No Country for Old Men

We thought it appropriate to review last year's Academy Award winner for Best Picture tonight - Oscar Night. Maybe this will become habit forming; reviewing the previous years Best Picture winner on Oscar night. Who knows.

GREEN'S TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN REVIEW:

This movie could alternatively be called “An Ode to Random Senseless Violence” or perhaps “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, part XVII”

What would you do if you stumbled on a bloody crime scene in the middle of the Texas wasteland, with no one seemingly around for miles? Would you take the two million dollars if you knew nobody was a lookin’?

I probably would have, and so would you.

First thing I would have done was get a duffel bag or something else to carry the cash in. And I certainly would have made a more thorough inspection for homing devices at the earliest opportunity, to make sure I could make a clean get away. Obviously, with that kind of coin just laying around, someone’s going to come looking for it. And they’re bound to be not very nice if they catch you with what clearly doesn’t belong to you.

That air gun thing that Chigurh used was certainly a neat toy, both to kill people with and to get into locked rooms quickly.

In any case, Javier Bardem was truly creepy from the beginning, as Anton Chigurh, and deservedly won Best Supporting Actor. I don’t think this movie was Best Picture or Best Director worthy though. I thought the screenplay was good, but was it deserving of the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar? Questionable call there, I think. Tommy Lee Jones, as usual, was excellent but in a understated way. I was annoyed at the whole hotel/pool sequence. Seemed like something was missing, without knowing exactly what. That is extremely annoying. I, unlike Scribe, did not read McCarthy's novel, so did not know exactly what the missing scene should have been, but obviously it was pivotal to how the film ended. Perhaps they'll include this scene on the three disc special edition, due in April.

Still, there was something compelling about the story that kept me watching. Did I want to see Chigurh get caught or did I want to see him get away? Did he kill Llewelyn's wife or did she get the coin flip right, like the storekeeper near the beginning of the movie apparently did, and walk away?

I don't think this will ever be the instant classic that the DVD case proclaims it to be, but it is a must see movie, at least once.

*** out of *****

SCRIBE'S THE COIN BROUGHT ME HERE REVIEW:

Cormac McCarthy’s writing style is an acquired taste. It is at once immediate, vibrant and pretentious. Eschewing normal structure such as quotation marks and italics, he forces his readers to pay attention by making it less clear who is speaking at any given time. Eventually, if one can pick up on the rhythm, one can follow his work.

When the Cohen Brothers decided to adapt his novel, “No Country for Old Men,” it was obvious the right guys had the job. Joel and Ethan Cohen were huge fans of the novel and looking to do something more along the lines of their more serious efforts such as "Miller’s Crossing" and "Blood Simple."

Starring the severely underrated Josh Brolin and a slightly miscast Tommy Lee Jones, this is a marked departure in tone for the Cohen’s more recent films. The mood is stark and desolate, like the American southwest in which the story takes place, and the characters are subtle to the point of nearly vanishing into the sunset.

Except Anton Chigurh, of course. An actor can only be as brilliant as the source material. That’s why, no matter how hard he worked on the role, Heath Ledger’s Joker was just passable. But a writer of McCarthy’s caliber can create an enduring psychopath whose very existence seems elemental, a product of natural selection. He is not a person so much as he is a force to be avoided.

The Cohen Brothers wisely follow the novel as closely as possible. The direction is evokes 1980 Western America very well and the actors inhabit their roles in ways rarely seen in mainstream Hollywood productions.

If anything causes the film to falter, it is the odd decision the filmmakers make in the third act. I read the novel. Like most who have read the novel before seeing a movie, I was following along pretty closely until I had to go to the bathroom. When I came back the film was winding down. I asked my friend what I’d missed and he told me. Baffled, I wondered how much had been omitted and didn’t find out until recently when I watched it on DVD.

An entire important sequence was removed from the film, causing a rather jarring experience toward the end. I won’t go into great detail for those who haven’t read it or seen it, but once Brolin’s character meets up with the girl at the hotel, there’s a whole minor sub-plot that results before the big climax. With that gone, the film takes a bizarre leap from gripping and riveting to disconcerting.

Still, that one point doesn’t prevent this from being a great movie. It’s rare that we complain about a movie needing more of what made it great.

****½ out of *****