I mentioned before that these “best of” lists often include one classic Disney animated film. They also tend to feature one film from the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, the two brothers whose iconoclastic filmmaking style has produced a fair number of great films. Most lists might go with their first Best Picture winner Fargo, and Fargo is both a good choice, one that showcases the general Coen style. The Coen style is a bit hard to pin down, especially as the brothers seem to alternate between bizarre comedies with a dark screwball feel or a drama where arguably no one really wins. Truth be told, the best anyone can really hope for in any Coen Brothers film is to break even, being no better or worse off than they were at the start of the film. Their lives can get worse, but they rarely if ever get better.
That feels like as good a way as any to describe the Stacker list’s Coen Brothers selection, No Country for Old Men, which may be the Coens’ masterpiece as of this typing.
No Country for Old Men is a cinematic adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel, and while I haven’t read that particular book, I have read two others, namely The Road and Blood Meridian, and those may be two of the most violent and depressing books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. No Country for Old Men certainly fits in with that general disposition, and the film opens with the arrest of a mysterious fellow with what appears to be an oxygen tank. The year is 1980, and the man will eventually be named as Anton Chigurh. This is the role that made Javier Bardem famous in the United States, and it’s easy to see why. Armed mostly with an air-powered bolt pistol, a device mostly used to stun cattle but more than capable of killing a human, while Chigurh’s name won’t come out until about halfway through the film, in the first five minutes he will have killed two people. One will be an unsuspecting driver he takes out with the bolt gun after posing as a police officer. The other is a deputy police officer, strangled to death with the very cuffs he slapped on Chigurh before the film even started.
The look of nearly orgasmic, silent glee, for lack of a better descriptor, on Chigurh’s face as he strangles that deputy is one of the few actual emotions the killer shows over the course of the film, preferring instead to show a more single-minded dedication to whatever it is he’s doing. And while Chigurh doesn’t murder everyone he comes across, he comes very close. The only people he seems to really spare are the ones who win a coin toss he initiates.
It’s rather easy to see why Bardem was the break-out performer here, and it’s a credit to his abilities as an actor that he hasn’t been typecast as villains after this role. This film actually has a pretty impressive cast including the likes of Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Stephen Root, Kelly Macdonald, and Garret Dillahunt, but it takes something special to have a Spanish actor, largely unknown to American audiences, essentially steal the film.
And it’s not like he runs clear away with it either. Brolin and Jones arguably are the other two co-leads here, with Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, a retired welder/Vietnam veteran who, while out hunting one day in the Texas countryside, comes across the scene of a drug deal gone bad and absconds with a large sum of cartel money, money Chigurh has been tasked to get back while also probably moving to take down Moss in the process. Chigurh is a relentless pursuer, someone who has the general skills and knowledge necessary to find Moss no matter where the other man hides. It’s actually something to Moss’s credit that he manages to both wound the seemingly implacable Chigurh and stay alive much longer than most people Chigurh encounters, and while Bardem’s scenes with the gas station attendant and pretty much every other one-on-one conversation he has fills the screen with an aura of doom and menace, the cat-and-mouse games he and Moss engage in are also pretty intense considering the two don’t really chat with each other much.
It’s also something of a foregone conclusion that Moss can’t win this one. He just doesn’t seem to realize that. Plus, in a nice touch given all the onscreen violence Chigurh engages in, Moss’s death happens off-screen, as does presumably the later death of his wife Carla Jean (Scottish actress Macdonald doing a pretty good Texas accent to my Jersey-born ears). Truth be told, since there aren’t a lot of women with anything like a substantial role in this film, I actually found Carla Jean’s lone scene with Chigurh interesting as the one person who might have slowed him down. Yeah, other people told him he didn’t have to kill anybody, and Chigurh’s strange honor code won’t let him not do so, but Carla Jean both refused to do the coin toss and likewise basically said she knew she was doomed, calling Chigurh out for his nonsense in the process, so why bother playing his games? She doesn’t appear in the film after this point, but she did seem to stymie Chigurh for just a moment.
Then again, after he leaves, he is badly injured in a car crash, so it’s not like Chigurh is indestructible.
That said, I do recall that many viewers were ultimately at least a little disappointed by the end of film as there was no final confrontation between Chigurh and Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a man who comes across as the classic Western hero. Full of folksy wisdom and generally coming across as a benevolent man who just wants to help, he ultimately chickens out rather than confront Chigurh at the end of the film. This apparently is book-accurate to McCarthy’s novel. Sheriff Bell, with cute scenes with his wife, and in a film full of people who are retired–some analysts think Chigurh himself symbolically represents a form of retirement–makes the decision to simply retire from law enforcement at the end of the film rather than face a psychopath he knows is there happened to strike a raw nerve for a lot of viewers.
Except in many ways, it shouldn’t have. Sheriff Bell’s narration at the start of the film reminds the audience of a simpler time. He speaks of former sheriffs who did their jobs unarmed. He rides on horseback to crime scenes. He is very much the image of the traditional Western hero. He even mentions how he comes from a long line of law enforcement types, that he greatly outlived his own father, and an uncle that he briefly visits (Barry Corbin), another former cop now confined to a wheelchair and living alone in a house full of cats, seems to see some wisdom in Bell’s decision, and that’s not even counting how he’s dreaming of his father waiting for him up ahead in the darkness. Bell may not know what to do with himself, but that’s not the point. The point is, well, Bell is now an old man. His ways are no longer going to cut it. And, unlike some people in the film, he very much knows that. That, more than anything else, is a reference to the title. There’s a new form of evil and violence in 1980s Texas that the Ed Tom Bells of the world never had to deal with before and aren’t really equipped to handle. The wiser ones realize that and get out of the way while they can. It’s not an easy decision, but really, Ed Tom Bell realizes that the land and the people he once knew are either long gone or past their prime, and that he’s not really cut out for his profession anymore. He may not have gotten as much attention as Chigurh and Moss, but he is the one the title refers to. This is a new West, and it’s no country for an old man like Ed Tom Bell.
NEXT: Looks like the Stacker list has one superhero film, and it’s the one we probably should expect. Be back soon as I take a look at my favorite superhero in one of his most acclaimed incarnations with 2008’s The Dark Knight.
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