No Country for Old Men - Review

Writers/Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: Josh Brolin/Javier Bardem
Runtime: 2 hours 2 minutes

Major spoiler warning: do not read this review if you have not seen the movie and plan to.

No Country for Old Men was without question the best film of the year. It had everything going for it, from a great cast to a superb script. And then it entered act three and completely fell apart. It turned into a shell game played by two great writer/directors, and it is a transparent insult.

Let me put it to you this way: the first three-quarters of the movie has some of the best writing I have ever seen. Ever. At one point in the film, I wanted to turn to my neighbors and say, "Isn't this incredible?" That's the truth. I had to contain myself from saying that.

The film stars Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam vet living in Texas. The time is 1980. Llewelyn spends time hunting in the wide open plains. On one of his hunting excursions, he happens upon the remains of a drug deal gone wrong. Three bullet-ridden cars sit idle. Dead men are all over the place. Llewelyn finds a briefcase with two million dollars inside. He decides to keep it.

And so the long chase begins. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is a hit man without peer. He's an intelligent psychopath, and in the movies, there is nothing more brilliant than a smart psychopath. He is on the trail of Llewelyn, and it makes for one of the great chase sequences in movie history.

By chase, I don't mean a bang-bang shootout chase. There is ample gunplay in the film, but the pacing and the plotting of the chase are done incredibly well. At one point in the film, an entire twenty minutes goes by with barely a word of dialogue. That's great screenwriting. Show us, don't tell us. The Coen brothers do it to perfection. They are so confident in what they do that the movie doesn't even use music to help it along. They're that good.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. He wants to find Llewelyn and bring him in to protect him from Chigurh. We first meet Sheriff Bell in voice-over, at the beginning of the film. Over Americana shots of open plains and wind mills, Bell talks about how the world is changing. The crime rate is going up, and the very nature of crime is getting worse. This voice over is an allusion to the movie's title, as Bell tells us that old men won't be able to understand the new world we're living in. It's a good voiceover, and it's a good set-up.

It should have scared the hell out of me. I should have had the "message movie" alarm ringing in both ears. But I let it slide. Surely the Coens wouldn't do me in with a dumb message movie about crime getting worse. I see that in the newspapers every day, and that only costs me a dollar. Why would they do that to me for ten bucks?

They didn't. Yet.

The dialogue in the film is sparse and gritty. Llewelyn turns out to be a very smart prey for Chigurh's brilliant psychopath. They match wits and bullets, and the movie is a hell of an enjoyable ride.

And then the Coen brothers completely screw you. Llewelyn is smart? Hah! He gets taken out by three bit-part Mexicans in fancy suits. They're so bit-part that we don't even get to see Llewelyn die, and we never learn the names of these killers. Ten minutes before, Llewelyn is on the phone with Chigurh, telling him that he's going to turn the tables and take Chigurh down. Ten minutes later, a scene fades up and there is Llewelyn, dead. Just like that. The bit-part Mexicans are racing away from the motel, machine-guns in hand, as Tommy Lee Jones pulls up in a taxi.

That is not the end of the film, but it is the end of the hero in whom we've invested so much time and emotion. He lies on the floor dead, and it wasn't even the villian that pulled the trigger.

The rest of the film feels like an insult. Tommy Lee Jones has another couple of scenes where we listen to stories that thinly veil the moral of the story: you never know when you're going to get killed. Shit happens. No one knows where the "end" of anything is. Life's funny that way.

Come on. I learn this every time I flip on the evening news. The Coen brothers are far too talented to sink to this level, but that is exactly what they do. There is no redemption in the movie, no ending. It simply ends with one of those smash-cuts-to-black that are supposed to leave you "thinking." I'm with the girl in the fourth row. When the movie ended so abruptly tonight, she simply said, "What?"

Before the film school losers get on my case, give me a break. I am not saying that the movie needed to end with a dumb showdown between Llewelyn and Chigurh. The Coen brothers are good enough to bring an arch plot to a great conclusion. Their version of a showdown would have been fantastic, as it was in Fargo. But this dreck is simply awful. A very bad cliche punctuates the ending, as Chigurh is driving along a suburban street. I said to myself, "Car crash coming." Sure enough, bang, as a car t-bones Chigurh. Shit happens. Chigurh gets out of the car, slings his arm with the help of some kid's t-shirt, and on his way he strolls.

To draw an audience into a genre picture and a mainstream plot, then turn the tables and try to teach a lesson with minimalist crap before cutting to black is simply disappointing.

I look at No Country as a rip-off. If they weren't named the Coen brothers, this movie doesn't make it onto the radar. Yet the critics will love this film. I am going to look at their reviews now, as I always dodge them before I get to see a movie. But I know they will love it, because bad, abrupt endings are "provocative" when done by rich directors.

I could go back through the third act and talk about all of the things that I found atrociously bad, but I won't. I can't. I loved this film so much that when the Coens did me in, I felt physically numb. The movie is that good, and the payoff is that bad.

Sometimes I like to climb on my high horse about supposedly "brave" films, and pooh-pooh the mainstream crowd that doesn't dig them. This time, I'm with fourth-row girl.

"What?"

Photos: Yahoo Movies