NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Directors: Joel & Ethan Coen Stars: Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald
Reviewed by PETER MALONE
The Coen Brothers are back to their idiosyncratic world, this time with a story based on a novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy. Intolerable Cruelty was a soufflé and the remake of The Ladykillers was misguided.
This time the setting is 1980. The initial voiceover of a weary sheriff tells us that this is a new west. It is more lawless and deadly than the old days of sheriffs and bad guys: Vietnam has scarred American consciousness and the gangster crime dramas of the past (and of the cities) are now played out in the Texas desert.
With plenty of their dry, wry humour and off-kilter characters, even in the smallest roles of clerks and kids, this is a chase thriller with a high body count as well as a frustrated attempt to administer law and order in a decent way. The Coens and McCarthy are telling us How the West was Lost.
Tommy Lee Jones has become something of a rugged icon of Texas. Here he is the decent one, the old-time sheriff who is a man of common-sense, practical action and useful intuitions.
Javier Bardem (who was raving made in a similar kind of role in Perdita Durango) is a memorable killer (if one wants to remember screen killers). Josh Brolin is surprisingly persuasive as the good man who illustrates the biblical maxim that the love of money is the root of all evil.
Philosophical about good and evil, with a number of yarns rolled in, this is the Coens reworking both crime and the west.
Reviewed by MARCUS SINCLAIR
Set in the vast semi-arid plains of west Texas No Country For Old Men, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, aptly uses this landscape to heighten the harshness of existence - a place that is hot and dusty, where life is cheap, and money is God. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, acclaimed as one of America's foremost contemporary writers of literature, it deals with drug-running from across the US-Mexican border; with the low types involved and the ill-educated poor who see it as a short, sure pathway from poverty towealth.
The film is dominated by a psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh, chillingly played by Javier Bardem, who is determined to obtain a case laden with money which is the booty from a deal that has gone wrong. Thus begins a cat and mouse type chase - the authorities (headed by the local aged sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones), the finder of the case (Josh Brolin), and a private detective (Woody Harrelson) working for those who originally organised and financed the whole operation.
The Tommy Lee Jones character has a dry wit, is philosophical, is slow moving and is unable to cope psychologically with the violence that he now sees around him. As a third generation lawman he laments the passing of the old West - an era that, for him, is tinged with rose coloured glasses. And it is here that the film is least satisfactory. Brutal murders are taking place all over yet the authorities are hardly seen. There are no alarms, no massive man-hunts, no road-blocks or stake-outs. It's as if such is happening in another world, or that officialdom has washed its hands of the whole matter, believing that the situation to contain drug smuggling and murder is hopeless.
Also, the Woody Harrelson character stretches credibility to the utmost. He's been around and has seen Life. Yet his attitude towards the killer is rather lay-back, though he's fully aware as to what he is like. He knows where the missing money is and could easily return it to his employer, but he doesn't. He bargains for a share. Was it greed that motivated him and addled his mind, or was he in the grip of the Freudian Death Wish and didn't realise the severity of the position he was in until it was too late?
McCarthy's writing is powerful and goes well beyond the world of Erskine Caldwell, of James Dickey (Deliverance) and even that of William Faulkner. The sickening brutality he portrays, the low-life he creates, the situations he builds, and his vivid descriptions of the landscapes through which the action occurs hold the reader mesmerised up to the very last page. The Coens' film, though powerful with its imagery, its superb craftsmanship and fine performances by all grips the attention, but when compared to the book it is only a bad dream whilst the other is a nightmare.