Depending on
your take, the Coens have been off their game, under par, or basically crap of
late. Of course, the devotee (easy to spot: goateed, bespectacled, Little
Lebowski Urban Achievers T-shirt) might posit some notion where they were
deliberately sabotaging their own reputation in some advanced form of
self-mockery. Who knows? It remains tough to argue that Intolerable Cruelty and
The Ladykillers are of the same calibre as the preceding nine straight
wacko-treasures (yes, including Hudsucker) that sealed their glowing rep as the
hippest geeks around.
Well, this
fresh in: whatever mosquito was buzzing in their ears is now a small red stain
on the flock wallpaper. The Coens have rediscovered their mojo, with, dare we
say it, a new maturity. There is also something back-to-basics about No Country
For Old Men, adapted from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s
violent neo-Western. It’s got Blood Simple’s dark moves, that clammy sense of
death lurking in the barren Texan landscape. And being a knotted tale of crime
innately wrapped up in an imposing location, it shares DNA with Fargo and
Miller’s Crossing.
What surprises
is how the film remains both recognisably McCarthy’s terse and sorrowful
parable, and a Coens enterprise bathed in oil-black humour. Despite the fact
that the brothers lift much of the dialogue verbatim from the page, in the
mouths of their cast the lines sound like choice Coenisms: all jazzy
syncopations or deadpan comebacks. “If I don’t come back, tell my mother I love
her,” Josh Brolin’s sort-of hero Llewellyn Moss tells his wary
but perceptive
wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) before he heads into the mouth of trouble.
“Your mother’s dead,” she retorts. “Then I’ll tell her myself,” he sighs.
The plot is
triple-headed, with the narrative shifting focus whenever one of the leads
seems to be taking centre stage. We start eyeing the tremulous determination of
Moss, a local hunter who happens upon the remains of a drug deal gone badly
wrong. Cadavers cook in the desert sun, even a dead dog, and a trail of blood,
splattered like ink along the parched ground, leads Moss to a case containing
two million dollars. He elects, as all noir folk are supposed to, to take the
money and run. Bad move considering the clean-up guy is Anton Chigurh (Javier
Bardem), a killer with the implacable dedication of a Terminator and the domed
haircut of a psychopathic Monkee. What proceeds is a startling chase movie
scattering through the border towns, grimy motels, and dry gulches of West
Texas. Always two steps behind is the old man of the tale, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell
(Tommy Lee Jones), a lawman longing for retirement, facing an evil that he can
no longer decipher. This is a new crew for the brothers to play with. Jones is
a perfect fit for the weatherworn Bell: he is Texan to his core, and looks as
if he is entirely the product of McCarthy’s Biblical prose. Age has granted him
stillness as a performer, and he gives the movie a grace above its lashing
violence. Brolin, battered from pillar to post, is the strong, doomed heart of
the story. But Bardem’s is the role with flamboyant possibilities — a
stone-cold killer obsessed with chance, holding lives to the random toss of a
quarter. He is the embodiment of evil as blank force made breathtakingly
plausible. With his Spanish accent flattened, his voice seems to come from a
place not wholly human.
Those who find
the Coens’ smarty-pants routines insufferable will find relief in the
naturalism on show. This is not a world fastened beneath the hermetic seal of
their whirligig genre-bending, but one that lives and breathes and bleeds.
There is something resonant in Bell’s soulful philosophy, something tender in
Moss’ love of his wife.
And we still
get all the off-centre mannerisms that made the brothers so much fun to begin
with. Although, silence is a tool we’ve not encountered before. Sure, Billy Bob
Thornton barely uttered a syllable in The Man Who Wasn’t There, but we had his
interior drawl. Here, between the bursts of visceral action, the film hangs on
a terrifying soundlessness and the striking atonal power of sharp noises
against nothingness: a bulb being unscrewed, a footfall on a wooden floor, the
soft breath of wind over hardscrabble terrain. Even Carter Burwell’s score is
defined by its imperceptibility — made up only of low groans and eerie
whistles.
If the final
act strikes out against formula to downplay rather than crescendo, it is true
to the book. The simple satisfaction of traditional showdowns is evaded for a
lyrical note that strikes both as deeply pessimistic and strangely pure. There
is something of Miller’s Crossing’s noble farewell about it. Those brothers
from another planet have returned to Earth.
Grade - A
Violent,
poetic, gripping, thrilling and blackly funny: that’ll be the Coens doing what
they do best then. Now with added humanity.
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