Review: No Country For Old Men
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. Read on…