I have to confess to a certain ambivalence when it comes to the Coen Brothers. On the one hand, I’ve only seen seven out of their 12 movies. But my experience has been that when they’re good, they’re very good, and when they’re bad, they’re either boring or obnoxious. No Country For Old Men is probably their most sophisticated and mature film. It’s a subtle examination of the role of evil in the world. It’s probably a great film.
In spite of this, there were a couple points towards the end of the movie that make me hesitate to declare it a success. The first half of the film is flawless. The script is tight, clear and concise. The cast is perfect, particularly Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem. Well, the cast isn’t completely perfect. Beth Grant is awful as Carla Jean’s mother. And I don’t think it’s her fault. Her character is just this awful cartoon stereotype in a movie filled with fully developed characters. Wendell (played by Garret Dillahunt) is also a little cartoonishly dim. These are odd notes in such a great cast.
The story is told quite well. The first section moves with great precision and momentum. And then it gets that typical noir-ish wandering. (If you’ve seen enough film noir, you know exactly what I mean; nothing meanders quite so much as the latter half of the second act of a noir plot.) And then we can tell that a key conflict is about to occur at an El Paso motel. We don’t see the violence that occurs. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell pulls up moments too late. We don’t get a clear look at who may have survived. We see a body in a morgue, but at a distance. And for quite a while, I was totally confused about whether a key character had been killed. Then, Sheriff Bell comes back to the motel. We see Anton Chigurh waiting for him in a room. We brace for the violence that will surely come. But it doesn’t. I couldn’t tell why. I couldn’t tell where Chigurh went and why he didn’t attack. Again, I was completely confused. (By the way, I checked Cormac McCarthy’s novel, and this ambiguity isn’t there. For example, Chigurh isn’t in the motel room, he’s outside in a car, so it’s clear why he doesn’t go after Sheriff Bell.)
And then the two final key points occur, as Chigurh confronts Carla Jean and then Sheriff Bell tells his wife of a dream. Two great scenes, but I couldn’t appreciate them fully, because I was still so damn confused over what went down at the motel. Maybe I’m cartoonishly dim, but I felt like there was a stumble here. It’s probably wrong for me to blame this on the Coens. But the point is that I will undoubtedly have to see this movie again a couple times before I can really appreciate it.
Tags: No Country For Old Men, Coen Brothers
5 Responses
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Dan Dorman Says:
It’s Moss’ body in the morgue, isn’t it? Why doesn’t Chigurh kill Bell? Why bring them so close together? Just for tension’s sake? I doubt it. I suppose that’s one of the mysteries that the Coens want us to ponder on. I agree with you on the noir pacing. Still, this is as close to Carol Reed as we are ever going to get. This is our The Third Man.
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alabamudclay Says:
After I saw No Country, I came home and looked on the IMDB message board hoping to find an explanation to Chigurh’s presence in the motel room. There were some good theories, but none of them satisfied me. Some thought we were seeing the sheriff’s imagination, and others thought he was in the room next door. Still it comes across as pretty sloppy, when I’m distracted by an incomplete scene through the rest of the film. Not sure if this one deserved the best film Oscar. I was similarly distracted during There Will Be Blood by the ominous music.
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Dan Dorman Says:
I just watched the DVD last night. It’s now been about 9 hours since I finished it. I still feel mixed about the film. On the one hand it’s this great masterpiece for the Coens (and American cinema) and on the other it’s this problematic stepchild of film noir.
I read an interesting article recently that went: “McCarthy and the Coens have come to bury Clint Eastwood, not to praise him (much less save him)”. Funny. But has Clint actually made a formal “film noir” much less a film portending to be like No Country? Clint’s movies have always operated on their own internal logic (much like the Coens). Even Blood Work — a film that could have been labeled a standard modern film noir — seems to exist in the confines of its own subtle Eastwood-Universe that isn’t anything like a “genre” picture. He just tells his stories from point A to point B. I dunno.
Where No Country bothered me most was in its themes outweighing its narrative. Sheriff Bell was practically useless in terms of the story. He only served to be a “storyteller” in the work. He was like fucking bookends to the story to me. He never really DID anything.
Bardem was spooky and unforgettable. I loved how he made Chigurh so put-upon by the end of the film. A lesser actor (or directors) would have let him simply chew scenery and get away with, well…murder (can you say: Mr. Day-Lewis?).
I’ve also been reading how the Coens have effectively “dismantled” film noir trappings with this movie. Whatever the hell that means. I don’t think they were consciously trying to do anything as such (much like Eastwood doesn’t purposefully try to make his films “fit” any type of classic mold). I believe in No Country the Coens found their ultimate personification of pure evil as a walking/talking force of nature (just like evil exists in human form in Raising Arizona, Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother Where Art Thou, etc). There’s not much difference between the two janitors (Good and Evil) duking it out at the end of Hudsucker then there is in Chigurh and Bell co-existing in the same rural Southwestern landscape of No Country. The only thing is, Chigurh and Bell never really duke it out (in a physical or intellectual sense). I think that’s the real problem of the movie.
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Dan Dorman Says:
as far as the whole motel room scene goes, I think I can only let it slip by because it’s not the first time in the movie that we see Chigurh seem to appear and vanish out of thin air. In the shoot-out on the street between Chigurh and Moss he just disappears (after being shot in the leg mind you) and we are led to believe that he escaped down a dark alley way. Maybe in the motel room he escaped through the blown-out door handle hole…
why the Coens don’t want us to see Moss get killed (nor his dead body in the morgue) is beyond me. Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe you don’t see him get killed in the book as well.
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Dan Dorman Says:
Okay, so I just re-read my rather lengthy comment above and I think I had a rather obvious epiphany. Chigurh and Bell do not “duke it out” because the Coens (and to a larger degree McCarthy) were trying to say that “good and evil” must co-exist together and perhaps — never the twain shall meet. That is why Chigurh walks away in the end to do more evil and Bell just tells stories and gets old. I like in the book how they wrap things up with Chigurh and settle the drug/money business (to some degree) and I think it works better in the movie to not go there. That was a good choice. I think they were going for some level of spiritualism with these basic good and evil archetypes. I wish the motel scene was done better. Maybe a DVD commentary further down the road will settle this.
I like the film. I like it a lot. For as simple as it is, it’s a very complex journey. It dares to be what it is and in the end the good outweighs the bad…at least in terms of the film making.