Sunday, February 3, 2008
No Country for Any and All Living Things
Joel and Ethan Coen are among the list of a couple dozen filmmakers I try to pay attention to when their new projects are released. No Country for Old Men has been collecting audiences and recognition for several months now and I finally caught up with it. My anticipation was high. It has been a great year for movies and a couple of hours in the off-tilt world of the Coens seemed like a good way to counter a wet and rainy afternoon.
But I forgot that Coenworld sometimes works for me and sometimes doesn't. This film definitely has relations to Fargo (so memorable and individual) but also to Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing and, to an extent, Raising Arizona, which didn't connect with me. And I have never read Cormac McCarthy so I'm not one of those No Country viewers who has that as a frame of reference.
No Country for Old Men shows semi-protagonists dealing with a unsurmountable pure evil force. Not that there is nothing to reflect on here but Javier Bardem's air compressed or air projected cannons get are overwhelming and the body count is so extensive. There are some excellent set pieces, mostly involving ambushes in hotels or motels. Josh Brolin's return to the scene of a drug deal gone of a landscape filled with dead pickups, Mexicans and dogs has to be one of the most ill-advised errands of mercy in the history of cinema. After all the violence, Tommy Lee Jones' waxed poetics at the film's beginning and conclusion of the film seem out of balance with the carnage and intensity. At least they were lost on me. Although I can look at the world from a seventies-era cynicism, I want my protagonists or heroes to at least have a fighting chance.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:45 PM
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