No Country for Old Men

Alfred Hitchcock, among his many cinematic talents, had a knack for elevating popular entertainment to high art. Joel and Ethan Coen have proven themselves adept at doing the exact opposite: turning art into popular entertainment. Working in the post-modern Hollywood universe, none of the Coen Brothers’ films are outrageously original; they seem to relish jumping into recognizable formulas between more prestigious projects. But when they choose to bring their A-game, no filmmaker can match their ability to craft indie ideas with mass-audience appeal. Fargo announced their artistic arrival, but No Country for Old Men cemented their reputation.

Leaning heavily on their previous set-in-Texas potboiler, Blood Simple, the Coens waste little time and even fewer words getting things started. Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon a pile of bodies and a stack of cash in the desert. Taking a calculated risk, he absconds with the money, only to be pursued by a relentless psychotic hitman named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), whose weapon of choice is a souped-up air compressor. As the two play cat-and-mouse across the country, local lawman Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) stays one step behind, following the evidence and a trail of corpses left in their wake.

Now the recipients of their second screenwriting Oscar, the Coens take a decidedly less-is-more approach in adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel. Dialogue is doled out in small portions. Full sentences are often replaced by shrugs. Yet every word is a masterpiece in its stripped-down simplicity, and all that silence is emphasized by the absence of any musical score. It would be almost unbearably depressing if there weren’t flashes of morbid wit peppered in just the right places, echoing the more overt humor found in films like Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy.

The film is still a few degrees from perfect. After a white-knuckle two-act performance, things begin to slow considerably toward the conclusion. Many will argue that the Coens’ refusal to deliver the expected good-versus-evil showdown is yet another aspect of their genius; a cinematic carrot dangled in the audience’s face. That may be. No Country is more interested in psychological closure than physical catharsis. But that final cut to black is a rude interruption of the bloodlust that has been building for two hours of screen time—and the last 20 years of the Coens’ career.

THE FEATURES: Benefitting greatly from the Blu-ray polish, Roger Deakins’ photography is a vision of Western iconography: blood-red sunsets, acres of scrub brush and miles of neon signs. Beyond the transfer, the disc includes a half-hour making-of featurette, Working with the Coens (8 min) and Diary of a Country Sheriff, focused on the character work of Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem.