blog entry

No Country for Old Men

Alison Piepmeier

My husband is a huge fan of the Coen brothers’ movies.  Raising Arizona is one of his all-time favorites (“If you think round is funny” is a familiar saying in our house).  I don’t know that I’d say across the board that I’m a fan of their films—as I’ve mentioned earlier, my movie tastes tend to be somewhat lowbrow—but I do love Fargo, a film that gave me a permanent crush on Frances McDormand (who, incidentally, later played the only Women’s Studies professor I’ve ever seen in a mainstream movie, in Something’s Gotta Give).

So when No Country for Old Men came out, we had to go see it.  Here’s the deal:  the movie I discussed yesterday, The Golden Compass, wasn’t good, but I enjoyed it.  No Country for Old Men was good, but I didn’t enjoy it.  What this says about my system of evaluating cultural productions, I don’t know.

No Country for Old Men had a series of bleak desert landscapes that were oddly similar to the bleak snow-covered landscapes of Fargo, and both films offered a sheriff protagonist making his or her way through these landscapes in search of justice or some resolution--Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, and Tommy Lee Jones’s Ed Tom Bell.  Both characters are competent, thoughtful, and kind.  Unlike Marge Gunderson, though, Ed Tom Bell doesn’t stand as the moral center of the movie.  By the end, things have fallen apart so completely that there’s no moral center whatsoever.  And when you think the film might be offering the message that things have gotten much worse than they used to be, you’re informed by Bell that, in fact, things have always been this bad—this brutally violent, this heartless, with people killing other people out of greed or just meanness.

I don’t have a great love for films whose message is, there is no message, because humanity just sucks.

If you’re looking to be frightened, the villain--Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem-- is one of the scariest I’ve seen.  And I did love the local color characters in the film.  The Coen brothers always do a great job with the local color, and these people were spot-on rural townsfolk—just the tiniest bit exaggerated for effect, but I really got the impression watching them that the Coens might have scanned the gas stations and diners in West Texas to recruit these cast members.  They made the film for me.  And several of them didn’t get killed.