NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN Review Pt.2 – Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin

Josh Brolin in Joel Coen and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN Review Part I: The Pros

The Cons:

• I was unable to either relate to or care about any of the "good" characters. Josh Brolin's Llewelyn Moss is supposed to be just an "ordinary guy" who acts the way ordinary guys would act under similar circumstances. Well, perhaps it's true that ordinary guys are really, really stupid, selfish, and greedy, but there's nothing ordinary about the skillful manner the Vietnam veteran uses his firearm to shoot both animals and his pursuer. Not helping matters, Llewelyn's deadly foolhardiness — innocent bystanders get slaughtered because of him — had me rooting for Javier Bardem's Chigurh to come and eliminate that tough-talking "ordinary" health hazard fast.
• The final battle between Chigurh and Llewelyn is never seen. That's quite a letdown, considering that most of the film revolves around their cat-and-mouse game.
• Roger Deakins' cinematography, though visually impressive in its brightly lit way, would have been more dramatically effective had it been shadier. As far as I'm concerned, No Country for Old Men is a horror fairy tale. Had it been treated as such — and that means having a more atmospheric look — it might have become an all-out horror classic.
• The suspense in No Country for Old Men isn't of the edge-of-your-seat kind. Instead, it's more like the sandbag-in-your-stomach kind, similar to what I felt while watching Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Scenes of potentially explosive violence involving peripheral characters are gratuitously milked for minutes at a time.
• I'm not sure if the problem lay with me or Joel Coen and Ethan Coen's screenplay (or Comarc McCarthy's novel), but several plot points made absolutely no sense — e.g., I couldn't figure out how characters could invariably discover where their targets were.
• I didn't buy the film's message that the world is a frightening place and there's nothing that can be done about it, as it's all in the hands of fate. That worldview reminded me of Woody Allen's Match Point (a film I admire), in which fate is to be blamed for the outcome of each character — except that throughout it all, whether in Match Point or No Country for Old Men, human beings are the ones who get the ball rolling. In fact, in No Country for Old Men — with, at times, the Coens' much-too-obvious assistance — they keep on kicking it.
• Javier Bardem winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, when he's as much the film's lead as Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones. That's cheating on real supporting players who have little chance of getting nominated (or winning) when competing with the big guys.

The Question Mark:

Was the fateful climax found in Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces inspired by the car crash near the end of No Country for Old Men? I'm not sure when Almodóvar wrote his film's screenplay — or even if he's ever watched No Country for Old Men, though it's likely that he did. After all, at the time Javier Bardem was Penélope Cruz's off-screen companion (they've gotten married since), and Cruz is one of the stars of Almodóvar's film.

Also, Almodóvar directed Bardem in two films: High Heels (1991) and Live Flesh (1997). And (fate at work?) Bardem was born in the Canaries Islands, where the Broken Embraces crash takes place.

In Sum:

As much as I wanted to admire No Country for Old Men, I found it a well-crafted but uninvolving suspense thriller.

Note: A version of this No Country for Old Men review was initially posted in December 2009.

Photos: Richard Foreman / Miramax Films