“Let me ask you something,” Javier Bardem’s character asks Woody Harrelson, who he is about to shoot with a sawed-off shotgun. “If the road you followed brought you to this, what was the point of the road?” In other words, if every choice you ever made culminated in your destruction, was every choice you ever made unnecessary? And if every choice was unnecessary, does that invalidate your reason for living? These, I believe, are some of the conundrums Joel and Ethan Coen were trying to ponder in their bleak, ultra-violent new film No Country for Old Men. If our lives are dictated by a fate we cannot control, or are too powerless to control, what’s the point? I found myself asking the same question when I left the theater. What was the point of the last two hours? What does this film have to say about fate, chance and free will?
The meat and potatoes of this film are simple on the surface. It’s 1980 and the U.S.-Mexico border is a hot spot for drug smuggling and all the bloodshed that necessitates. While out hunting antelope, Llewellyn Moss (played strong and silent by Josh Brolin), stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. The scattered dead bodies stain the desert sand blood red. Amid the carnage he discovers a suitcase containing $2 million in cash, which he promptly makes his own.
Predictably so, the rightful owner of the money dispatches merciless bounty hunter Anton Chigurh (a creepy Javier Bardem invoking a homicidal Johnny Cash with a page-boy haircut amidst an existential crisis) to track down Llewellyn and return the cash. Chigurh proceeds to slaughter his way across the state towards Llewellyn like the personification of all things unstoppably evil.
Tommy Lee Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, an aging sheriff who feels the times have changed so rapidly and regrettably that the tide is irreversible. He sees the wickedness spilling across the boarder infecting all that was once innocent and realizes he is incapable of stopping it. However, in a last ditch effort to save the final shreds of his optimism, he tries to save Llewellyn before Chigurh has the chance to destroy him.
No Country for Old Men is a million miles away from the Coen brother’s movies most people are familiar with. The comedy of Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski is no where to be seen. Even Fargo seems hilarious compared to this, and Fargo was pretty damn violent. This movie is a straight philosophic drama - think of a Sam Shepard play penned by Samuel Beckett.
The meat and potatoes of this film are simple on the surface. It’s 1980 and the U.S.-Mexico border is a hot spot for drug smuggling and all the bloodshed that necessitates. While out hunting antelope, Llewellyn Moss (played strong and silent by Josh Brolin), stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. The scattered dead bodies stain the desert sand blood red. Amid the carnage he discovers a suitcase containing $2 million in cash, which he promptly makes his own.
Predictably so, the rightful owner of the money dispatches merciless bounty hunter Anton Chigurh (a creepy Javier Bardem invoking a homicidal Johnny Cash with a page-boy haircut amidst an existential crisis) to track down Llewellyn and return the cash. Chigurh proceeds to slaughter his way across the state towards Llewellyn like the personification of all things unstoppably evil.
Tommy Lee Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, an aging sheriff who feels the times have changed so rapidly and regrettably that the tide is irreversible. He sees the wickedness spilling across the boarder infecting all that was once innocent and realizes he is incapable of stopping it. However, in a last ditch effort to save the final shreds of his optimism, he tries to save Llewellyn before Chigurh has the chance to destroy him.
No Country for Old Men is a million miles away from the Coen brother’s movies most people are familiar with. The comedy of Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski is no where to be seen. Even Fargo seems hilarious compared to this, and Fargo was pretty damn violent. This movie is a straight philosophic drama - think of a Sam Shepard play penned by Samuel Beckett.
However, in the end, the movie feels incomplete. There are no easy answers and really no resolution. Like Ed Tom Bell realizes, you just have to fight through each day and hope that there is someone out there preparing a warm, safe place for you to sleep because there are bad men out there with existential crises on their minds and sawed-off shotguns in their hands.
1 comment:
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
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