No Country for Old Men
by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Barry Corbin, Beth Grant, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Rodger BoyceDirector: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
Cinematographer: Roger Deakins
Composer: Carter Burwell
Editor: Roderick Jaynes
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Original Language); French (Original Language)
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 122 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-03-11
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: WALT DISNEY VIDEO
Movie Reviews of No Country for Old Men
Movie Review: Dark, disturbing, thought-provoking--especially for anyone who plans to grow old.
Summary: 5 Stars
Translation of the title: the older we get in this finite world, the more conscious we become of our mortality and death. Some of us pretend we can beat it, most of us see it as irrational and unfair, practically all of us avoid or at least postpone thoughts about the subject, instead preferring to wait around and see what happens. (Hence, the increasing popularity of the one-word utterance: "Whatever.")
Tommy Lee Jones says in the latter stages of the story that he's quitting as sheriff. He had expected "God to somehow come into his life" but is now too fully aware that God much less he himself is over-matched. The film's nemesis is a merciless "executioner" with less conscience than The Terminator and sufficient inscrutability to make even Woody Harrelson's perceptive diagnosis of him (as a psychopathic killer with principles, albeit devoid of "morality") inadequate. In short, the film is a version of an Ingmar Bergman film like "Through a Glass Darkly" or perhaps an earlier film like Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"--the primary difference being that the Coen Brothers' filmic and narrating style is more apt to catch the attention of a larger, even mass, audience. It's doubtful many of those who see the film will be satisfied with the conclusion. In fact, there is no closure, thus breaking an unwritten rule of all cinema. Recall how Hitchock has a shrink appear at the end of "Psycho" to explain in logical terms the character of Norman Bates and the whole narrative for us. And when the 1919 German expressionistic film, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," played before American audiences, an actor was hired to appear on stage at the end of the movie to assure us that the monstrous killer-psychopath was now completely cured (no need to worry about a Hitler or Nazi movement). And so we would all like to believe--about extended life-spans, the "cures" of medicine, the progress of science. But the older you get--and the more inquisitive--the more you realize that the advertisers-promoters-money-hungry pharmaceutical companies, cosmetic surgeons, "powerful" positive thinkers--have sold us all a bill of goods. Like the characters in the film, we walk around saying we don't know what's going to happen next, pretending that life is an open and free proposition and that we could be one of the "lucky ones," awaiting the equivalent of personal fame and fortune if not immortality.
Josh Brolin appears to be the sympathetic "hero"--flawed by greed and, like the characters of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," making what could be a fatal mistake. Yet he has a John Wayne-like rugged individualism, a knack for survival, and commands instant respect from those around him once they learn of his service in "Nam"--but that won't get you diddly in the relentless, fatalistic, flip-of-a-coin determinism that, in the Coen Brothers' view of modern existence, controls our lives. Brolin's conscience requires him to return to the scene of a crime with water for the survivor of a drug deal gone terribly bad, yet he can dismiss his wife's concerns for her mother. And in this instance we as the audience can afford to dismiss them as well. By this time we're conditioned to expect such a remark to be followed by the Executioner's (Javier Bardem--looking like a smaller but more chilling version of Schwarznegger or Andre the Giant) quick extermination of the person so named via his powerful weapon with its menacing silencer. But that would follow a certain pattern of logic--instead she dies of cancer. And when our leading contender for hero is momentarily distracted by a sunbathing babe in long shot, there's no need any longer to even play out the executions. We're not permitted the privilege of seeing him bravely succumb to the enemy: after all this, he's instant "dead meat" floating on a motel swimming pool (motels outnumber "homes" by a considerable margin in this movie--after all, who among us can claim NOT to be a transient).
