Against a pitch black screen, we hear the whistle of the Texas wind as it haunts its way across the gargantuan, desolate landscape, and, as the newborn sun slowly creeps its way above the horizon, we hear the voice of a weary, defeated old man say: "I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old... hard to believe".
As the man continues lamenting the seemingly new, incomprehensible brutality arising from the modern world, as if on cue, we see a young sheriff's deputy calmly escorting a handcuffed figure with a particularly odd hair style into the back of his patrol car, placing what appears to be an air tank on the passenger seat before driving away, the unseen prisoner sitting deathly silent in complete darkness all the while, the outline of his obscured figure looming over us like an angel of death. And, as the camera ominously rises away from the sun-baked asphalt, the voice of the old man concludes: "I always knew you had to be willin' to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet somethin' I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say: 'Okay... I'll be part of this world.'".
This is the opening scene of Joel & Ethan Coen's No Country For Old Men, an astonishingly tense neo-Western Thriller, one of the best movies of its decade, and just one of the best movies I've ever seen, period. It tells the tale of three men; Llewelyn Moss, an utterly everyday, blue-collar good ol' boy who randomly stumbles upon a suitcase full of cartel money, Anton Chirgurh, a bizarre, almost alien-like assassin tasked with recovering the stash, and the aforementioned Ed Tom, the tired, weary old sheriff who observes everything on the sidelines, as the film brilliantly utilizes the men's dueling perspectives to illustrate its piercing discussions of the central themes, while the main pursuit wears on, the innocent continually get caught in the crossfire right alongside the guilty, and the bodies pile up all over the state.
Admittedly, while the basic story of No Country isn't particularly innovative on paper, on film, it differentiates itself from any more standard "cartel thrillers" out there (coughSicariocough) through its sheer technical and atmospheric perfection, whether it be the incredibly haunting overall tone, with the specter of death looming heavy over the entire experience, the way that cinematography icon Roger Deakin juxtaposes lovingly detailed, intimate close-ups with shots of the massive Texas plains that are as desolate as the spiritual darkness that envelops the film's characters, or the emphasis on eerily placid moments of complete silence, which are inevitably shattered by the sudden outbursts of carnage, as the film's agonizingly slow, patient pacing takes the sparse prose of Cormac McCarthy's novel, and stretches it out into endless, nerve-shredding eternities.
Besides the constantly amazing sense of tension, Country also distinguishes itself by utilizing McCarthy's musings on the natures of fate, chance, and what seems to be the increasingly worse presence of evil in the contemporary world, interspersing the scenes of cat-and-mouse carnage with genuinely insightful, thought-provoking discussions, as the story contrasts the perception of a more peaceful "Old West" with the horrifying crimes of today, suggesting that, as the film's Wiki put it, rather than triumphing over evil, the best thing the modern heroes can hope for is to merely escape with their lives intact.
This makes No Country the rare Thriller that gives us something to actually think about long after the screen has faded to black for the final time, as its three main characters all serve to contrast each other perfectly, whether it be Ed Tom's utterly conventional (and ultimately defeated) black-&-white sense of morality, Anton's bizarrely-principled amorality that proves to be perfectly adapted to survival in his particularly pitiless day and age, or Moss's central position inbetween those two extremes, neither being "good" enough to keep his nose clean of the whole affair, but also not cunning or ruthless enough to ultimately survive it either. It's a brilliant central trifecta that is strongly supported by the film's minor characters, the relentlessly colorful, salt-of-the-earth Texans who make for equally colorful exchanges that fit in plenty of the Coens' signature pitch-black sense of humor into No Country, simultaneously keeping it from ever becoming too overbearing with its fundamentally dark tone, while also avoiding turning into the dreaded, unnaturally-forced style of "comic relief" that Hollywood so often thrusts upon us unnecessarily.
And of course, I would be remiss in my review without discussing at length what is easily the best character within it, Anton Chirgurh, portrayed in a soul-chilling, Oscar-winning turn by Javier Bardem, who has become one of the newer additions to the cinematic pantheon of great villains, with his unbelievably creepy, monotonic line deliveries, "pageboy"-style haircut that would look laughable on anyone else, but instead serves to make him even more unnerving, and his signature weapons in the forms of a silenced shotgun (yes, you read that right) and a cattle gun that's mostly utilized to shoot open locks, but which gets used for its original purpose (sort've) in a particularly disturbing moment early in the film.
With the inscrutable set of "principles" that he lives by, as an agent of the chaos he perceives as fate, Anton contrasts the other two main characters brilliantly, serving as a complete mirror image of both Llewelyn's everyday normality and Ed Tom's outdated "traditional" morality, helping him become one of the greatest film villains of all time. It makes perfect sense though, since NCFOM is one of the greatest films of all time, becoming one of those rare occasions when the Oscars truly got the "Best Picture" of the year right, as, even considering all of the great movies they've created to date, No Country For Old Men still remains the true magnum opus of the Coen brothers' long, storied career, as far as I'm concerned; "you can't stop what's comin'" indeed.
Quoting megladon8 (view post)
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