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A bloody meridian

The Coen brothers' take on Cormac McCarthy is near-perfect
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 27th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Fighting body and soul. Josh Brolin finds himself back in war in the Coens' new film.
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No Country for Old Men

Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen
With Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald, Tess Harper and Beth Grant

The moral center of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men is Ed Tom Bell, sheriff of Terrell County, Texas. He’s the type of soft-spoken lawman that has a healthy wariness of guns, and who makes friendly prison visits to a young man being prepped for the electric chair — a boy bound for execution based on Bell’s arrest and trial testimony.
Bell’s respect for the “old-timers” in law enforcement who came before him is fierce, though it blurs the past’s often-bloody realities. Still, there were some certainties to cling to once, certainties that seem to have suddenly become disturbingly fluid.
Five years after the Vietnam War, something has been released into the world. Bell has noticed it but can’t explain it. Motiveless murder seems to have come in tandem with a loss of manners. Even for a hard country full of hardscrabble lives, there’s a new callousness that’s come, and Bell admits to trembling before it: “I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. You can say it’s my job to fight it, but I don’t know what it is anymore.”
So the world seems to be grappling with black-hole metaphysics. Laws, in their broader sense, are overturned. It’s as if one of the Book of Revelations' seven seals has been opened. “A man would have to put his soul at hazard,” Bell says. “He would have to say, ‘OK, I’ll be part of this world.’ ”
The Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning film version of McCarthy’s novel cleaves closely to its source, and returns the brothers to the landscape of their first triumph, Blood Simple, with its quietly menacing Western expanses. The meeting of the Coens and McCarthy is an interesting one considering that they basically share an aesthetic. McCarthy’s prose, a kind of Rio Grande baroque, is near kin to the elaborate visual style and complex scripts that are hallmarks of the brothers.
Yet No Country for Old Men is one of McCarthy’s sparer works, and the Coens have honored this by making their leanest, most contemplative film.
The world that concerns Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is very quickly spinning into greater chaos. He’s looking for a local man, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam vet who might have accidentally allowed himself to become a target for ruthless drug gangs. After stumbling upon a gang massacre spot out in the desert, Moss finds a satchel of money, millions, and takes it back to his trailer, which he shares with his young wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald).
But stalking this bone-cracked land is Anton Chigurh (Oscar clencher Javier Bardem), a law unto himself, who is also after the money. Chigurh is a killer without conscience, though not without pretensions. He has cast himself as Fate, often deciding whether to kill someone by their success in calling a coin toss correctly. Like the chessmaster Death in Bergman’s Seventh Seal, life, for Chigurh, is confined to a gameboard.
Both Bell and Chigurh try to track down the cagey Llewelyn, who has transferred the jungle tactics he learned in Southeast Asia to the mesa wastes and suburban squalor of El Paso, Texas. In other words, the vet is pursued by both life and death. Before it’s all over, death will have won the first round.
The performances in No Country for Old Men are as perfectly restrained as the film. Bardem’s Chigurh could so easily have become either a cartoon of evil (itself a cartoon concept) or madness. Yet he manages to create a frightening portrait of a randomly conscienceless man with a steely gaze, bad haircut and powerful bulk (plus, no one has made an oxygen tank appear more twisted since Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth in Blue Velvet).
Brolin grows as a dynamic screen presence, and is equally matched by the excellent Macdonald’s Carla Jean. The supporting cast is also superb. Woody Harrelson takes on the small but important role of Carson Wells, Chigurh’s own bounty hunter. The film includes many faultless character actors, especially Tess Harper as Sheriff Bell’s wife, and Beth Grant as Carla Jean’s mother.
The Coens’ film, however, belongs to Jones. The craggy sadness of his face, lit frequently with an ironic smile, perfectly expresses humanity’s long struggle to survive in a violent world.
As in the last chapters of a few of McCarthy’s books, bloodshed will give way to mercy — or at least a suggestion of it. The Coens’ often elegiac film ends similarly: Death may still be in command, but it can never fully check hope, even if that hope must wait until after the grave.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (27/02/2008):

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