I got a new stereo installed in my car on Friday, so I can plug the iPod in directly rather than using one of those stupid FM transmitter gadgets, and the installation guy said it would take a few hours. So I did a little shopping, and then went to see the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.
The one-sentence review is basically “Just like Fargo, only set in Texas and not funny.” As with any Coen Brothers movie, it’s beautifully done on a technical level– the camera work is great, the shots are set up very well. There’s great acting as well, particularly from Tommy Lee Jones as Frances McDormand– I mean, Sherrif Ed Tom Bell, and Javier Bardem as the psycho hit man Anton Chigurh.
It’s not exactly an uplifting story, though you got that from “Coen Brothers” and “Cormac McCarthy” above. Plot spoilers below the fold, so click through at your own risk.
The story is pretty much straight noir: Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) is out hunting, and runs across the remnants of a drug deal gone bad. There’s a truckload a dope, a bunch of dead bodies, and a little ways away, a dead man with a satchel containing $2 million. There’s also a dying man, who asks Moss for water. He takes the money, but wakes up in the middle of the night feeling guilty about not giving water to the dying man, so he goes back to the scene with a jug of water, and some of the parties to the original deal show up and chase him away, leaving his truck in the desert.
He sends his wife to hide with her mother in Odessa, and goes on the run, pursued by the implacable Anton Chigurh, who kills just about everybody he meets in the movie. Meanwhile, Tommy Lee Jones is investigating the killings in the desert, and dispensing folksy wisdom.
This is fairly standard noir/ action movie fodder, and in a typical story, you would expect a showdown between Chigurh and Moss, or Chigurh and Bell, or possibly Bell and Moss. Instead, the principals never meet– Moss and Chigurh blast away at each other, and talk on the phone, but never come face-to-face (at least not on-screen), and Bell narrowly avoids running into Chigurh at one point, but they never meet or talk. Chigurh cuts a bloody swath across west Texas, and Moss gives him a good chase, but in the end, everybody but the psycho killer and the sherrif ends up dead.
It’s an odd take on a fairly typical noir plot (Kate asked “Why would anybody want to make a movie of that?” when I described it, and I pointed out that there are dozens of books and movies with the same basic “lowlife finds large sum of illicit cash, and everything goes pear-shaped” plot outline). The attraction of this particular movie is not so much the story as the acting and filmmaking. Bardem is brilliantly creepy, and Jones turns in a great performance as an aging lawman who’s watching the world go to hell (so he thinks) and powerless to do anything about it. The Coens, as always, have a great way of making fairly stage-y dialogue feel real (though there’s still a little of their characteristically uneasy relationship with class issues), and the shots of the barren Texas landscape have a certain stark beauty.
I haven’t read the book, or anything else by McCarthy, but I understand that he’s noted as something of a literary stylist. In that respect, the Coens are probably a perfect choice to adapt the book, being noted for fairly stylized films themselves. The fixation on small details– there are more shots of people turning screws in this movie than you usually see in a year– and the utter lack of incidental music combine to give it a great sense of tension, even when nothing in particular is happening.
This is an excellent movie, if you like this sort of thing. It’s not cheery holiday fare, though, so don’t go in expecting to have your spirits lifted.