No Country for Old Men

No Country gets great benefits from the outstanding performances at its center - Javier Bardem's cold-blooded killer the kind of outsized stereotype that self-identifies as a Coen creation, but paying dividends in counterpoint to Josh Brolin's quiet desperado and Tommy Lee Jones's mournful good-ol-boy sheriff. I was yanked out of the story when vibe-busting reminders of the old-school Coen Brothers' schtick appeared on screen, especially the straight-out-of-central-casting types who inhabit the film's smaller speaking parts - the motel clerk who woodenly insists Brolin select from a menu of room choices, the mama who dodders through her scenes like a Spike Jonze Jackass parody of the elderly, and even the gas-station proprietor whose highly directed performance almost wrecks that crucial early, mood-setting scene with Chigurh. In a broad comedy like the wonderful paean to country folk and bluegrass O Brother Where Art Thou or the bountiful ode to stoner lifestyles The Big Lebowski, they'd be welcome, maybe even show-stealers. But juxtaposed with No Country's sad-eyed hero performances, they feel forced, inauthentic, even (here's that accusation so often lobbed at the Coens) crudely condescending.

That's not to say that the Coens' style is a liability; they make consistently smart decisions in condensing and adapting McCarthy's novel, especially when it comes to packing the gist of Ed Tom Bell's lengthy monologues from the printed page into snatches of dialogue on screen. They work the story for suspense, fully exploiting the conventions of crime drama in a narrative (McCarthy's) that, eventually, deliberately flouts genre convention to terminate in a meditation on aging and mortality and maybe nostalgia. And they invent a scene that has the sheriff and the killer coming almost eyeball to eyeball across the portal of a motel-room door with a blasted-out lock cylinder, their simultaneous proximity and distance a necessarily cinematic expression that vaults beyond the source material.

But the irony remains: two of our greatest cinema stylists have made the most critically lauded film of their career by ruthlessly corseting their formidable drive and vision into the literary strictures dictated by a great American novel. Seeing it a second time, at home, the melancholy grandeur of the film's final cut to black became even more apparent -- reassurance that I wasn't simply bowing to conventional wisdom by placing it on my top-10 list. No Country For Old Men is a triumph for sure. But for the Coens, it's also something of a capitulation. A-
Posted by Bryant Frazer on March 10, 2024 3:53 PM