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No Country For Old Men
Many fine novels buck and bridle under the constraints of movie adaptation. Others open up to the form as if it was a natural evolution, the film complimenting the book and vice versa. John Huston's The Maltese Falcon is a classic example, the movie and Dashiell Hammett's novel are now virtually indivisible to anyone who is familiar with them both. The Coen brothers' film of Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men is of this ilk. One of contemporary American literature's great prose stylists, McCarthy has written several very tough, violent Westerns in words that seem to have been hewn from the landscape itself, and which have mostly resisted Hollywoodisation - although his "Blood Meridian" is high on the wish-list for several directors, including Tommy Lee Jones and Andrew The Assassination of Jesse James Dominick. (If that seems like a long sentence to you, you haven't read much McCarthy). His gentler All The Pretty Horses did get made, but Billy Bob Thornton disowned the heavily cut version released by Miramax a few years back. A linear thriller set in the modern West (it was published in 2005 but set in the early 1980s) No Country might have been mapped out as a movie treatment - it's a bit like an Elmore Leonard page-turner, notwithstanding a few philosophical ruminations (most of which have bitten the dust in the Coens' otherwise markedly faithful take on the material). Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin - and what a year he's had!) happens across the aftermath of a massacre out in the desert, tracks down the bleeding corpse of the last man standing, and decides to cling to those nine-tenths of the law that talk about possession. Then he does a fool thing, returning to give a dying man a drink of water. It's potentially a fatal kindness.
These early scenes out in a desert basin -�a handful of pick-up trucks ringed by bullet-ridden bodies - are shot by Roger Deakins and edited by the Coens (under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) with tremendous composure - it's not just the cowboy hats that make this the closest thing they've done to a Western. The patient tempo is a welcome change of pace after their increasingly frantic farces; they allow the gravity of the situation to sink in good and slow. Then they let the dogs loose for a ferocious chase scene, the ultimate postie's nightmare. If the dog seems frightening, he's a pussycat beside Chigurh, the implacable assassin played by the great Spanish actor Javier Bardem. In McCarthy's book he's less flesh and blood than the Epitome of Evil, a deadly ghost who's always a crime scene ahead of Texas sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). Sporting the kind of haircut that can only be meant to incite a fight, Chigurh totes a kind of air-pressured cattle gun as his current weapon of choice (we gather he likes the novelty value). Bell and his deputies are bewildered by an accumulation of corpses with leaky foreheads but no bullets in the vicinity. Chigurh tracks Moss, meanwhile Bell tracks the both of them in the forlorn hope of averting disaster. Meanwhile Llewelyn's wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald, whose come a long way from Trainspotting) frets and flees in the opposite direction. In times past the Coens might have cocked a snook at the denizens of the motels, trailer parks and gas stations who fill out this spare, brusque narrative. But the supporting characters retain their dignity here. Most of the humour comes directly from the laconic West Texas argot McCarthy catches so well: "It's a mess, ain't it sheriff?" observes Bell's deputy (Garret Dillahunt, from Jesse James and Deadwood). "If it ain't it'll do til the mess gets here," he replies.
Jones was born to fill these boots, though in truth Bell is never an active agent in the proceedings, more of a dismayed bystander at the oncoming crash of greed, opportunism and dreadful nihilism that seems to have poisoned American society. Such dismay isn't new in the Coens' work: Marge in Fargo and even the Dude himself would probably share the sentiment. But it's been some time since they've allowed themselves to strike such a grave note. Gripping from first frame to last, No Country For Old Men is consummate filmmaking, and the Coens best for a decade. Tom Charity 
More information about No Country For Old Men » Critics' Reviews
West Texas, 1980. Out hunting deer in the desert down by the Mexican border, Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh... read more on www.timeout.com Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
Geoff Andrew, Time Out