Tommy Lee Jones’s world-weary yet stoic sheriff (does he ever play any other kind?) is just one of the many Oscar-worthy performances in No Country for Old Men, a return to form for the Coens
After one mediocre and one abysmal showing (Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, respectively), the Coen Brothers' fans have been eagerly awaiting their return to the good old days full of pitch-black comedy, sharp dialogue and neo-noir worlds so densely written the scripts trapped light. When No Country for Old Men — an adaptation of a novel by the famously twisted Cormac McCarthy — first appeared on film snobs' radar there was a collective sigh of relief. Finally, after six years, the Coens were making a film that played to their strengths again. No Country could be dark, violent and funny where you least expected it — a “real” Coen Brothers movie.
By any measure, No Country is an excellent film. The story is so bleak and profoundly upsetting that it will hang over anyone who experiences it for weeks. Every performance is Oscar-calibre and the sheer technicality of the film — the nimble camera, moody editing and atmospheric lighting — is some of the best the Coens have ever done. Yet, for the gleaming diamond in the endless sea of Hollywood vomit No Country is, it isn't without its significant flaws.
The most fundamental problem stems from its origin as a novel. In a novel, writing plural protagonists is easy; there's a lot of narrative space to flesh each of them out. On film, in part because of the narrative compression demanded by the form and in part because film audiences lack the benefit of seeing inside a character's mind, we're forced to see any character who appears on screen through a lens of classical plot structuring. Because we're oblivious to all the other characters' deeper motivations, what No Country boils down to is this: Llewlyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is the good guy, Anton Chigurgh (Javier Bardem) is the bad guy, and all other character arcs are aggregate to their conflict. In and of itself, though, this isn't a bad thing. It's what the Coens are good at.
It helps that Bardem portrays Chigurgh as one of the most genuinely frightening screen sociopaths since Hannibal Lector — he's a bogeyman to be sure, but he's an incredibly well-done, believable bogeyman. His chase with poor Moss across the American South and Mexico plays out as one of the most memorable, violent rural epics since Straw Dogs and every second if it is unadulterated hick-noir bliss. The problem comes from the second act climax. In the novel, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is the third protagonist to Moss and Chigurgh, but in the film, he feels ancillary to them until this moment, when we see the culmination of their conflict through his eyes. For an audience that has been understandably viewing Moss and Chigurgh's relationship up until this point as hero and villain, the moment that should be elating — the payoff of the central plot line — is just stunted and distracting.
No Country is a grim story, and though the last 20 minutes could be criticized as being more of a conceit than an ending, this uncomfortable resolution is a satisfying exclamation point on the unnerving message. A word of warning, though: The ragged conclusion is awfully uncharacteristic for the Coens, and anyone expecting the tidiness of Fargo or Miller's Crossing will likely find themselves confused or disappointed.
Necessary criticisms aside, No Country for Old Men is one of the best films of the year, and arguably one of the Coens' best as well. Though it has its issues, they seem more the result of experimentation with the form than any kind of mistake or oversight, and it's tough to discourage that, no matter the result. If No Country does indeed mark a return to form for the Coens, the next film they pen specifically for the screen may be a truer reminder of just how staggeringly talented they are.
