Saturday, August 9, 2008
No Country For Old Men
Just saw No Country For Old Men. It's a grim if interesting movie. They were trying for the mythic quality of great westerns. It is set in 1980s west Texas with the landscape playing a major role. It is a chase movie, a psychological thriller, a bit of a monster movie, and something of a downer; given the genre mix this is not a surprise. Movies can have down subject matter but return something in catharsis. This movie did not.
Movie making is a team sport and the chemistry was excellent. The casting was perfect. The direction and marriage of all the crafts that go into making a good movie were there. The best part was the dialog, which had the dark mad humor of modern life percolating underneath and had the added benefit of spinning mysterious things off, associations that played as grace notes, using a laconic Texas drawl as the instrument.
Most credit should probably be given to Cormac McCarthy for the fact it held together, although the actors gave all the credit to the Coen brothers. Surprise. Maybe it was the Coen's who were solely responsible for the excellent dialog and not McCarthy. The Coen brothers didn't mention McCarthy much in the accompanying documentary.
There may be spoilers in the following…
The interpretation of the Bardem character as “the devil” by one of the actors didn't quite seem right to me. And since no one else offered a satisfying exegesis, here is mine:
The Bardem character, the psychopathic killer, without affect or sense of humor; without a human based logic, but with a logic nevertheless, was death incarnate. Tommy Lee Jones' character described him as a ghost, but there was a cold inevitability in Bardem's character that suggested a lack of moral agency unlike the devil whose choices are an eternal undoing; Bardem's character was “egoless” as the Scottish actress in the movie suggested — again suggesting the ruthless enterprise of cold death. The movie portrayed the irreconcilable nature of death's dialog with the living, the unfair randomness of it. Bardem could not be caught, and overmatched Tommy Lee Jones, because no one catches death. It catches you.
The Tommy Lee Jones character said he could never find belief. At the end, it seemed clear he knew he would be found and killed and there was nothing he could do about it. And there would be no inner peace for the man who had no inner resource.