Jonathan Poritsky

In crit­i­cal cir­cles it is often men­tioned that for­eign­ers often have the best per­spec­tive to make films about American life and his­tory. This argu­ment will cite Polanski’s Chinatown; Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; Wenders’s Paris, Texas; and count­less oth­ers as proof of the notion that American-ness is some­thing best con­sid­ered from afar. However, there are two boys from Minneapolis who throw a lit­tle kink into that tried and true theory.

With No Country For Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen have fur­ther devel­oped their tire­less effort to under­stand what it is to be a cit­i­zen of this qcoun­try and, duly, of the world. In the most basic sense, the film is about chas­ing the American dream, rep­re­sented here, as a bag full of money. There are three men going after a piece of the pie: the every­man, the law­man, and the (not so) dark other. How about we rewind and do that again with more semi-colons: Llewelyn Moss, played with indomitable tim­bre by Josh Brolin; Ed Tom Bell, the once-and-future nar­ra­tor offered up by Tommy Lee Jones and the deep pock­ets beneath his weary eyes; and Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, who will get his own para­graph should you care to read on.

It’s not that women aren’t in need of some of that pie, this just isn’t their story. As an adap­ta­tion of a Cormac McCarthy novel, it should come as no sur­prise that American mas­culin­ity takes cen­ter stage.

Let’s take this a step fur­ther. This is more than a cin­e­matic study in Americana. At it’s core, this is a film cri­tiquing American film. At once Scorsese, the next minute Tarantino, and pop­ping into David Lynch for spats at a time, the film winds its way through famil­iar ter­ri­tory only to improve upon the ground­work laid by so many of our most tal­ented auteurs. Sometimes the Coen broth­ers drop us down to B-movie stylings, other times they ramp us up to art house con­fu­sion. After all, what is this story? What is this movie? It is a mon­ster movie, it is a crime thriller, it is a chase movie, it is a period piece, and it is a west­ern. As usual, the broth­ers ask us to set genre aside and enter their world where strains of cin­ema all hap­pen simul­ta­ne­ously. It is this logic that allowed them to meld Greek tragedy, the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury American south, and mod­ern pop cul­ture suc­cess­fully in 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Each of their films can be bro­ken down sim­i­larly, but there just isn’t the time. Back to now.

Javier Bardem has cre­ated a haunt­ing and wholly orig­i­nal vil­lain in Anton Chigurh. With the face of a Greek tragedy mask and the voice of Alpha 60 (some­times Hal 9000, pick your poi­son), he lum­bers across the screen win­ning our heart and tear­ing it out in alter­nat­ing frames. No time is wasted on the devel­op­ment of his evil nature. Rather than ease the audi­ence into his purely evil nature the broth­ers flash right into it mere sec­onds after he first appears on screen. His eth­nic­ity, seem­ingly his­panic, is never dis­cusses or high­lighted. Racism shows up as tiny blips through­out the film, but never in ref­er­ence to his char­ac­ter. You need to know one thing abut Mr. Chigurh; he is a deadly killer and noth­ing else. If you added one or two quirks to the great white in Jaws, he would be the result.

Josh Brolin plays the wannabe cow­boy, a man whose fight­ing words are twice as glo­ri­ous as his actions. Ultimately, his efforts are com­mend­able, but he does not belong in the under­world of bor­der drug traf­fick­ing. What’s so won­der­ful about his char­ac­ter is that we always want him to get out of the hairy sit­u­a­tions he puts him­self in, yet we never ques­tion his judge­ment in allow­ing him­self to get into them in the first place. He is an ordi­nary man will­ingly thrown into an extra­or­di­nary sit­u­a­tion, how­ever, this boy-scout is no match for Chigurh’s Raskalnikov-on-crack men­tal­ity. Watching the two hover around each other, rarely on screen mind you, becomes a del­i­cate bal­let of wits and col­lat­eral damage.

Speaking of ordi­nary men, let us not for­get Tommy Lee Jones play­ing the soon-to-be-retired sher­iff. Every west­ern needs a sher­iff, and this one spends much less time at the O.K. Corrall than any of his onscreen pre­de­ces­sors. Rather, he sits in a cof­fee shop offer­ing up Tiresias like nar­ra­tion to the events hap­pen­ing in his town. Perhaps he is the old man that this coun­try has no room for, this coun­try being replaced by boys with “green hair and a bone in his nose”. It is through his back-in-my-day thoughts that we see a new wild west emerge. The film takes place in 1980, the arguable begin­ning of the infor­ma­tion age. The sher­iff is a relic, a man who detects with his gut and his hands. Those who will replace him will check every­thing in com­put­ers, spend more time at desks, and work more and more with the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to curb local vio­lence. In the end, the vio­lence will remain, and it breaks his heart that he can­not adapt and become a vital cit­i­zen of the future.

When all is said and done, the Coen broth­ers will prob­a­bly be remem­bered for infus­ing the cin­ema with a stun­ning new visual palette through the adop­tion of cut­ting edge tech­nolo­gies. While the Camerons and the Spielbergs of the world have worked to cre­ate worlds out of thin air through the advent of dig­i­tal imagery, the Coen broth­ers have been using the very same tech­nol­ogy to bet­ter focus their ideas. And this time out, it would seem as though they’ve per­fected heir rev­o­lu­tion­ary use of color to cre­ate a truly vibrant work of art. If each frame could be laid out in a row, the result would be some­thing wor­thy of a spot at the Louvre. Finally, some­one knows how to use the 2.35:1 aspect ratio! This ain’t a film you can watch pan and scan kids. Kudos to Roger Deakins for his usual pow­er­house photography.

And not to dwell on the tech­ni­cal mas­tery of this film too long, but the sound­track is about three times as amaz­ing as the cam­er­a­work, and that means a lot. Craig Berkey, a new and hope­fully per­ma­nent mem­ber of the Coen cabal, has woven a truly phe­nom­e­nal sound mix that, for me, was the real star of the film. The diegetic ten­sion is mixed with sounds that could only be described as aural mood enhancers. Throw in Carter Burwell’s sparse music cues, and you have a mix that will make your ears do somersaults.

In the end, No Country For Old Men is a won­der­ful film, but I don’t want to over­play how great it is, if you can believe that. The film has received such a pos­i­tive inter­na­tional recep­tion because there is a dearth of such tech­ni­cal mas­tery out there. Ultimately, all movies should be made like this, with the same care and matu­rity that the broth­ers have been tem­per­ing for the past two decades. Until film­mak­ers start get­ting hip to that, then yeah, No Country… is going to top many peo­ples’ lists.

And it really is that good.