No Country For Old Men...film review
Feb. 9th, 2008 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatJust saw the Coen Brothers' film No Country for Old Men - which has been for quite a while now and I've admittedly drug my feet seeing it, since I knew from reading numerous reviews that it was not an upbeat movie - yet an oddly humorous one, for those of us who have an absurd or black sense of humor like the Coen Brothers.
I've seen quite a few of the Coen Brothers films, O Brother Where Art Thou, Blood Simple, Fargo, Raising Arizona, parts of Miller's Crossing,Barton Fink and Big Lebowski (three films I've never been able to watch all the way through for some reason or other, Big Lebowski is Wales favorite movie, I find it unwatchable. We don't talk about it. While I adore Blood Simple and she found it too violent and scary (this from a woman who loves gross out zombie movies such as 28 days, but what-ever.)) My favorite films of the Coens were Blood Simple, Fargo and Raising Arizona. The others have put me to sleep. Since No Country For Old Men is remarkably similar in tone to Blood Simple and Fargo - it's not surprising that I loved it. In my opinion it is the best thing they've done.
The audience was dead silent at the end of the film, sort of shell-shocked. Stumbling out of the theater with little conversation. There was no music over the ending credits - like there usually is. Just dead silence. So it was a remarkably quiet theater as people got up and left.
There's a great piece of dialogue that haunts me from it, all the more so because it addresses something raised in a Buffy comic I'd read earlier and have been thinking about off and on in my brain.
Tommy Lee Jones plays an old Sheriff on the verge of retirement. He visits an old deputy of his grandfather's. The deputy asks Tommy Lee's character, whose name I've forgotten, if he's retiring.
Tommy Lee tells him that he's grown tired of it all. That he feels no matter what he does he can't make a difference. He can't stop it. That it is getting worse. Does it even matter?
The old deputy, surrounded by his cats in a pig-stye of a house, looks Tommy Lee in the eye, and tells him a story about his grandfather. How his grandfather got a bullet in a lung in the area way back when. It was 1909. Always been like this. Always will be, he says. "This country is hard on people."
There's a pause.
Then he says, "you can't stop what's coming, by yourself or change it significantly. It will come. It doesn't change. To think you can do it. Just you. Is vanity. But you do make a difference all the same."
I wish I could remember the exact words. It struck me as oddly comforting and humorous in a film that is anything but comforting.
The film is perhaps the most realistic film I've seen in a while. It does not coddle the audience or provide us with safe answers. Like Eastern Promises - No Country is a realistically violent film. Where you feel the violence in your gut and wince. Look away. When someone gets shot, they fall, they stumble. They are hurt. They do not magically heal. The anti-hero of the piece or villian, if you will, an irredeemable killer - who tosses a coin to determine at certain point whether or not to kill someone, walks with a limp at one point. He survives, but he struggles to do so. Just as the protagonist, or the guy he is chasing, Lou Ellen Moss (in an underrated performance by Josh Brolin), gets hurt.
No Country unlike many films is visual and literary - it is a film shock-full of words. We have to listen to the words. The visuals complement the words, showing a harsh, unrelenting landscape, with dark foreboding skies, and windswept desert, rocky, and bare of life. Filmed in the borderland between El Paso and Juarvez - it is a hard country, rocky, tough and breeds tough people. This is the land that haunts many a modern Western novel - the land that Larry McMurty wrote about in books such as Horseman Pass By (Hud) or Lonesome Dove, or that Cormac McCarthy writes about. Not the land we see in the more romantic westerns of Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey. It's the land that is featured in the darker westerns - of Sam Peckinpah. Tough men. No happy endings. No endings at all. Just the continuous crawl.
I'd read before seeing No Country, in the New Yorker - that the film drug in places, that it was slow, so put off seeing it. It's not slow. I was riveted throughout, tense, on the edge of my seat, which was bloody uncomfortable - but unlike Sweeny Todd (a film I enjoyed by the way) - I never noticed it - I was that embroiled in the action.
I can see why it has won so many awards. It is perhaps amongst the best films I've seen. I left the theater in awe, blown away, and changed by what I'd seen. Haunted by the words and the images. Flipping them over in my head. Thinking about it.
I can't see any flaws in the film. It's tight. The performances are tight and well-drawn. I fell into the film. My attention rarely wandered. And I can still vividly remember it over an hour or more later.
It is a violent film. The humor is best described as gallows humor. Or as Tommy Lee Jones character confides at one point to his associate, who has just laughed at something he read from a newspaper - "It's okay, you can laugh. I laughed too. Sometimes it's all you can do..is laugh." But unlike the violence we see on tv or action flicks, the violence has a point, it reveals the pain of it, the consequences. It does not romanticize violence.
If you haven't seen it? I recommend it. Well worth the ten bucks I spent tonight. Yes, my small art theater is now charging ten bucks for films instead of 9. I remember when I thought five was too high.
I've seen quite a few of the Coen Brothers films, O Brother Where Art Thou, Blood Simple, Fargo, Raising Arizona, parts of Miller's Crossing,Barton Fink and Big Lebowski (three films I've never been able to watch all the way through for some reason or other, Big Lebowski is Wales favorite movie, I find it unwatchable. We don't talk about it. While I adore Blood Simple and she found it too violent and scary (this from a woman who loves gross out zombie movies such as 28 days, but what-ever.)) My favorite films of the Coens were Blood Simple, Fargo and Raising Arizona. The others have put me to sleep. Since No Country For Old Men is remarkably similar in tone to Blood Simple and Fargo - it's not surprising that I loved it. In my opinion it is the best thing they've done.
