No Country For Old Men. Directed (and written) by Joel and Ethan Coen, the Coen brothers, “based” (read: “they paid for the rights”) on the novel by overrated novelist Cormac McCarthy, who’s been cinemahed before (All the Pretty Horses). Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Josh Brolin, Xavier Bardem, Kelly Macdonald, Tess Harper.
Well, it’s the Coen boys back and likely don’t have to warn anyone of violence, seediness, inexplicability, vulgarity, inexplicability, malevolence, did I say inexplicability? After Fargo, the high tide of the Coens’ “art,” we’ve tumbled kinda into slackwater, as for instance, with The Great Lebowski and as always that “art” consists in moments of inspired brilliance among the lesser of our species down there in demi-monde (French for “trailer park”) and shivers of terrific cin-ee-mah terror welling up, then subsiding into incomprehensible stasis and anticlimax (antsy-climax, actually). Trick might be to stalk out before the end, take with us memory of the menagerie of unforgettable lowlifes from the Coens’ stable of manqués, ratés, neverwasses, wannabes, selfdeluders, haventacluers, fallen angels, and everymenses… and the dark world they evolve—and revolve—in, abandon hope for resolution or closure to the (mis-)adventures of same.
The premise is not a terribly novel or imaginative one, only its execution here at the hands of the Coens. Josh Brolin (son, I’m guessing of Barbra Streisand’s paramour, sporting the same Fu Manchu mustache and sleeked back hair as Nick Nolte in his latter—and fatter—years) plays Llewellyn Moss, a pretty much guy guy like us welder (he enumerates for a bounty hunter from his hospital bed the exotic metals he can bead), out hunting antelopes (seems to be temporarily between welding jobs like aren’t we all?), stumbles across the scene of a Messican drug deal gone sour: vehicles bulletpocked, scruffy drug types ditto and scattered around the desert floor in postures of violent death, one truck full of the stuff in neat poly bags and a blood trail leading off onto the horizon to show that a solitary survivor has made away with the cash for this purported transaction, then passed into that paradis de mes rêves under a tree where Moss finds him. Moss snatches the briefcasefull of Benjamins, hides it under his trailer (where else), kisses his frumpy wife, and then inexplicably returns to the site where his trail is picked up by the druggie lords who’ve come to retrieve their jack (and their crack).
We get the impression right off that Moss is a clever guy (like us, maybe). The question is whether his cleverness can match the fury with which the druggies pursue their lost money. Emblem of this fury is the hitman launched after Moss and the floss, Anton Chigurh (and no, I dunno what kinda name is “Chigurh”—except vaguely, darkly East European—nor why there’s an –h in it since it’s never written down or displayed and can’t hear it on screen: “chirurg,” of course, Romanian for “surgeon,” that is “butcher”… Maybe.). Anyhow. Chigurh is a relentless assassin and, apparently, part-time casuist who now and again interrogates his potential victims on the nature of Fate, Destiny, Chance, the Wheel of Fortune… just before he plugs them with an unearthly (but only too earthy) compressed air tank that shoots projectiles of something or other—poof…kablang!—right through door locks and parietal lobes, leaving a trail of shot-out lock cores across the sandblown and treeless desert wastes for wasted Sherriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, looking a hunnert years old and doing his now-patented craggy sage of the craggy sagebrush: The Three Burials, Lonesome Dove) to follow with the same remorseless intensity and passionless obstinacy.
Will Moss make it? Will his pretty young wife escape at least? Will bounty-hunter (and wearing hair this trip) Woody Harrelson cut off the avenger in mid-stride? Will Ed Tom zero in on his quarry before…? Will anybody get out of a Coen movie alive? Will anybody figure out what the flock the ending means? As ever with the Coens watchable (even rewatchable) but ultimately useless, and that would be forgivable (even desirable) if it weren’t for the somber hint in the Coens’ myth-ology and the critics’ moo-ology that there is a point here sommeres if only us dummies could fathom it and this is cin-ee-mah, not just a movie to which that somebody forgot to put an ending to which.