Spooked but absorbed
Deborah Ross
No Country for Old Men 15, Nationwide
No Country for Old Men, adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is not for the squeamish or easily spooked, or at least should not be for the squeamish and easily spooked. I am both — in spades — yet found it almost ecstatically absorbing. This is not to say I liked it. But neither is it to say that I didn’t. It’s not a film that asks to be either liked or disliked. It just is, branding itself on to you like a heated iron.
It is set in Texas, in 1980, on the USA– Mexico border where the men are men (‘Quit yer hollerin’,’ they say to their womenfolk) and the desert landscape is vast and dry and desolate. Into this landscape — this intensely cinematic landscape — comes Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder and Vietnam War veteran who, out hunting, stumbles across the aftermath of a drugrelated gun battle which has left almost everyone dead. Moss finds a truck full of heroin and a briefcase containing $2 million in cash. ‘Don’t, don’t take the money,’ you may find yourself urging him, particularly if you have seen the Sam Raimi thriller Simple Plan, in which a bunch of friends find $4 million in the cockpit of a crashed plane and no good comes of it. Moss? He takes the money. There is just no telling some people.
And so begins a cat-and-mouse game in which Moss is pursued across Texas and Mexico, across bleak desert and lonely motel rooms, by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a psychopathic professional hitman with a sculptured, totem face beneath a scary pageboy hair-do, and weary, sardonic Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who despairs at the soullessness all around him and is, one assumes, the old man for whom this is no longer any country, if it is country for anyone.
The chase is high-hokum, pretty much, but the casual, Pulp Fiction-style violence is not. Chigurh has no goals beyond retrieving the cash; nothing else matters to him. His weapon of choice is a cattle gun. Aimed between the eyes, it blows a hole in the brain that the wind could whistle through. He is the embodiment of violence, the embodiment of that soullessness, often deciding whether to kill or not on the flip of a coin. The gore is not high-hokum either. Bullet wounds ooze. Blood spurts from shot throats. Broken bones leap out of punctured skin. This I did not like. At all. But the suspense ... the suspense has you.
In one scene Moss sits in a dark hotel room as Chigurh walks down the corridor outside. You hear the creak of floorboards and see the shadows of Chigurh’s feet in the thin striplight under the door. The footsteps move away, and the next sound is the faint squeak of the light bulb in the hall being unscrewed. All else is silence. Absolute silence, as so much is in this film. The odd fitful murmur of music, or the slight shriek of a wind, and that is about it. Anyway, such is the tension, as that bulb is unscrewed, that I think I might actually vomit. This is not pleasurable — I’m so easily spooked that on DVDs I fast forward the tense bits in films so that they are over quicker — but it is always exhilaratingly absorbing. Although this is a film in which actions don’t speak louder than words, as they speak instead of words, it is not an action film. Such is the genius of the Coen brothers, I guess.
No Country for Old Men is both deeply primal and masculine; something I only realised when Moss’s wife (Kelly McDonald), who offers the only hope of tenderness, refuses to co-operate with Chigurh when it comes to deciding her own fate on the toss of a coin. She is not playing that game. What’s it all about? Well, according to my press notes, it is about ‘the last stand of honour and justice against a broken world’ and ‘the fast approaching end of an entire way of Western life’, but who cares? I’m not even convinced I know who actually gets the cash at the end. (What was that open ventilation shaft all about?) This is a film that will have you, whether you want it to or not. And the moral? If there is one, perhaps it is this: if you ever happen across a large stash of money, turn it in, even though one accepts, of course, that you might have to skim a little off the top.
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