Not Coming to a Theater Near You

No Country for Old Men / USA / 2007

I was practically vibrating in my seat when the credits started to roll. The only comparable feeling I can recall having at the movies was at the same point in Unforgiven, to which my father and brother escaped on a rainy day in Cape Cod back in 1992. The screen went dark and I simultaneously experienced a draining of emotion and a jolt of physical energy, like a cross between a funeral and a football match, a testament to vigorous (if futile) masculinity yoked with an invocation of total, incomprehensible blackness.

No Country for Old Men is an utterly pitch-perfect film, beautifully and expertly made in every way, and a thrilling reminder of the Coens’ consummate craftsmanship. Surely, as Jit has noted elsewhere, there will be naysayers. It is arguable that the film’s tenor and ethos are wholly indebted to McCarthy’s novel and that the Coens are merely channeling him. But even if this is the case, one can hardly have predicted how perfectly McCarthy’s language sits in the mouths of the Coens’ actors and how beautifully aligned the brothers’ sense of mood and pacing is with their source material’s. There is not a line out of place, not a bum note in any performance, not a cut wasted, and not a single composition that doesn’t marry with the West Texas landscape or turn a paneled and padded motel room into the surface of a chessboard.

But whether this film is lauded for the Coen Brothers’ contributions to it or in spite of them, many of us will be hard pressed to find a better American film made this year.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Paramount Vantage 35mm Print
09 Oct 2007 12:05 PM | Comments (1)

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1. Alex / 12 April 2008 / 3:40 PM

   The shadow of Iraq looms large over ‘No Country.’ Sherrif Bell’s cozy little world is torn apart when two unknowable giants come storming through his land, wreaking a storm of violence & suffering that moves even his weary heart. The ending is a stroke of brilliance; I couldn’t help but think , with the audience as much in the dark as to what has just unfolded before our very eyes as Tommy Lee Jones’s (other than certainty of existence uprooted that is, never to be the same again) that this just a taste of what the destructive foot of ‘progress’in post a 9/11 world might seem like to those with no stake whatsoever in macho pissing contests, who just want to live their lives by their own terms & stay out of the path of the machinations of thugs & martyrs alike. Just my impression.