No Country For Old Men Review

Many reviews have been citing the Coen brother's latest film, No Country For Old Men, as a "return to form" from recent lacking efforts, but personally, I never got thrown off- why can't they make a madcap romantic farce (Intolerable Cruelty), an oddball southern crime caper remake (The Ladykillers), and a sparse neo-noir (The Man Who Wasn't There) without people complaining that they've lost their "form"?

In fact, I'd argue that beyond meticulous storytelling and a general black humor sensibility, the Coen brothers don't really have a "form" you could pin down. But No Country is a worthy companion piece to their debut Blood Simple and 1996's Fargo, in that they both concern crime and money in rural towns.

No Country For Old Men is adapted from Cormac McCarthy's artful 2005 thriller, and it's literally shot by shot, line by line from the book. A welder (Josh Brolin) finds a satchel full of cash at the scene of a drug deal gone wrong in the plains, while out hunting. He takes the money, but returns to the scene to bring water to a survivor of the fracas-big mistake. Soon he's running from both sides of the botched exchange- one represented by a truckfull of gun toting Mexicans, and the other by a singularly psychotic villain in the form of Javier Bardem.

Tommy Lee Jones attempts to give the film a soul as the local sheriff, always a step behind the action, who despairs at the type of lunacy the drug trade is bringing to his part of the world. McCarthy's book has more passages of narration from the sheriff than the film, and sets him up as the thematic and moral center much easier than the film does. It might also be that Bardem's utterly serious but darkly hilarious demeanor (and his haircut) steals the show. Either way, it's compelling viewing.

I'd read the novel a few weeks ago, so I knew precisely what would happen as the film came to head- which is to say, it really doesn't. A climactic confrontation happens "offscreen" in both the book and film, leaving the sheriff to put together the pieces, and ruminate on his dreams as the narrative draws to a close. It's a poetic counterpiece to the beginning: Jones gives us some voice over about putting a psychopath on death row while the sunrise illuminates the spare, but beautiful Texas countryside- a juxtaposition of grisly reality and majestic landscape that the entire film embodies.

When to See it: As soon as Humanly possible