2007 Best Picture Winner: No Country for Old Men
Sheriff Bell sits at the breakfast table and tells his wife the dreams about his father. He holds back his emotions as he talks about his dead father “Then I woke Up.” Cut to black, and the credits roll.
“That’s it?!? That’s how it ends?!?” That was my reaction after seeing the 80th best picture winner the night before the Oscars ceremony. I mean, after witnessing a brutally suspenseful chase movie only for it to end with nobody getting what they want. The hero dies off-screen, the hitman walks away, and Sheriff Bell dreams about his dead father and how he just woke up. It all just felt pointless and hopeless.
Maybe I was just exhausted after seeing five films in a row, four of which I enjoyed. It wasn’t until a few years later I watched No Country in a class about the Coen Bros. After seeing the film in context with the rest of their filmography, I have to say that No Country is easily their best film. That opinion has only solidified as I catch the movie on TV and rewatch it for this blog.
Josh Brolin is brilliant as Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam vet who has fallen on hard times finds two million dollars of drug money at a deal gone bad. He is pursued by the Cartels and by Anton Chigurh, more on him later. Tommy Lee Jones is brilliant as Ed Tom Bell. It’s easily in the top five of his performances. The opening and closing scenes are a thing of beauty. An actor can deliver outstanding performances in just the eyes. As he recounts that dream about his father, it’s utterly heartbreaking and stoic.
Now the reason for the season. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh. How best to describe Chigurh? A pestilence that belongs to the Texas plains or a familiar figure as seen in other Coen Brother films (Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona; Gaear Grimsrud from Fargo). Chigurh is such a cold and calculating figure who shakes off any wound he gets. He does feel one thing, though; A sick joy that comes from instilling terror and killing his victims. I have a theory about Bardem. Any movie he is in where he has a fucked-up haircut, the movie will be interesting at the least.
On a technical level, No Country matches its thematic brilliance. No one since Ansel Adams has captured the beauty of the west like Roger Deakins. A longtime collaborator of the Coen Brothers, Deakins captures the atmosphere of the story in the frame. That first chase scene where Llewyn returns to the shootout and is chased by a truck is marvelous. That lightning in the background was a stroke of luck to capture. The chase in the city is equally haunting with the orange streetlights and the darkness that surrounds it. What helps make the film so suspenseful is the sound or the lack of it. The hissing of the air tank, the beeping of the tracking device, the “thunk” of the lock hitting the wall (or flesh). It creates the perfect amount of tension. The lack of dialogue also compliments the film. I don’t think any scene had one character provide an exposition. The film exemplifies the idea of showing and not telling. What also makes the film so brilliant is its simplicity and sparseness. No scene feels like it’s showing off but instead flows along so nicely. It helps that the Coen Brothers storyboarded almost every scene.
When I made my first ranking of the Coen Brothers, I picked A Serious Man as my favorite, and thus, their best. While I enjoy the crisis of faith and a cast of character actors lead by an exasperated Michael Stuhlbarg, No Country is the culmination of everything they have worked towards. Blood Simple, the Coen Brothers’ first film, was about a deranged maniac hired to kill a cheating couple in Texas. The film even has their trademark sense of humor, although No Country has it few and far between. It’s almost as if Cormac McCarthy’s novel has been on a journey to the Coen Brothers like that coin. No Country for Old Men is a violent, dark, and timeless masterpiece that deserved every Academy Award it got. And “If it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here.”
