007 —
When Joel and Ethan Coen last explored the crime/thriller with Fargo, they captured the grit while maintaining a level of quirkiness, which was unsettlingly impressive. With No Country for Old Men, they have perfected this contrast, and the genre, by capturing horror with grit and humor instead of simple quirkiness.
No Country (based on a Cormac McCarthy novel) focuses on three men. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a simple man hunting in southern Texas when he comes across remnants of a failed drug deal (several bodies, a truck load of drugs and $2 million). He takes the money and goes on the run. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is a bounty hunter set on getting the money back. Aging Sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) soon finds the scene of the crime, and the film quickly turns into a game of cat and mouse, where Chigurh leaves body after body in his wake, seeking Moss.
Where is all the humor in this? Well, it might sound impossible from the synopsis, but I found myself (and much of the audience) laughing nearly as much as I was terrifyingly entranced by the ominous Bardem. This isn't simple-minded humor I'm referring to, however. The dialogue is fast-paced and eloquently written, and the humor is carefully intertwined with profound, yet simple, statements questioning the nature of man.
While the film follows three strands, it becomes clear that it is Chigurh who is at the center of the story. I don't believe that since Anthony Hopkin's Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs has there been a figure as frightening as the monster Bardem creates in Chigurh. Bardem captures a terrifying malice that he hides behind a cold and expressionless demeanor. It surfaces in the most subtle of smiles throughout the film, which makes him all the more scary.
Jones, too, is in top form. He finds the majority of the laughs in the film with either the most witty or most truthfully somber statements, and it is in his vocalization of Bell that he is strongest, as in his voice alone you can hear changes from futility to sarcasm to nostalgia. Brolin stands up strong to these performances as Moss. We see the widest variety of emotion in his character, jumping from desperation to overconfidence almost instantaneously in one scene. The script (adapted by the Coens) is what really allows the actors to disappear behind their very real characters, however.
The atmosphere of the film itself is further befitting of that realism. The cinematography of the film is continually juxtaposing stark, expansive and beautiful landscapes with weathered and confined motel rooms. Also, there are constantly pictures within the film that cause parallels to be made between the three men, and further adding to the mesmerizing images is the absence of any score until the end credits role. I didn't notice the absence until about half way through the film, but from then on, it made every word, noise and picture stand out all the more potently.
Ultimately, No Country delivers because of the Coens unique and detailed questioning of what human nature is. And as other audience members, the sheriff's deputy in the film and I all laughed during the scene where Bell reads of and comments on an absurd set of murders, we all seemed to catch ourselves laughing at something terrible at the same time (audience and character alike). "It's alright," Bell says, "I laugh sometimes, too. 'Bout the only thing you can do." It was a surreal moment (the film seeming to reply to the predicted response of its audience), and I think that, in that moment, the Coens got their answer.