No country for old men

ah stranger danger

Ok, when I was reviewing Claymore, my problem was my total lack of emotion that I felt from the series as a whole; it was good, just not profound. So I figured, for the summer I’d better review something that got a real emotional response out of me, and that tends to happen if a movie is really popular but isn’t really good (it being good requires me to like it, clichéd egomaniacs joke there). So, as the title indicates, I’m going to be attacking one of the most popular films of the last few years, “No Country for Old Men”. No Country for Old Men, a 2007 film made by the Cohen brothers, it guys who made Fargo.

The movie takes place in Texas where a hunter/cowboy person named Llewelyn Moss who comes across a botched drug deal, and finds two millions dollars. However, the mafia finds out who he is and send a man named Chigurh to kill him, (yes it’s a play off sugar), who is the poster boy for disturbing serial killers, but nobody seems to be able to catch on. Chigurh tracks Moss while mowing down all of the Mexican gangsters who get in his way with a shot gun that has a silencer on it (did I mention this movie takes place in 1980), eventually fighting moss with shot guns in the middle of a city, where nobody seems to notice. And then another operative shows up to make a deal with moss, and then Chigurh some how he knows where he lives and kills him and…ok no this stuff is absurd. The plot is just nonsensical violence, broken up by long scenes of people staring at things. But the plot is nothing more than a series of fights and Chigurh implausibly avoiding getting caught.

Now the film is cinematically impressive, and I think that is the main reason why this was so well accepted. If you look at it from a fully cinematic viewpoint, this thing will blow your mind, and most of the praise for this film comes, justifiably, from the extremely high quality of the film. The landscape shots are mind-blowing, and the editing ins profound, the props look and feel realistic in the characters hands, and the audio effects are superb, giving the effect that you are actually at these locations feeling what the characters feel. In fact, it reminded me of “The Shining”, in the sense that the tension and the emotions comes from the feeling that you are present at the location. And it has that same great quality of the tension being in the atmosphere of the scene, rather than any particular event, like the first coin toss scene in the film, all of the emotion is in what will happen next, and the expectations and eventually defying the viewers expectations. They both also have a talent for generating a lot of fear and suspense in fairly normal situations, without a climax (shut up Freud), and still be horrifying. Like the scene in “The Shining” where the boy I standing by the forbidden hotel room and is considering opening it but doesn’t? Even when the boy eventually chooses the anti climatic solution and doesn’t open the door, the tension is still there, and the scene is still far more suspenseful than any actual monster hunt, and that is because it taps into some very inner primal fears. Very few American movie goings have actually been chased by a monster or been chased by a psychotic hit man, but many of us know the primal fear of what is on the other side of a creepy door into the scary room, or been alone in a passage way when you suddenly feel a sense of fear, or have run into a really creepy guy at work. When the movie choices showing suspense in simplicity, it is brilliant. However, the effect is ruined by the sheer absurdity of the evens that occur. Does nobody in this city know how to use a phone, when you see a shotgun fight in a hotel room, police do something about it. It wastes its best quality in its absurdity, and just becomes a well-made action movie. One thing the movie does deserve massive credit for is that it has a total lack of background music. None, the entire movie goes without any background music at all, which gives it massive kudo points in the grand scheme of things. Now, I’m not against background music as an idea, and I think it can be used to great affect (The Shining again). But I like movies experimenting with new things, and in terms of drama, I think the lack of background music worked almost entirely in this movie. And lets be honest, technically speaking, this is nothing short of a masterpiece. However, that doesn’t excuse the actual biggest fault of the movie, and that’s well…the story.

The film, based upon a book of the same name, is a film trying to be a deconstruction of the typical western, as well as the clichéd Hollywood format, by showing that life isn’t fair and evil triumphs over good. Now, I think that is a good message, it is easy to get disgusted with he sappy, corny, and sickenly clichéd happy endings that always seem to come out in Hollywood movies. Now I don’t object to happy endings, but I do get sick with the extremely implausible happy endings, where everything works out in an utterly implausible manner (Disney is particularly guilty of this). One of my top dislikes of films that are painfully optimistic or painfully idealistic (I don’t mind idealism, but it has to be contrasted with reality for me to take it seriously, Pan’s Labyrinth did this very well) without a sense of realism. Sappy, overly sweet endings in particular are a personal pet hatred of mine (again, Slumdog pulled this off well by making the characters earn their happy ending), cause its sappy, cliché, and horribly false. However, and I’m sure you can see what I’m building up to, some films go too far in the other direction, in trying to show how dark, unfair, and unjust the world is, they make everything so absurdly horrible and life so dismal that it just comes off as absurd, cause people realize that it isn’t accurate. Anything by Frank Miller (Sin City, I’m looking at you), suffers from this, as well as racism and crappy writing, because the violence, sex, drugs and cursing is so gratuitous and over the top, that it is just as unrealistic as a description of the Native Americans and English settles living happy idealistic lives. The trap that film makers fall into, and No Country for Old Men is a painful example of this, is that it is so absurdly dark and cynical, that its message of “this is the harsh reality” comes off as just silly rather than moving, most likely because the directors are desperate to show off the unfair nature of the world they just go straight into the realm of impossibility. Cynical works can be effective, if they feel like they could actually happen, “Song of Ice and Fire” is a good example of this cause dark as the world may be, its feels like a retelling of Historical England, which was pretty dark. But the most cynical, dark and idealistically shattering thing I’ve ever seen was in a work that contained no blood, no cursing, no fighting and no sex. The English TV show, “Yes Minister” and its sequel Series “Yes Prime Minister” depict a far darker reality than the over the top violence of “No Country for Old Men”. Both shows are basically dramas about how politics actually work in England, with the weak willed but idealistic minister Hacker butting heads with the cynical and corrupt secretary Sir Humphrey. Within the show, many good ideas and competent solutions to the nations various problems are proposed, but are shot down, delayed, or tainted by the inefficient, back biting, and corrupt British Government (this corrupt isn’t limited to Britain, France and the US are shown quite negatively as well). The show very accurately shows why blind idealism doesn’t work so well in the real world, and it does this so effectively cause it feels real. The reason why it is so chilling is because you know, that to an extent, the politics of the show are real, and the way politics works is real. The cynicism, the corruption, the incompetence and the nepotism all take place in our own government; the show just displays how it works. “No Country for Old Men” makes the claim it isn’t a typical Hollywood movie, but in a sense it is, the plot armor is instead protecting the villain instead of the hero. Chigurh by rights should have been killed or caught long before the ending. I mean, in the opening he kills a cop with a pair of hand-cuffs, and a random man on the street, and considering his name and appearance, not to mention the body trail he leaves behind, he shouldn’t be that hard to track. I mean, now inept to the police have to be to not notice two shot gun fights in the middle of a city and a motel? And then he comes backs to the motel, and murders another man; does anybody go outside their houses in this town? Not to mention his seeming omnipotence, always knowing where his enemy is, such as the second assassin who appears with a lot of build up, and is then quickly killed off (just like how Halloran is killed off in the Shinning after a massive build up, which I thought was great), but Chigurh somehow both knows he is in town, and where he is staying. Not to mention how a guy with a shotgun fighting men with machineguns never seems to get hit by any bullets.

