No Country for Old Men: a cast of manly men.
Film
Texan noir
by Matt Nippert
The Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is a spare and excruciatingly tense thriller.
If Anthony Hopkins is best known as Hannibal Lecter, No Country for Old Men should see the Spanish-born Javier Bardem forever typecast as Anton Chigurh, coin-tossing sociopath. His name rhymes with sugar, but there’s nothing sweet about this malevolent force of nature.
With a profile seemingly cast on Easter Island and a mop haircut suggestive of a demented Beatle, while wielding a hissing, clicking pneumatic bolt-gun – usually seen at the killing end of a meatworks – as well as a silenced shotgun, Chigurh is certainly memorable. And with a body count well into double figures, there’s no denying the chilling efficiency of this human slaughterman.
The landscape Chigurh stalks is spare – the desert, trailer parks, twopenny motels and the wide roads of 1980s Texas – and it sure looks great. No Country is directed and adapted by Ethan and Joel Coen and based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name.
Good ol’ boy and trailer-park resident Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) goes a-huntin’ and stumbles across the scene of a Mexican standoff. With bodies, drugs and dead dogs strewn across the landscape, Moss makes off with a satchel containing $1.2 million and he’s just smart enough to think he’ll get away with it. Chigurh gives chase, joined on the hunt by laconic sheriff Ed Tom Bell (a scene-savouring Tommy Lee Jones) and cocky bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson).
The set-up is gritty western folk pulp, but the Coens use the minimal material – dialogue is a considered drawl, no rapid-fire patter here – to craft an excruciatingly tense thriller. The creaking of floorboards, the beeping of a transponder, the deliberate unscrewing of a light bulb and the low hiss of Chigurh’s bolt-gun are enough to set nerves to stunned. The only aspect of the film lacking minimalism is the violence, which comes in short, sharp, shocking and regular bursts.
The Coens let their leading men (and, with the exception of Kelly Macdonald in a supporting role, the cast are all male) be manly men. The masculine disciplines of folk wisdom, forensics and medicine are the order of the day.
Bell tracks from horseback and reads the time of death from corpse bloat and coyote scavenging. Chigurh picks pants out of his own blasted leg while sitting on the toilet and later makes a sling out of a child’s shirt to support a compound fracture. Moss has no need for James Bond’s Q, as after a trip to a hardware store he is more than capable of sawing off his own shotgun.
But it isn’t all Man Alone self-reliance and Silence of the Lambs slaughter, as the Coens haven’t neglected their talent for cutting tension with wry comedic asides. Bell bounces off his gullible halfwit of a deputy, and Llewelyn, realising he is out of his depth, decides to go bush and tells his girlfriend, “If I don’t come back, tell mother I love her.”
“Your mother’s dead, Llewelyn,” she says.
“Well,” he says, leaving his trailer, pausing, “I’ll tell her myself then.”
The pacing is deliberate and confident, and the rumbling black hole of a plot draws Llewelyn, Bell and Chigurh inevitably together. Old Country is tight until the end, where the conclusion is blankly ambiguous. As the laconic Bell notes after recounting a tale about an especially stubborn cow at the meatworks, “Even in the contest between man and steer, nothing’s certain.”
But if anything is assured, this film as a whole is. Of the three sets of brothers currently plying their trade in Hollywood, the Coens are the only duo to successfully cross genres and generate consistently good results.
Compared with dark action duo Andy and Larry Wachowski (the Matrix trilogy and V for Vendetta) and gross-out kings Bobby and Peter Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary, The Heartbreak Kid), the Coens have adeptly managed farcical thriller (Fargo), stoner comedy (The Big Lebowski) and a restaging of The Odyssey in 1930s Mississippi (O Brother, Where Art Thou?).
And now, with No Country, they can tick off noir western. Whatever next?
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.
