The Coen brothers' latest is a classic with a bad guy for the ages.
The new Ethan and Joel Coen movie,
No Country for Old Men
, opens with several inter-spliced vistas of the vast, empty, hay-yellow landscape of***image1*** borderland Texas (filmed partially in New Mexico). Over these desolate visions comes the voice of third-generation sheriff, Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), as he recalls an interaction he had with a young man who later died in the electric chair because of Bell's police work.
"I've been fixing to kill someone for as long as I can remember," Bell recalls the boy saying.
The next scene finds a sunnily dispositioned and sandy-haired young sheriff strangled by the handcuffs of his prisoner. As the young sheriff writhes, the killer stares off into the distance and a calm and happy expression begins to play across his face.
These first scenes are tossed out like divination bones, harbingers of the type of world into which the audience rapidly descends: a sprawling void of dogged and pitiless death. The expression of ideas and feeling are as indeterminate as they are plentiful. None of these things will come as a shock to those familiar with the Coens' work, or that of Cormac McCarthy, from whose novel
No Country
is adapted. Still, the ruthlessness and formal mastery with which their vision is wrought can still suck away an audience's breath.
But the core of the plot begins in the next sequence. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a welder who, while out on a hunting excursion on the Texas plains, misses the elk he was tracking and comes instead upon the bullet-riddled scene of a drug deal gone awry. Among all the carnage, he soon finds a briefcase filled with $2 million. Once home, he promptly declares himself retired and informs his sweet-as-sweet-tea wife, who works at Wal-Mart, that she's retired, too.
Alas-surprise, surprise-all is not so simple. An indomitable psychopath is soon on Llewelyn's trail.The killer, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), carries at his side a canister of compressed air that powers his weapon of choice: a pneumatic gun of the sort used to kill cattle. Chigurh also decides the fate of his multitudinous victims with the flip of a coin. Moreover, Chigurh is the sort of lumbering bad guy who can walk while you run and still keep up with you.
***image2***Following the bread crumbs of punctured carcasses left behind by Chigurh is Sheriff Bell who, between crime scenes, takes time to pensively mull over the existential and spiritual crises of his near-retirement. Bell is a man who has spent his life fighting the degenerative aspects of society only to have them increase under his watch. This role-that of a weary, worn, tender-hearted cop-is not exactly new for Jones. Still, it seems practice makes perfect. He's pretty damn good at it. In
No Country
he is decidedly at the top of his weary, worn, tender-hearted cop game.
A hunter-becomes-the-hunted motif materializes, it's true. But, through some sort witchcraft, it does not take hackneyed form. This brotherly black magic emerges as much from ambiguity as it does from formal mastery.
No Country
is by turns a black comedy, a crime drama, a Western revenge, an existential adventure and a horror movie. So many genre expectations are dispensed that the audience never has firm ground on which to stand. And it's the plenitude-not only of expectations, but also, as the film takes a more philosophical tact-of meaning that adjourns its closure and, ultimately, renders it a classic. As the literary theorist Roland Barthes once wrote, "At its discreet urging we want to ask the classic text: 'What are you thinking about?'" But the text, wilier than all those who try to escape by answering, 'About nothing,' does not reply, giving meaning its last closure: suspension.
