A guide for enthusiasts of Badass Cinema
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is one of those movies that’s so quiet it can be uncomfortable to watch with an audience. Alot of scenes all you hear is the wind blowing lightly over the wide open Texas plains, or the cars driving past outside a motel room, along with every squirm, every sigh, every shoulder crack in the theater. At the end when I saw the music credit for Carter Burwell I honestly couldn’t for the life of me remember any point in the movie where there was music.
So it’s clearly a little arty, it’s not like anybody’s gonna mistake this for THE MUMMY RETURNS. Or for THE FRENCH CONNECTION for that matter. It requires a little patience. But there’s so much about it that’s so fuckin good that it will win over all kinds of people from all walks of life. At first.
It’s a movie full of great performances and great characters. James Brolin’s boy Josh has a career-catapulting role as Llewelyn Moss, Vietnam vet who’s out hunting when he stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone real bad, and decides to take home a briefcase of money as a souvenir. Javier Bardem, with his worst haircut since PERDITA DURANGO, plays Anton Chigurh, an enforcer who’s gone crazy enough to kill pretty much anybody who sees him along the way while spouting philosophy to justify his actions. And Tommy Lee Jones, in another topnotch quiet old lovable sadsack performance like he’s been doing lately, is the disillusioned Sheriff Bell who follows the trail.
And it’s a movie with alot of great talking, a script that pays careful attention to the interesting ways different people put words together. But this time credit doesn’t go as much to Joel and Ethan Coen, the brothers out of Minnesota who made the movie, as to Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the book that way already. Alot of the dialogue is lifted straight out of the book so it has alot of classic lines. I was glad they kept my favorite: Llewelyn’s wife asks him where he got that gun and he says “At the gettin’ place.”
This is a jawdroppingly awesome piece of filmatism, but is it a piece of Badass Cinema? This is a question not relevant to most reviewers but since everybody else has already written ten books worth about every other angle I might as well focus on this one. (more…)
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THE ROAD is a good movie, better book. If you’re thinking about reading it but haven’t got to it yet I’d say read it, then see the movie. The movie (directed by John Hillcoat, who did THE PROPOSITION) is very faithful to the book (by Cormac McCarthy, who did No Country For Old Men) and illustrates it well, but it can’t really do the same thing.
