No Country for Old Men, by Coen Brothers [Rating:5 in 5]

When Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” was published in the year 2005, Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review, “No Country for Old Men would easily translate to the big screen so long as Bell's tedious, long-winded monologues were left on the cutting room floor — a move that would also have made this a considerably more persuasive novel”. As it is often the case with literary critics, he was absolutely wrong. It is the monologues of sheriff Ed Tom Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones) that holds the core of the movie “No Country for Old men”, this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner. It is, at the end of the day, a post-modern (not in the hip sense) character study that believes in leaving more loose ends than answering each and every rational and inconsequential question about details. It hints at a dislocation that would have been unperceivable in any other era than ours. AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, IT IS A MIRACLE OF A GOOD FILM!

Let us look back at the words I quoted at the very beginning of this review. Kakutani thinks the novel was not adequately persuasive because he was regarding it as a Genre novel, which it, and the film, is not. No Country, as a film, is a subversion of a genre that is all too familiar in the American cultural scene: Psychopath vs. The Force of Good; it is also not a spoof or a critique; it works through the structure of thriller and chase movies, breaks through every single loophole, and at the end, becomes something completely different. It is a movie about something a little inconceivable, something that looses its meaning once spelled clearly, something that lurks just behind the our all-too-certain understating of contemporary society. May be that’s the only way of showing what is there to show.

In the film, Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brollin), a poor man hunting antelopes at the valley of Rio Grande, discovers the remnants of a drug deal gone-all-wrong. Bullet-ridden cars stand desolate; in this scene, not only the men, but even the dogs are shown shot dead. Moss finds a huge stack of drugs, and with his habitually cunning mind of a hunter, understands what is missing: the money. He stalks the trail of a wounded man and finds a satchel full of money. He was discovered later, and a corporation hires Anton Chigurh (with Javier Bordem in his Oscar-winning role), a psychopath with a “principle”, who goes around Texas with a tank of compressed air in hand and killing people with a cattle stungun, to kill Moss. It propels a cylinder into their heads and whips it back again; it can bust locks as well. Chigurh starts stalking Moss, which forces Moss to leave his childlike wife Carla Jean (Kelly McDonald) behind. The sheriff of the town, played by Tommy Lee Jones, realizes the danger Moss and his family is in, and tries to help them. There are other characters, such as a bounty hunter who knows Chigurh well (Woody Harrelson) who is hired by a businessman (Stephen Root) to track down the money, and other nameless characters in motels, swimming pools, on the roadside. Yet, it is a curiously lonely movie, where none of the three major characters are shone together in a frame. And that brooding loneliness hints at a strange dislocation, something I was feeling continuously while watching the movie.

Take the scene early in the movie where Chigurh walks into a run-down gas station and talks to the visibly shaken elderly owner. Throughout the sequence, both the characters jostle with each other verbally with a stiff awkwardness, as if something was just not fitting in, something was just not right. It was like watching an English missionary looking at the orphan child from Blue Lagoon with a nasty feeling that he knows the language but cannot understand a word. Or something even more subtle. Subtle enough to elude the gasp of written words. Chigurh makes the man call head or tail in a toss to decide whether he should kill the man or not. The dialogs in this sequence are undoubtedly the best-written ones I have heard in a film for a long, long time. If you watch the film look very closely at this section, savor the strange tension such crafty screenplay can create [Coen brothers absolutely DESERVE their Oscar for Adopted Screenplay], and, if you can, try to feel that dislocation there. Can you feel it? There is a chance that you may not. That’s precisely the charm of such great films. Personally, I felt that the dislocation is the unspoken core of the whole narrative.

Before I went to see the film, I was apprehensive about one thing: Would the film be about nostalgia? The name of the film at least indicates that. The character of Tommy Lee Jones constantly feels outstaged by the capacity for violence of the next generation. One of his monologues sounds nostalgic too. But, to my great relief, the film turned out not to be so. We have had a bit too much of nostalgia lately, especially a sort of snobbish nostalgia about the innocent, “non-violent” days of the past. That sort of stuff makes a film stink of shit. Being a fundamental study about violence (among other things, such as, chance, self-will, unspeakable evil. Other critics have pointed those out before), No Country avoids all the cliché answers and solutions to violence (effect of consumerism, television, homosexuality and whatever-you-may-have-a-grudge-against); it only paints a cinematically sparse and austere landscape that hides hints that are only hints and not answers.

The cinematography of the film is remarkable: it refuses to be stylish (as an unfortunate after-effect of the film “Traffic”, every movie in Hollywood nowadays routinely depicts deserts through extremely grainy deep-yellow filter, dark sides of a city through blue, using the most bizarre angles a camera can possibly find. Apparently, they call it “stylish”), it gets to the core of the ambience the film uses, so much so that the landscape becomes one of the principle characters in the film. It again shows that Coen brothers are one of the greatest exponents of the dramatic capacity of a landscape; they did it before in “Fargo” (using a landscape of blindingly white snow), they have done it again. The editing of the film follows the same path: it is effective, precise, and self-effacing. Surprisingly for a Hollywood film, it uses only 16 minutes of music, which is minimalist in nature as well. It was an inspired decision. Such decisions have made this film such a great one. The actors down to the nameless woman by the swimming pool do a truly swell job; I have seldom seen such perfect casting.

In my last piece about the Oscars, I wrote “Javier Bordem as the Best Actor in a Supporting Role (for “No Country for Old Man”) was again a routine choice, Hollywood loves its psychopaths.” I do not intend to change it. Javier is a great actor and has done mesmerizing work in this film. But, like all great art, this film will be easily misunderstood by most people, I fear. Like they called “Brokeback Mountain” a “gay cowboy movie”. I suspect that after this Oscar, many will watch the film the way they watch “Silence of the Lambs”, counting “nicely” shown “cool” killings; they will come out of the hall trying to imitate Anton Chigurh’s grin. It will become the benchmark for a new-era psychopath. The film will be lost in a labyrinth of deliberate mass-censorship. We are not very good at handling our own violence, are we?

So if you watch the film, try to look in closely. Check what is scarier: the chilling acts of Chigurh, or how the scattered symbols repeat themselves in the path of both Chigurh and Moss, obscuring the line between the hunted and the hunter? Why, after all the obvious evil, can’t we make an ethical distinction between Moss and Chigurh? Why do we perceive only a forlorn sense of futility at the end of the film? Keep those questions afloat in your mind, but don’t try to seek an answer. You might see a truly great film.

Making such an astounding film is a feat that belongs to the order of a minor miracle; add to that the fact that Coen brothers have done it before with “Fargo”. If we still stop short of counting them among the first three directors in Hollywood, it will be an act of blasphemy. This film deserves a five by any standards.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI