No Country For Old Men – A Dust Bowl Odyssey

Not being a fantasy or sci-fi movie, I wasn’t going to post my thoughts about this flick. The fact that I initially hated it also played its part. But like it or not, this movie stays with you - it is one of those “different” sort of flicks that "get you thinkin".

And I figured that in itself is a kind of recommendation regardless of my initial reaction; is the movie you “liked” but forgot about a week or two after seeing it really better than one you “hated” but were still thinking about months later (when I say “thinking about” I mean something more than just feeling grossed out)?

SPOILER WARNING. If you ever plan on seeing this movie – STOP HERE. This movie’s effect hinges a great deal on surprise and you won’t enjoy it half as much if you know it in advance.

NCFOM is set in the Western US of 1980, its plot is unaccompanied by soundtrack, and follows a quietly rambling pace – punctuated by moments of extreme violence until its “conclusion”. I put quotes around that last because the movie doesn’t really end so much as the camera turns off (one of those).

I group this type of movie under what I call the “dust bowl” genre, for lack of a better term; cast in the West (often with little or no soundtrack), usually having a sense of general emptiness, quiet or desolation, it has some very basic character motivations occasionally contrasted with quirky or sometimes psychopathic behavior, and it falls in with the likes of The Hitcher, Wild At Heart, The Last Great Picture Show, Natural Born Killers, My Own Private Idaho, Into the Wild, and probably many more that I could have included but can’t think of at the moment.

There seems to be something about the West that lends itself to the offbeat modern story; full of big open spaces, its wildness and isolation bespeak a kind of mystery – even moreso now in the modern age than it was back in the days of the "wild west", as trends roll in from the coasts and acquire a distinctly Western twist before blending into the general stew of tidepool cultures where you never know quite what to expect, and the term “local” becomes meaningless. This to me is a kind of modern "magic", and is therefore partly what I meant when I said that NCFOM “grew on” me, because it made me realize that in this sense, “dust bowl’ movies actually are cousins to the fantasy genre I'm so fond of.

The first thing that hit me when I watched the movie was the thought that Javier Bardem looked a lot like Martin Landau in his earlier days, and I couldn’t shake the impression throughout the movie that the main character was being stalked by the commander of Space 1999. Since then I managed to get some side by side photos and I guess now they look more like distant cousins to me than twins…

By the way, no I’m not that old that I was an actual fan of Space 1999; I knew about it mostly because I grew up surrounded by my dad’s sprawling collection of sci-fi paraphernalia (issues of Starlog, Cinefantastique, etc). Just for the record.

But as usual I digress.

The thing most responsible for my original dislike of the movie was the sense that everything was hopeless, and that in such an environment Bardem’s character Anton Chigurh appeared as a kind of omnipotent force in a world consisting purely of killers and the waiting-to-be-killed.

If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if John Ryder from The Hitcher had gone on to become a part time contract killer instead of being ventilated by a shotgun, this is probably the film for you. For my part, I thought I might have been the kind of person who would want to see that kind of movie, until I saw NCFOM.

Chigurh for his part seemed like a murderous Forest Gump, or maybe a cross between Forest and the Terminator. Quiet, plodding, inexorable, deadly (and sometimes plain annoying), he was always turning up in the shadows and committing random ultraviolence before disappearing again, accompanied by his “captive bolt pistol” (I had no idea what this was until I looked it up on wiki) and what looks like a semi-automatic shotgun with silencer (which unfortunately kind of underscored the Space 1999 thing for me, as it looked and sounded like a “pew pew” style raygun).

He is like a supernatural entity, even being described as “a ghost” by rival operator Carson Wells. Generally he stayed on Moss’ trail by way of the transponder hidden in the suitcase, so they explained that much, but how did he manage to track down Wells? Pure luck? I mean nowadays you can use the internet as an excuse for supposedly finding a person’s most hidden information in half an hour, but this was set in 1980.

And for what it’s worth, why was he apprehended at the beginning of the movie, other than for a cheap excuse to show his badass credentials by way of him breaking out of a police station? At least when the Terminator did his police station scene he actually had a recognizable motive...

