No Country for Old Men - DVD Review
Mar 24th, 2008 by Brinson
I am on of the few morons unfortunate that didn’t go to see No Country for Old Men in the theaters. Fortunately, our media relations department (read: me) was lucky enough to stumble upon some advance copy review DVDs for the movie. Even more fortunately, I just happened to hook up my new surround sound on my HD television. So I sat down last night, after the weekend long slew of madness to finally watch the movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Yes, we will be giving away DVD copies. No, we haven’t figured out what the contest is yet; when we do we’ll put it in the “contest” section above and announce it here. Onto the review, after the jump…
No Country for Old Men is the Coen Brothers latest jaunt. They are, obviously, the geniuses that wrote Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou?, so my expectations were high for both the quality of the film and the dark side of the humanity, with a touch of comedy (bear in mind, I somehow knew nothing about this movie before watching it, other than my brother said I would “be scared”, because he thinks I can’t handle horror films…I, um, totally wasn’t scared.) Anywho, my expectations got met and progressively shattered by the quality of the film and the two hours of suspense that followed.
It’s a “period piece”, to borrow from the spectacular “Making of…” in the Bonus Features and it’s set in 1980. I find this particularly ingenious for a number of reasons. First, there are no cell phones in 1980. That changes everything in relation to plot movement, particularly when there is a sense of “chase” that follows throughout. Secondly, 1980 really was a changing period of time in American culture. Now, in many parts, it involved glam rock, but in Texas, the manifestation of drug culture stemming from the close proximity to Mexico juxtaposes well with the primitive nature of law enforcement. That’s where Tommy Lee Jones, playing the role of Ed Tom Bell, the protaganistic sheriff, comes in.
Tommy Lee represents the moralistic and naive side of society that is reaching for some sort of order in the evolving society that seems to be drowning in violence and drug counter culture. He’s a little to the right side of Josh Brolin, playing Llewelyn Moss, who, you see, was a simple country boy. One might say a cockeyed optimist, who got
himself mixed up in the high stakes game of world diplomacy and international intrigue. Oh wait, wrong review. Although Kramer wasn’t entirely off — Moss’ character stumbles upon a pile of money and the plot centers around his attempts to escape from this person (we know it’s Javier Bardem playing antagonistic sociopath Anton Chigurh) that is attempting to track him down for the money. It seems simple, and it actually is. But that’s the beauty of seeing something that the Coens do within a movie, specifically the thematic presence of a Cormac McCarthy novel, that makes this movie so fascinating.
And it’s not that those themes are so obscenely esoteric that they don’t present themselves on the forefront, either. Clearly, there’s something to Chigurh’s character — a total disregard for the essential tenants of even the most violent society — that make the movie so horrifically violent and fascinating. It’s equal part western, equal part horror, as “close as we will ever come” to an action movie according to the Cohens, and it even has some small town Texas comedic charm. But Chigurh’s completely unexpected yet patiently lethal actions drive the plot; despite Moss’ best efforts to escape, it’s almost as if he doesn’t know enough about the external world to plot out a proper escape route. He represents simplified Americana at it’s best, almost like a character out of The Wire, in the sense that it his knowledge of the everything that surrounds him is lacking at best. Chigurh may not be worldly, but in both his accent and behavior he comes across as someone, or maybe something, that defies the logic of this simple Texas world that Bell and Moss inhabit. And that world, “organic” and accurate portrayed, is as important a character as either of the three primary members of the cast (or even Woody Harrelson’s charmingly yokeled and overconfident assassin character). That’s why the Coens, as is typical of their work, put so much detail into the surroundings.
As the members of the crew mentioned in the “Working with the Coens” feature on the bonus section, “each screw” is important; they’re that focused on all of the intricacies of their movies, and it shows. Because there is that technical focus on each individual portion of the movie while making it, a certain dramatic presence shines through in each individual scene. When you break down the movie, in fact, it only seems like there are really 5-10 locales, and that’s even with three main characters. Yet there’s an intense plot movement in this little amount of space–while Chigurh and Moss physically and verbally battle for the money, Bell attempts to figure out what it all means. In the end, maybe nothing. But maybe that’s the point (and it’s an applicable point today)–whatever we’re fighting against today, in the basic sense of society constantly confronting a sense of change in what is considered right and wrong, well, we don’t like to push all our chips in without knowing what we’re up against.
Or maybe I’m just being high minded and reflective. But that happens a lot when I see a damn good movie, and that’s exactly what No Country is; if you haven’t seen it, it should go without saying that you need to hustle up you local purveyor of digital video discs and purchase it. An absolute A.
[...] Wrestlemania matches ever. Bright Black Internet - Remember when Britney was a hot piece of ass? Brahsome - Review of No Country for Old Men. Mac G’s World - Mac G is on Spring Break. Hottest Girls [...]