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No Country For Old Men
Life’s a bitch, then you're obliterated in a brutal revenge slaying
2007
Review: December 7, 2007
Director: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Starring: Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly Macdonald, Woody Harrelson
I would, but not necessary.
THE SETUP:
Guy finds a case of money in the desert. His life goes downhill from there.
DISCUSSION:
It difficult to watch acclaimed movies with a completely open mind. Inevitably part of your mind is devoted to classifying the movie into "This is as brilliant as everyone says!" or "This shit is WAY overrated." This movie was announced as the best film of the year by the National Board of Review the day me and my friend finally made off to see it, after absolutely everyone else we knew had already seen it. Would it live up to the hype? Well, yeah, pretty much.
We begin with a voiceover by Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell talking about a teenage killer his testimony sent to execution for killing his 14-year-old girlfriend, which the guy says he did just to kill someone. Meanwhile, Javier Bardem as killer Anton Chigurh is arrested. He kills the deputy holding him, and one of the details that immediately made me like the film is a shot of all the scuff marks the deputy's boots have made on the floor during their struggle. We then join Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss [pronounced Lou-Ellen] out hunting when he comes upon the site of a shootout in the desert, trucks and bodies lying out in the sun. A bit away is a dead guy with a $2 million in cash, which Llewelyn makes off with.
That night Josh realizes that he needs to clean up his presence at the site a little more, and this leads to the first of a few unbearably tense sequences. He looks back and sees his truck silhouetted against the blue of the coming dawn—oh, have I mentioned that the photography is gorgeous? Yeah, especially toward the beginning—and when he looks back, TWO trucks. This leads to a chase by Mexicans who shoot him the shoulder and sic their pit bull on him. There's an incredible chase down a river, followed by a wonderful moment where Brolin has to assemble a gun on the riverbank before the dog reaches the shore. A more action-oriented film would make a big deal out of moments like this, but this movie is so low-key they just happen and we move on. Anyway, Llewelyn makes it home, sends his wife to her mother's, and takes off to try to survive with the cash. Soon after, Anton finds Llewelyn's truck, and soon after that, the sheriff is on to them both.
The rest of the movie is a series of intimate interactions, narrow escapes, and more incredibly tense sequences. Anton goes around getting new cars by luring people over to help him, then killing them. He kills people with an air gun meant to kill cattle. He is said to be a psychopath, and it is said that even if he were to get the money, he would still kill Llewelyn and his wife "on principle." Sheriff Bell pursues both men, trying to reach Llewelyn to talk some sense into him and protect him.
There are two more brilliant action setpieces. One concerns Llewelyn hiding the money in a motel room while Anton searches for him in another room in the same hotel. The next is another shootout in and outside a hotel room. The whole film takes place in transitory spaces, motels, hotels, cars, and more than one character exchanges clothes with another, or exchanges cars with another. Peppered throughout are similar exchanges in which someone will refer to a dead character and say "He's a Mexican—or, he WAS a Mexican," or "He thinks—or, he USED to think…. " In one instance the Sheriff responds to this by pondering "at what point does he cease to become Mexican?"
Eventually the money situation and all of its characters are resolved in a way that makes it clear that the plot resolution wasn't all that important anyway. We now have a final 15 minutes that banks hard into reflective territory. First the Sheriff shares a cup of coffee with a fellow Sheriff who just had a horrible gunfight in his town. They talk about how guys used to have terrible verbal fights, but wouldn't shoot each other. They talk about how the world is getting worse and worse, so bad they feel there's no longer a place for them in it. You can stop small, individual incidents, but it's "the dismal tide" they're up against—a slow change in every aspect of the world. The Sheriff visits another older man who has given up and retreated from the world. At last he returns from home. Now, one thing I forgot to mention is that in an very early scene, the Sheriff tells his wife that he wants to tell his mother something, and she reminds him that his mother is dead. At the end, the Sheriff retires from policing, and says he woke up with a dream of his father. His father rode past him with a fire in a horn, without stopping when he called, and the Sheriff knows that he's waiting for him up there in the future.
The title comes from the Yeats poem "Sailing To Byzantium," [copied below] which I don't pretend to understand, but in many ways seems to echo the themes that emerge toward the end of the film. The first stanza is about songs sung while youth ignores them, they're so caught up in living. The second is about older people, and how the songs they sing have become self-reflective, about their own lives that have passed. In the fourth stanza the author longs to be a mechanical bird, and can sing his song of what he sees in the world without having any emotional connection to it. I'm interpreting the film in this vein, to end with a statement of weariness with this world, and the new evils it has today—possessed figures like Anton and all this high-powered weaponry that didn't exist so long ago, let alone be in the hands of the general populous—ending in a wish for one's own time just to pass so one can be free of this world.
How's that for bleak?
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Yeah, you'd better.
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM
1927, W.B. Yeats
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees--
Those dying generations -- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
