No Country For Old Men has been hailed as a bona fide masterpiece by just about every living critic, so I want to make a few comments slightly to the contrary, maybe like one of the ornery 'ol coots in the film itself. The directors are smug as smug can be, and always have been. Their triumphs (like Fargo) seem to be achieved despite their winks and nods. Compared to sublime, dark masters of the post-modern, like David Lynch, their cinematic works seem like the Mad Magazine spoofs of the real things. That was their skill and brilliance, this pastiche-style. This new picture is being rewarded with awe, and shucks it's great, because it has none of that. It is as if someone stripped off all the layers of paint on some old farmhouse floors, and let the original grain earn its keep.The mise-en-scene is controlled, and exact. The camera is steady, and it is eagle-eyed. I very much enjoyed the book this movie is based on, and can attest to the verisimilitude of the transition from page to screen - the look and feel of the imagined moment is complete. There are several key locations - signalled by the John Ford reference near the beginning (watch the vehicles throughout as a key image-system) - that establish this is the modern, serious Western films like Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, or even Unforgiven, tried to kill off.
It is, of course, like The Searchers, except this time, the one searching is pure evil, and, essentially (but not certainly, the film's hinge) wins. Though in The Searchers, Wayne was morally tainted, too. What I am getting at is, this is a reverent take on America, men, and The West. Tommy Lee Jones is terrific as the mainly passive, measured, ruminating, ageing, Good Sheriff, the man who lost the West, but did so with gravitas, dignity, and decency, intact. His final dream-soliloquy expresses this vision utterly - his father is riding into the darkness, with a horn of fire, to blaze the trail. The truth is, it is darkness ahead, God may be mainly absent, but there will be fire, there will be fathers. I love this sad, nostalgic tone - captured well, oddly enough, in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Trilogy, also a Western in genre - and also about the fading of a whole way of life, an enchanted, fabled past - in this case, America's frontier expansion, at the expense of much blood and treasure, and many Native American lives.
The wide open spaces are now sun-bleached, and a mess of corpses, and meaningless money just left in the open, as good as gold, or oil, and as bad. The biblical monotony of this film is unleavened by the Avenging Assassin, plated by Javier Bardem. He seemed to me to be channeling Nicholas Cage, The Coen Bros.'s own cut-rate Cary Grant, in terms of sullen nerdiness and weird danger. The role has been described as star-making and brilliant, but, when the dust settles, will likely be seen as simply dull and strange. The best performance is from Josh Brolin, who comes from nowhere and has a solid, manly Cowboy presence that seems uncannily sturdy. The main lack in the picture - which at times is as thrilling as the best Hitchcock (especially in the three key motel/hotel sequences, all homages to Psycho) - is the one central to the ultimate theme: that there is no final confrontation between man and devil on this soiled earth. That is, the Showdown, the gun battle, is deferred, endlessly - the West is the victim of some eternal recurrence, where evil gets its scalp, and god-fearing, gun-toting men, take their chances - or, as Moss's wife decides, much to her credit - they don't. Because there can be no final meeting of the mad killer, and the good man, the suspense dries up when Moss's blood gets shed for the final time. The last reel is a hollow, mournful coda to a beautifully-rendered, oddly-inert drama. Less a film than a morality tale, this is latterday Bergman in Texas, bone-dry and emblematic as hell. I guess what I am finally trying to say here is this: all the other Coen movies were Genre Movies Playing at Being Art House - this one here's an Art Film, Playing At Genre. Go in thinking this is going to be just a funny, dark thriller, and you'll be puzzled by its fearsome, slow-running depths, and arid desert spaces. Four Specs.
Comments
The biggest problem with your review is that your presciptivist (using Richard Schusterman's nomenclature) interpretation of No Country as a Western neglects the fact that there is no God in this new sphere that the Coens stoop out to conquer. Not only is there no God on this stoop, however, there is no pastiche/parody. Fredric Jameson left the building a long, long time ago.
Sure, you state, "God may be mainly absent, but there will be fire, there will be fathers", but there is not even a "mainly" here. God has left this planet, and only the survivors of the planet-to-be will understand what life means.
You see, the quest in this movie is not Anton Chigurh's search...or if it is, then it is of an autistc's or a savant's search for why evil is. So it is. No really, roll the dice, and so it is. And then so it isn't. A rather potent depiction of these times, with the badly-motivated invasions of far-off countries, and so forth. Anyhow, the quest is, as I said, the search for the meaning of why and how evil comes to be. This opens us up to chance.
I am not even being a Richard Dawkin-ish hawk here. Quite the contrary. I resist the cult atheisticosity (sorry - terrible word - but it can't be helped) just as much as I resist the cult of religiosity. And so do the Coen bros., I suspect. They can never take themselves seriously enough to truly contemplate the idea of no God. At the same time, their narrative so frequently leave themselves open to, nay require, some sort of Deus ex Machina (Barton Fink being a classic example). I am not contradicting myself, since this is a purely agnostic vision, and the Coens' most serious existential quest yet.
No, this is not a Western, anymore than Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is. In fact, No Country cannot even come near to a pastiche of a Western. There are shards, broken fragments, dust, and detritus. It is a murder mystery of the collective self. Why and how did whoever kill us? Or No Country is a romantic comedy, laying ground for what is, ultimately, our romance with morality, be it with the good, the bad, or the a- kind. Looked at equally as a romantic comedy, murder mystery, and experimental film (think of van Sant's Gerry), No Country works. It works and haunts.
As for the referential aspects, let me revise, and turn over some of your claims: the Psycho reference is too old and obvious and doesn't necessarily apply here. There are a number of examples of movies with motel-scenes that have more affinity. For example, the recent Vacancy, or Red Rock West (if I remember correctly, or U-Turn, or Paris, Texas (actually the last comparison would be the most intriguing and apt). The characters here in No Country (even Bardem's) are not even unsympathetic. We watch them, Brolin, Jones, Bardem, and McDonald with a great amount of fascination. We, the spectators, in this case, are temporarily God. What would God do? Well, just what He has handed us the task of doing: watching things like this (and by extention, in much messier contexts, and less organized like the evening news). We see that trying to understand is not an easy task. Impossible, even. Impossible for God? Quite possibly.
Oh yes, and you mention the vehicles (like the picture of the Ford pick-up you post at the start of your review) as "key image-systems)...well about that. Here's my own response. Which Ford are we talking about here? John Ford or Stagecoach? Or Henry Ford the actor? Or Ford's actor Henry Fonda or Honda? This is a welcome turning point for the Coen's (much like Cronenberg's recent forays into making British, er, Russian gangster films. In this poker game, instead of coming up with an ace of spades, or even a joker, the Coens have come up most incongruously, and appropriately, for these times, with the Death Card.
Now l will go back to writing my Western, featuring telemarketing fraudsters…just kidding. Or maybe not. Remember the phone sex scamsters in P.T. Anderson's Punch Drunk Love? Speaking of which, stay tuned for my review of There Will Be Blood, which I will be watching tonight with my reading group friends.
Davide