It's Been Travelling Twenty-Two Years To Get Here

I love me some Coen Brothers. If pressed to make a list of my favorite 50 movies, most of their stuff would be high on that list, especially Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink and naturally The Big Lebowski. I do have to say though, that of late my opinion of Joel and Ethan’s talents has been a bit tarnished. Intolerable Cruelty is a pretty funny movie, but seems to lack that Coen Brothers’ sparkle. The Ladykillers was awful, it pained me to get through it. So, I went into their new one with more than a little trepidation.

I will say that No Country For Old Men is, in my opinion, one of the best films they have ever made.

Much like Blood Simple, it is for the most part an exercise in tension. It opens with an off screen, dry Texas drawl over wide pictures of dry Texas landscapes. You are calmly introduced into this world, but in a moment the story is off and running and you are at its mercy until its end. The basic line of story is a Texas hunter stumbles upon millions when he stumbles upon a drug bust gone bad. He is soon being tracked by a psychotic killer with his own form of morals and a can of compressed air. Soon there enters in an elder country sheriff who sets about in his stoic way to make sense of what has happened and what continues to happen. In the film worlds of Joel and Ethan Coen, all bets are off. There are no guarantees that the good guy will prevail, or that the bad guy will prevail for that matter. There’s no guarantee that the good guy is the good guy.

Tommy Lee Jones plays the sheriff precisely as It needs to be played, with a heartbreaking intensity just below the resigned, old Texan. And Javier Bardem, playing the obviously dressed man in black to Jones’ sheriff’s whites and looking like Emo Phillips gone way, way wrong, is so effectively creepy as to make you nervous just knowing he’s in the scene. He’s not a typically over the top psycho, he has a rationality that grounds him and makes him that much more frightening. He is a man with a strong work ethic, it’s just that his job is tracking people down and fucking them up.

Underneath the tightly constructed Western/Caper Gone Wrong film, beneath the chases and the shootouts and country logic, is a primary idea of how the roads you take lead you to where you are. Visually throughout the film there are roads, and the dialogue subtly points this out a number of times, all without banging you over the head with the idea.

Ultimately, I was enthralled with this film from beginning to end, even during the slower moments of simple character dialogue. I feel that the Coen’s have remembered something that many filmmakers forget; there is sublime drama in simply listening to, and watching, people talk. The film ends like a meaningful whisper in your ear. When the credits came up I felt this whirlwind of emotions and a realization that I was not breathing, I was on the brink of crying, of laughing, of giving a loud cheer for the realization that film is not dead.

I cannot recommend this film highly enough.