Brolin's wife suddenly becomes a central figure, but only briefly. She at least has no illusions about getting a lucky roll of the dice. Her fate, like that of all mortals, is preordained, and she refuses to play the Executioner's coin-flip game, calling it more accurately: "It's not me or the coin that decides what happens to me. It's you." But in this circular question about free will and the meaning of life, Bardem answers her back: "You're wrong. That's how I got here." Each of us could not have been born had the slightest circumstance been changed on the night (or whenever) we were conceived. And who knows why we were born as human beings and not cats? It's all a game of chance, and there's isn't even an authentic card dealer. (The viewer can only speculate why the Executioner sees his own dicy birth as license to reverse the process--serving as the agent of hastening death for all. Is he sparing his victims Kierkegaard's "sickness onto death"--a charitable interpretation, yet his actions practically resist characterization as "evil" due to their inexorable and mechanical necessity). Because of him, the movie destroys all of our illusions and ultimately goes after the most hideous sin of all--which even after the Bible, the great tragedians, all the world's important literature and religions, we still can't seem to learn: pride, hubris, appropriating God's prerogatives. When will we learn? Why can't we? Why must we be so prideful in the face of so much evidence to the contrary?
But therein lies the film's admission of Aristotle's "fatal flaw," and along with it the small ray of light in the film (along with some moments of humor, which even the critics seem to have missed). Brolin, after all, did make a mistake and had the arrogance to think he could get away with his theft of the drug money intended for someone else. And for a moment, he let carnal desire distract him from the real threat. Moreover, he took his own life more seriously than that of his wife or mother-in-law, by assuming that the Nemesis-Executioner was interested only in him. And the Executioner passes up an opportunity to snuff out the sheriff, Tommy Lee Jones (the closest thing to an authentic hero). Not being detected could be a motive, but is it possible he senses in the sheriff greater realism and honesty than in any of the other characters?
The last two scenes do nothing to prepare the spectator for an end, but they do "require" interpretation. Those viewers who simply refuse to discuss, think about, or interpret a movie are basically told by this movie to shape up or ship out. The Executioner (quite vulnerable himself, by the way, but a better survivor than Harrelson or Brolin) walks away. Behind him he leaves the seeds of greed (and of fatal pride) in a young boy who took money (from the Nemesis, naturally) in exchange for began as a Good Samaritan act. Before the recovered Executioner, who ambles off into a typical American neighborhood reminiscent like that in David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," lies-- who knows what? Another victim? The sheriff? His are the last words as he reports a dream about meeting his father (who did not die an old man), and then says: "I woke up." That awakening is what this movie is all about. The screen goes black waiting for the spectator's inner light to come on. It's time to wake up--perhaps now more than ever. There may be a future, but there will be no lottery tickets--even to those who win them. It's we who must act to make the best of that mortally-defined fateful span of existence that lies before us. We can't know if our efforts will bear positive fruit, but we can know that "good" isn't simply going to happen by wishing and waiting for it. And we can also know that our prideful moments can only bring more misery. And if you don't know this now, you most certainly will either know it, or feel the effect, when you're older.
But this may too rigid, or unforgiving, an interpretation. Thinkers like Kierkegaard, Tillich, O'Connor, Ingmar Bergman had no illusions about the lack of theological curiosity among the majority. Yet they had to be mindful that those who take overly seriously Socrates' insistence that "the unexamined life is unfit to be lived" can themselves guilty of an "intellectual pride." Created with the unique ability to question, to examine, and to know, humans often appear all too ready to forfeit this gift to the ubiquitous "whatever," but does such a "denial of death" remove them from the limitless spread and power of divine grace?
For those who prefer a less theological interpretation, the emphasis on "land" in the title provides it. Why would the story select as a setting for this parable about modern-day America a vast, open, dry and sterile wasteland? Reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's modernist poem "The Wasteland" or Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni's critique of present-day America ("Zabriskie Point"), the setting repeatedly points to a vacuum, a void, a land laid waste by the same human beings it once nurtured and empowered. For those viewers unfamiliar with Kierkegaard, O'Connor and their ilk, the best time to see this film may be immediately after a screening of "An Inconvenient Truth" or the nightly news about the BP disaster.
Summary of No Country for Old Men
When a man stumbles on a bloody crime scene a pickup truck loaded with heroin & 2 million dollars in irresistible cash his decision to take the money sets off an unstoppable chain of violence. Studio: Buena Vista Home Video Release Date: 12/26/2008 Starring: Tommy Lee Jones Josh Brolin Run time: 122 minutes Rating: RSimilar DVD Movies
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