Sigh – when is this coming to New Orleans????
FILM REVIEW, By Joe Morgenstern
No Country for Old Men’ reviewed by the WSJ
The villain in “No Country for Old Men,” a psychopath named Chigurh who is played to demonic perfection by Javier Bardem, uses a coin toss to decide a potential victim’s fate. I’m not advocating the same approach to seeing Joel and Ethan Coen’s spectacular new thriller, only noting both sides of its coin — uncommon cinematic artistry, along with some of the most horrifically violent moments ever put on screen. If watching movie violence is cathartic, then this film amounts to heavy therapy. It’s much more than that, however. This is the best film the Coen brothers have done since their glory days of “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski,” maybe the best they’ve done, period. My admiration is tempered only by my apparently incurable resistance to the very qualities that draw others to the Coens’ work — the stylization I find self-preening, the philosophizing that seems sententious.
Javier Bardem shows his sinister side in ‘No Country for Old Men.’
Yet the film was adapted from a highly stylized crime novel with philosophy at its core, Cormac McCarthy’s lean — and cinematic — disquisition on good and evil, and on the question of whether the nature of evil has recently been changing. (The lethal nail gun wielded by Chigurh, the most terrifying screen monster since Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet,” suggests, at the very least, that evil’s arsenal has been upgraded.)
The plot is set into motion — into what quickly becomes the headlong motion of a fateful trackdown — when Llewelyn Moss, a scruffy Texas hunter played by Josh Brolin, stumbles on a small fortune, not to mention a shipment of heroin, that Chigurh is determined to recover at all costs. Mr. Brolin gives a fine performance, strong but self-effacing, while Tommy Lee Jones plays the disillusioned and gallantly superannuated Sheriff Bell. It’s tempting to wonder if Cormac McCarthy wrote the book with the actor in mind, because what’s on screen is a fine but familiar Tommy Lee Jones performance — world-weariness suffused by regret at human frailty — plugged into the perfect receptacle.
The cinematographer was Roger Deakins; his work is a marvel, as it has been in so many Coen brothers films, including “Fargo,” “Barton Fink” and, most recently, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Though Sheriff Bell is the story’s soulful philosopher, Mr. Deakins captures the movie’s soul in stark, sere landscapes and haunted faces. And, of course, in the spectacle, at once spectral and corporeal, of Javier Bardem’s unspeakable reaper.