Chigurh isn’t totally untouchable – if only to carefully demonstrate otherwise to the critics, they have the protagonist Llewelyn Moss put a round in his leg at one point (leading of course to the over-the-top drugstore scene), and Chigurh gets his arm mangled in a random (as in “Pulp Fiction” random) car accident near the end of the movie, but those are in stark contrast to the rest of the movie, and all in all I had a hard time finding Anton Chigurh very believable.

Then on the other hand you have his quarry Lleweyln, someone else who inspires mixed feelings – initially I kind of rooted for him as the “everyman”, but he was just so clueless about the danger he was exposing his girlfriend to, as well as several innocent bystanders who got (fatally) caught in the middle of things as he attempted to escape with the money, that by the time the Mexican Mob caught up with him I had become sort of indifferent to his fate.

Not to say Moss wasn’t believable – after all who wouldn’t want to keep $2 million he found lying around, and be spooked into making some stupid choices in the process of trying to do so? I’ve got no problem with greed being a primary motive; my indifference stemmed more from the way Moss’ character developed along lines similar to those in The Sopranos, i.e. kind of a clever, brutal animal who did what he felt he had to to get by, with no real aspirations to be a better man. If anything Moss was a little too believable, much as I hate to say it (yeah I know, there’s no pleasing me).

Tommy Lee Jones. After his initial voiceover, I kept waiting for this mild, unassuming but weathered lawman to do something extraordinary, maybe even make a difference of some kind… but no. His character Sheriff Bell makes one bright deduction about the timing of Chigurh’s escape early on, and then spends the rest of film stumbling along in the assassin’s wake, mouthing twangy western jargon and ultimately deciding to retire and dwell upon his dreams and their deeper meanings at the very end. One more person who just cannot manage to slow down much less thwart the progress of Anton the Unstoppable.

Those are all the things I didn’t like about the movie, however the film certainly has its good qualities too. Superbly acted, cast and filmed, it hooks you and reels you into its quiet, dusty atmosphere, and you’re never checking your watch even if you can’t manage to like any of the characters much, because you’re too busy feeling like you’re there, and taking it all in.

More than that, in a weird sort of way NCFOM cleanses the palate of the more typical good-guy-wins action/thriller movies, by showing you what happens if things don’t go in the hero’s favor every step of the way, something worth seeing once in a while if only to refresh your sense of danger and to let you go back to enjoying the “Die-Even-Harder-With-A-Vengeance-Yet-Again” movies (the sort of flicks that I normally want to enjoy).

And as with all “dust bowl” flicks, it’s an example of a plotline whose outcome you really can’t anticipate until you get there; here the “protagonist” and “antagonist” clash and rebound off eachother in a fast moving tangle of events that keep you guessing throughout and thereby transfixed.

If I would have changed anything it probably would have been to shine a bit more light on Chigurh’s more mundane motivations – after all the fact he is even nominally working for money despite being a compulsive psychopath indicates the existence of a more human (if not likable) side to his nature, and I think showing it a bit would have fleshed out his character more; why does he want money? Just to pay for food and gas? Or does he have a mortgage to pay, an ex to support or maybe a heroin addiction to feed (etc)?

The other change I’d have made is more of a “neatness” thing than something which would have made the film better per se; I’m talking about Sheriff Bell and his seemingly incidental role in the movie. He really does nothing more than provide random commentary, yet he is exactly the sort of unlikely hero that normally comes through in the end. Watching the movie closely you sort of get the sense that the book’s author Cormac McCarthy may have originally intended something like this for Bell, but dropped the idea midway through in favor of something more ambiguous and “real”.

That said, I think Bell could have at least taken out Chigurh toward the end (which could have been a very cool fight/shootout after all the buildup to it), even if it was too late to save Moss or his wife, without ruining the movie – after all, the “good guy” won in Pulp Fiction and at least arguably made it a better movie by doing so, so I don’t think the negative ending in NCFOM is so much essential to its being “good” as much as to its being its own quirky self – for better or worse.

In the end I’d have to say for all my disappointment in the villain’s unstoppableness, the hero’s animal baseness and the sheriff's cluelessness, the storyline, casting and cinematography are nonetheless very well done, the tempo is great and it gets you thinking. It just takes a while for it all to sink in.

Go rent it.