No Country for Old Men (Movie Review)
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
Winner of 4 Academy Awards including Best Picture 2008 – usually a reason I’ll avoid a film like the plague. No Country for Old Men stars Tommy Lee Jones (Sherriff Bell) as a tired law enforcement officer, Javier Bardem (Anton Chigurh) as a bizarre psychotic hitman with his own set of highly unusual principles, and Josh Brolin (Llewelyn Moss) as the unfortunate man tempted by 2 million dollars from a drug deal gone wrong.
Based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy, this film is set in the harsh desert environment of West Texas. Its one of those movies that greets you the next morning with deep feelings of anxiety for minor characters you would normally never remember. When the psychopath Anton Chigurh, who incidentally walks around with a gas powered weapon that fires giant projectiles, buys petrol at a remote station he enters into an entirely bizarre but captivating monologue. A toss of the coin can lose you everything or win you everything.
One of the things this movie does extremely well is the creation of a world where disbelief is totally suspended. In my opinion a major coupe of the storyline is that its unpredictable, like real life. When you associate someone as the good guy its not a given right that he’ll be the winner at the end of a fight. Some journeys are about the journey itself. Life, especially when you’re talking about stealing 2 million dollars of cocaine, isn’t going to be pretty or fair. And there would have been nothing worse for this film if it had decided to go down the path of mediocrity and made a cliche genre film. Instead, they’ve pushed the limits of personal character in such a way as the individual characters make destiny rather than a foretold tale where you know the good guy always wins.
It took me half of this film just to finish appreciating Anton’s hair. And why should hitmen always look buffed and have pretty hair? The strange hair contributes significantly to Anton’s believability as the abomination he’s playing. No conscience, very little true morality and definately no style. He had an uncanny personality resemblance to a character played by Harvey Keitel, Victor the Cleaner in Point of No Return (1993). Although Victor did have style.
No Country for Old Men reminds us that bad decisions can follow bad decisions and those ripples affect everyone, even the indirect touch of Sherriff Bell and several innocent casualties in the hunt for Llewelyn Moss through the seedy motels of West Texas. I’d highly recommend this movie both for seat of your pants action fans and serious movie fans alike. I also like that this is about older men not 20 year olds. Anton Chigurh tells the petrol station owner after the coin toss not to put that coin in his pocket where it will become like the other change. That coin took over twenty years to find him in this spot at this time.
Don’t be put off by the Academy Awards and hook in for a fast paced storyline. It never hurts to make movies from brilliant books.
