Vintage

The cinematography evokes a walk through of an Ansell Adams–like vision of the South Western U.S.  However, horror lurks in the country and one man must come to grips with it in his sunset years.  Cold-blooded thoughts lurk in the interesting face of Javier Bardem, who plays to my knowledge, one of the scariest hit men in cinematic recollection.  There is something too real looking at him. 

Bardem’s face oddly reminds me of those chiseled on Mt. Rushmore, notably Washington’s.  It is hard as stone, yet piercing and intelligent.   How he arrives in this story, bares some explanation.

While Llewellyn Moss (Broslin) is hunting antelope, he stumbles across the aftermath of a drug-related gun battle which has left everyone dead except a single badly-wounded Mexican. Moss finds a truck full of heroin and a suitcase with a cool million in cash. Leaving the Mexican alive, he takes the money, which ignites a hunt for him that stretches for most of the remaining flick. He sends his wife, Carla Jean Moss, to her mother’s while he leaves his home with the money.

The mistake he makes seems is to have a stroke of good conscience.  He can’t let the man in the car die from a lack of water.  He double backs to the grim scene with a jug of water.  I wandered what exactly this meant in the grand scope of the universe presented here in the bookend of the opening and closing credits.  Is it that sometimes good deeds can be your undoing in a cold, indifferent world, where danger and death and estrangement can strike with little provocation regardless of one’s Karmic investment in doing something good?  Are today’s atrocities the misdemeanors of tomorrow?

Josh Broslin was deadeye as Llewellyn Moss.  He was cool as hell.  We were sympathetic to his plight and he was notionally on the good side of morality, but morality seems to have lost its bearings in this vision of a world gone over the edge, into the morass, deep into the abyss, happily over the cliff.

No Country reminded me of Apocalypse Now, which you may know was firmly rooted in the literary work, The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.  In that story, one man goes up the river to the heart of mankind’s darkness and loses his sanity.  Here, No Country, the Heart of Darkness is not so much something that must be traveled to as it is a wave of progress that is bringing the heart of darkness down river to you waiting at the alluvial entrance of civilization.  There is no escaping it.  There is no reconciling the dark reality of the world with the campfire tales of the good ol’ days. 
I felt distinctly sad about the character portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones, who delivers a nuanced and tender performance.  He is in my book, a man who the movie is aimed at, which lends to its cold hard hitting effect.  We are Tommy Lee Jones in this film, even though he is a static character in the film and by design.  He does not change at all.  He gives up, if you can call that change.  He is overwhelmed with the resignation that life has “overmatched” him and this is indeed no country for old men, men who never wore guns when they defended their counties in the good ol’ days, he hailing from a long line of Sheriffs in the Texan tradition.  But, we are terrified because we are static in the onslaught of encroaching evil.  No Country evoked the Holocaust in this sense—sensible smart men who remained static in the face of unimaginable and animalistic evil.

There is a cool scene with a relative who is curious about the Sheriff retiring, giving up so to speak.  He talks of an old story in 1909 about a time when six or seven men came to the ranch and before grandpa or whoever, could grab his rifle, he was shot in the gut and left to die on the porch.  The point being, this has been happening for ever and it will continue.

Tommy Lee Jones, as us, is a man who has lived his life isolated from the truly evil men and deeds of the world.  When I read about raping and ravaging and revenge killings in the underdeveloped, more lawless regions of the world, I imagine I felt like Tommy Lee Jones was meant to feel in this film, when he was hearing of disgraced corpses and unspeakable acts committed against regular normal folk.  The more negative aspect of that feeling is that perhaps violence and cold indifference is what at the world really is all about and our place  in it is protected by a delusional wall of morality, where there is good and bad and a God that even gives two pesos about what really happens to us.

I could spend these bytes here talking about plot constructions and some of the more visceral action oriented attractions this film delivers too, which it does as good as any that would offer up drug deals gone bad, random acts of violence against town folk and unflinching cruelness by design.  But, that would be missing the point of this great film.  There is something more here than action.

No Country for Old Men is the rare film that wallows in violence and action but at heart is an intelligent film, a masterful work of art.  The film makes you think.  Now, how old does that make you feel?