The audience was dead silent at the end of the film, sort of shell-shocked. Stumbling out of the theater with little conversation. There was no music over the ending credits - like there usually is. Just dead silence. So it was a remarkably quiet theater as people got up and left.
There's a great piece of dialogue that haunts me from it, all the more so because it addresses something raised in a Buffy comic I'd read earlier and have been thinking about off and on in my brain.
Tommy Lee Jones plays an old Sheriff on the verge of retirement. He visits an old deputy of his grandfather's. The deputy asks Tommy Lee's character, whose name I've forgotten, if he's retiring.
Tommy Lee tells him that he's grown tired of it all. That he feels no matter what he does he can't make a difference. He can't stop it. That it is getting worse. Does it even matter?
The old deputy, surrounded by his cats in a pig-stye of a house, looks Tommy Lee in the eye, and tells him a story about his grandfather. How his grandfather got a bullet in a lung in the area way back when. It was 1909. Always been like this. Always will be, he says. "This country is hard on people."
There's a pause.
Then he says, "you can't stop what's coming, by yourself or change it significantly. It will come. It doesn't change. To think you can do it. Just you. Is vanity. But you do make a difference all the same."
I wish I could remember the exact words. It struck me as oddly comforting and humorous in a film that is anything but comforting.
The film is perhaps the most realistic film I've seen in a while. It does not coddle the audience or provide us with safe answers. Like Eastern Promises - No Country is a realistically violent film. Where you feel the violence in your gut and wince. Look away. When someone gets shot, they fall, they stumble. They are hurt. They do not magically heal. The anti-hero of the piece or villian, if you will, an irredeemable killer - who tosses a coin to determine at certain point whether or not to kill someone, walks with a limp at one point. He survives, but he struggles to do so. Just as the protagonist, or the guy he is chasing, Lou Ellen Moss (in an underrated performance by Josh Brolin), gets hurt.
No Country unlike many films is visual and literary - it is a film shock-full of words. We have to listen to the words. The visuals complement the words, showing a harsh, unrelenting landscape, with dark foreboding skies, and windswept desert, rocky, and bare of life. Filmed in the borderland between El Paso and Juarvez - it is a hard country, rocky, tough and breeds tough people. This is the land that haunts many a modern Western novel - the land that Larry McMurty wrote about in books such as Horseman Pass By (Hud) or Lonesome Dove, or that Cormac McCarthy writes about. Not the land we see in the more romantic westerns of Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey. It's the land that is featured in the darker westerns - of Sam Peckinpah. Tough men. No happy endings. No endings at all. Just the continuous crawl.
I'd read before seeing No Country, in the New Yorker - that the film drug in places, that it was slow, so put off seeing it. It's not slow. I was riveted throughout, tense, on the edge of my seat, which was bloody uncomfortable - but unlike Sweeny Todd (a film I enjoyed by the way) - I never noticed it - I was that embroiled in the action.
I can see why it has won so many awards. It is perhaps amongst the best films I've seen. I left the theater in awe, blown away, and changed by what I'd seen. Haunted by the words and the images. Flipping them over in my head. Thinking about it.
I can't see any flaws in the film. It's tight. The performances are tight and well-drawn. I fell into the film. My attention rarely wandered. And I can still vividly remember it over an hour or more later.
It is a violent film. The humor is best described as gallows humor. Or as Tommy Lee Jones character confides at one point to his associate, who has just laughed at something he read from a newspaper - "It's okay, you can laugh. I laughed too. Sometimes it's all you can do..is laugh." But unlike the violence we see on tv or action flicks, the violence has a point, it reveals the pain of it, the consequences. It does not romanticize violence.
If you haven't seen it? I recommend it. Well worth the ten bucks I spent tonight. Yes, my small art theater is now charging ten bucks for films instead of 9. I remember when I thought five was too high.
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-10 03:34 am (UTC)Speaking of underrated performances I thought Woody Harrelson did a really good job. It reminded me of some characterization adage I'd heard, about the best way to make a villian seem scary is to have a competent or other scary character afraid of him. So seeing Harrelson's terror when facing Javier Bardem made Bardem even more frightening which I hadn't thought was possible at that point.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-10 03:59 am (UTC)The ending blew me away - it was so realistic.
Most movies either drift or they'll wrap things up neatly in a bow, here, we had Tommy Lee Jones - the central pov of the film, who we start out with - in a voice-over narrative, ending it with a dream. The dream is interesting - it's about losing money and it's about his fear of not quite accomplishing what his father was. His father apparently died young and on the job. While TL decides to retire from it and isn't quite sure what to do with himself now.
He wanted to accomplish something great. Catch the bad guy. Save Lou Ellen, save Lou Ellen's wife. But all he accomplishes is survival, he doesn't get killed. And he doesn't hurt anyone else. The two things his wife asks for - don't get hurt and try not to hurt anyone else.
But he wants more. And yet, wonders if it matters. So elegant, and so simply portrayed.
The acting in this blew me away. Harrelson has a bit part, but he subtley gets across everything he needs to. His terror felt real not telegraphed.
Amazing film.