Share on FacebookTweetFollow us
Read More
Movie review: No Country for Old Men
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
Joel and Ethan Coen have adapted Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed novel “No Country for Old Men” into a stomach-churning horror drama. With the stunning kick of a rattlesnake bite, the story is bleak and hideous in its violence.
Terrell County Texas is being terrorized by a killer (Javier Bardem) so relentless and bloodless he is like a modern day Frankenstein monster that’s discovered it really likes drowning little girls.
The Coens make the tone of Anton Chigurh’s rampage more blood-curdling and dreadful with their use of “real people” (instead of bit players from central casting) in minor parts as simple how-dee-do folks who think homespun courtesy and helpfulness will spare their lives when faced with the ghastly man who utters what may become filmdom’s newest iconic phrase: “Call it.”
This plague of death is unleashed with the desert massacre of drug smugglers. Their trucks, circled like some perversely bludgeoned wagon train, dust-coated, glass-shattered and blood splattered; their bodies bloating in the wind-scoured dirt—these luckless merchants, their bricks of heroin and their two-million dollar-stuffed valise there for the taking, fill the amazed eyes of local Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who comes upon the scene while tracking a deer he
wounded. Dispassionately, he takes it in and takes the money.
He has an inkling of the sort of persons that will come after him. Sending his sweetly protesting, worried wife (Kelly Macdonald) to her mother’s for safe-keeping, Llewelyn hits the road, with Anton after him, helped by a tracking device; whose dreaded clicking sound is sure to achieve icon status, as well. Anton has already catatonically butchered several people, while sparing one who correctly guessed the outcome of a coin toss. Llewelyn is cagey and tough; you think he’s going to outwit Anton. You think he’s “cut out for it.” But, Anton is a different breed of criminal.
That’s clear to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who’s seen it all and still can’t comprehend the scope of sadistic mutation evil has undergone. Like a worn down Andy in a Mayberry gone mad, Bell laments the turn society has taken, the diminishment of human caring and decency. He’s been “taking the measure” of death for a long time, now; and he knows he is “over-matched” this time.
Brutally brilliant, this is a film with an impact not felt since the likes of such movies as “Bonnie and Clyde”, “The Godfather” and “Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” Miramax Film release rated R for graphic violence, language.
