No Country for Old Men

Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen

Tomorrow night when the Oscars are handed out I will be deeply disappointed if this film wins Best Picture. It is not that I didn’t like the film; I really enjoyed it. But I don’t think that it was the best picture in the past year. This film cannot compete with There Will Be Blood. Despite being a really intense, well acted film, I wouldn’t even rate it the best of the Coen brothers’ output. If I was to sit down to satisfy a craving for a Coen film, I would watch Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy and The Big Lebowski in that order before I would watch No Country. Okay, maybe not Lebowski, but you get the point.

Much has been said about the performance of Javier Bardem, and rightly so. He delivers one of the best performances as a villain that I have seen in quite some time. He’s the kind of bad guy you really fear. He is ruthless and vicious, yet takes great care to avoid getting the blood of his victims on his boots. Bardem appears to be larger than life, not just figuratively but literally. Because of the camera angles and zooms he appears to be a very large and intimidating man.

Because of the attention given to Bardem’s acting, the presentation of Josh Brolin has been largely overlooked. When I first saw previews of the film I thought that Brolin was Kurt Russell. It’s hard to believe that he ever played Brand Walsh in The Goonies. His mien is the sort of dry manner that is seen in so many Coen brothers films. At times he reminded me of Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona. At other times I could see Tim Robbins from Hudsucker.

The Coens always find a way to subtly link their films together and this was no exception. Brolin’s character Llewelyn Moss and his wife live in a trailer in Texas. The floor plan of the trailer is exactly the same as the one from Raising Arizona. It could be the same one. Who knows? In one seen from No Country Tommy Lee Jones, who plays a local sheriff, is looking for Moss, and searches through the trailer. Earlier in the film when Bardem had broken into the trailer he had used a high pressure tank to blast the dead bolt out of the door. As Jones bends down to examine the mark that the dead bolt left on the wall, I can’t help but think of the scene in Arizona when Randall ‘Tex’ Cobb is searching the trailer and bends down to examine the word ‘FART’ scrawled on the wall.

One thing that this film really has to its credit is the dialogue. As usual the Coens did a great job with the witty and disturbing interactions between characters. There is more that I want to say about a careful message within the film, but I cannot do so without ruining the film for anyone who has not seen it. If you see it, come ask me later about the significance of the phrase “Beer leads to more beer.”

Despite how negative I might sound about this film, I still really enjoyed it. I would still give it a 7.5 out of 10.


Next Up: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, directed by Andrew Dominik