‘No Country for Old Men’ Is Not a Good Country to Live in

“No Country for Old Men” – “Fargo” by way of “Barton Fink” – is undoubtedly a beautiful piece of cinematic craft. Roger Deakins’ cinematography draws the eye in, the cast is pitch-perfect in their roles, and the Coen Brothers’ directing achieves the masterful pacing and brilliant shot quality that translates to a raw yet subtle visceral experience, although they overdo ambiguity. Yet the bare-bones plot, about an Antelope hunter who helps himself to a satchel full of money from a drug deal gone wrong only to become quarry to a ridiculously violent psychopath, isn’t balanced by a suitably beefy study of character.

Characters with Feathery Impact

The character work comes mostly from often the extraordinary performances. Tommy Lee Jones, as overwhelmed Sheriff Bell, brings to the screen, a wry and worldly fatigue defined by the film’s best one-lines and most acute connection to the film’s theme. Similarly gritty and nuanced – a joy to watch – is Josh Brolin as Llewellyn Moss, the last of the lonesome cowboys and the film’s man on the run. But while similar praise could be heaped on any of the film’s actors, “No Country for Old Men” turns out to be a character study without a lesson plan. Some characters, like Woody Harrelson’s bounty hunter Carson Wells, come and go with no real impact on the plot or memorable character moments, begging the question as to why it was necessary to include them. The main characters ultimately have one note: The Sheriff is overwhelmed by a world changed for the worse, Moss is trying to stay alive, the psychopath is a psychopath. This is problem in a film that ultimately lacks a narrative “anchor” – something for the plot or character study to latch onto – and, worse, tries the admittedly bold move of switching anchors mid-film. There are films, of course, that switch between multiple anchors. “The Winter Guest,” for example, successfully alternates between four pairs of character. Ensemble films, like “A Prairie Home Companion,” focus on a group of characters rather than any particular individual. But “No Country for Old Men” doesn’t quite succeed in keeping its disparate elements in a coherent state of balance. When one anchor is obliquely eliminated – if only the script could have supported such a bold move! – the rest of the film feels like it’s overstaying its welcome merely to deliver a weak and disappointing ending. And considering that some characters, like Bell, don’t really have much of an effect on what actually goes on in the film – other critics have compared the character, rightly, to a Greek chorus – there really isn’t all that much stick with which to poke into the characters’ psychologies. Limited plot, limited character study – limited movie.

It Feels Cartoonish

The case could be made that there is, in fact, a single constant, an “anchor,” in the form of Anton Chigurgh, the aforementioned psychopath. As an immutable force of evil that kills just about everyone he meets, played with such chillingly understated ferocity by Javier Bardem, Chigurgh is the linchpin around which the film more or less revolves. Unfortunately, for all of the malevolent charisma Bardem puts into the role, Chigurgh comes across as cartoon thanks to the Coen’s characterization. (I can’t speak on the film’s relationship to the novel by Cormac McCarthy.) A reality check would suggest that a killer who leaves such an absurdly high body count with a disregard for the niceties of forensic science would have an FBI task force on his tail. But the film is more interested in presenting Chigurgh in a more mythical light. On those terms, Chigurgh, who is no Frank Booth, comes across as a refugee tossed out from a David Lynch film. Or maybe it’s that Chigurgh reminds me of a Batman villain: The Joker (an irrational mass murderer) crossed with Two-Face (given Chigurgh’s tendency to kill or spare a victim’s life at the toss of a coin). When even Carson Wells, perhaps provided to offer commentary on the inscrutable killer because the killer certainly betrays no inner life, can’t do better than speculate that Chigurgh operates according to principles no one can discern, it is surely the death of depth for the character. As an archetype of Death, or Evil, or whatever, and as visceral a character as he is, Chigurgh brings a new conceptual archetype to the screen: Boring.

Of Downbeat Endings

With boring comes the bourgeois nihilism that’s all the rage these days, the kind of nihilism still immaturely impressed with pointing out how miserable things are but unable to take the mature step of a providing a serious critical discussion. “…The Mist's damn-everyone-to-hell finale still proves a refreshing rebuke to the Capra-esque pap peddled by the director's [Darabont] prior ‘The Majestic,’” wrote Slant Magazine’s Nick Shager of the Stephen King-adaptation. Setting aside the question as to why happy endings need to be specifically rebuked – must films always reflect the world as it is as opposed to how we wish it to be? – I have to wonder if the film’s relentlessly bleak tone, apparently shared by films like “The Mist,” is merely playing into a larger pattern of cultural gloom rather than making a worthwhile, specific and, dare I say it, useful observation.

While I can appreciate a good expression of despair – given the state of the world, it’s hard not to suffer a bleak outlook – it’s not enough to parrot the same old, same old. Endings don’t have to be happy, but they should be more than merely downbeat. They should certainly offer more substance than a lament for things going wrong when kids stopped saying “Sir” and “Ma’am.” Just as the unexamined life isn’t worth living, the unexamined presentation of evil in the world isn’t worth bothering with, no matter how handsomely or cleverly filmed.