Now people mention that he is like some kind of unstoppable force or deity, but the thing is, it feels cheap. The man is a hired hit man by a gang sent to retrieve money, that man being the symbolic incarnation of fate just seems petty. And in the film he gets called out for being a human being near the end. So the whole angle of painting him as some sort of angle of Death just doesn’t feel right, he is clearly a human and clearly a sociopath, not some person who ought to maintain judgment over life and death. And its not even random chance, cause despite his flipping a coin, he is the one who chooses who has to get that choice. And the whole concept of him being some sort of force of nature falls flat when he is killing Mexican gangsters for cash. The whole concepts has been done before and done better. Take the classic Swedish film “Seventh Seal”, which his about the man who plays chess with death. He is also running away from an unstoppably dark antagonist who is the metaphorical representation of death and inevitability. However, it has a context, the knight has played chess with death and is targeted for death, and it takes place during the time of the Black Death. And there is this whole theme about fate vs. faith vs. despair, so it’s all part of the story. In “No Country for Old Men”, the whole “unbeatably avatar of death” angle feels out of place, cause it has no real part of the story. The protagonist is marked for death but apart from materialistic money dealings…um, why? Why is fate against this guy, he hasn’t really done anything that seems to justify the fates aligning against him, and it doesn’t seem to mesh well with the whole story, cause it doesn’t relate.

In short, while the movie is impressive, it ruins all of its best moments just by not being well written. The best parts of the movie are I admit, but, there are only a few scenes where both the technological genius combines with actual good writing. The best example of course, are at the end, and are both massive spoilers, even more so than everything else I’ve said, so if you ever plan of watching the movie and care about these sort of things, then stop reading now, leave the blog alone, then come back when you finished. For you people, my final words are going to be “It isn’t at all worth the hype, and suffers from some truly painful writing, but is certainly worth watching simply for the quality of the film itself alone. I wouldn’t put it on any “best movies list”, but it does deserve some of its praise for the technical achievements, and all of the actors, but in the end, just watch Fargo”

For those of you who’ve seen it, or don’t care about spoilers, here are the two scenes that I think actually deserve praise. The most shocking of course is that the main character dies…off screen. The last scene we see him in is seeing the Mexican Gangsters (opposed to Chigurh) coming to his door and his preparing himself for a fight. Then we cut away, and when we cut back Chigurh finds Moss’ corpse surrounded by dead gangsters, and then moves on. Basically, its like the film just skipped over the massive fight where the main character brings down like half the gang before being shot and mortally wounded, having a brief flashback to his wife or something, then with his last dying strength unleashing his full fury upon the remaining gangsters and dies looking up at the sky taking about yada yada yada we’ve all been here before. It’s a standard cliché in action movie, and the fact that the movie actually skipped it actually legitimately shocked me. Up until now, while there were a few “oh, didn’t see that coming” moments, this was the only time I actually was pretty shocked, cause we’ve grown to expect the main character dying in a final blaze of shotgun cocking (shut up Freud) glory, that the final 20 mins of the film being nothing but a long shooting happy moment is kinda taken for granted, so I will give the film points for simply skipping over all of that and spending the final 20 mins of the film doing something a bit more plot related, not to mention how much that shocked the audience. It also kinda makes a point on how the final explosive final, isn’t actually that needed in a film, by not showing it, the entire concept is kinda made to look silly and unneeded, so kudos to the film for spending its ending on something more time worthy. And in that, we get the second good part of the film, the final 20 mins. Now these aren’t actually good, just unlike the rest of the film, something is keeping your attention apart from the film quality and the actors, and is the first time Chigurh gets any real humanization in his confrontation with the wife where somebody finally calls him out for being a psycho. And then getting hit by a car, which is the only time the world actually seems remotely unfair (the other driver doesn’t seem eager to talk to him through, normally the driver is worried bout the whole insurance angle), and the symbolism made sense, cross roads being the crossroads of life ect ect. But these too scenes don’t make up for the movie as a whole. In the end…wait I already told you what I thought. Oh fine. Worth watching, but shockingly forgettable.

From
EE