No Country for Old Men
10 January 2008 by jaksoul
(pic via)
No Country for Old men is one of those films for which it’s very easy to start bandying around superlatives. It’s a contender for my film of the year (I saw it at the very end of 2007) but would still be in the running if I had seen it on January 1st. It is a film made by incredibly talented people at the very height of their abilities, from a book by one of America’s finest authors.
On the surface, it’s an old fashioned morality tale, good vs evil, set in the Texan/Mexico border familiar to readers of Cormac McCarthy’s wonderfully rich body of work. It’s a spare and brutal film, set in a world of random encounters of enormous coincidence and characters tossed around and buffeted by events way, way beyond their control. In short it’s a world which feels very much like reality.
Toning down their usual predilection for the surreal and absurd, the Coen brothers stay unerring true to the spirit of the work to deliver a taught, intensely focussed narrative which draws heavily on the expansive moral questions which underpin McCarthy’s work. Why good men fail and the wicked prosper, where justice seems absent, what hope remains ?
They are questions as old as questions themselves and fittingly, as McCarthy is oft compared to an old testament prophet, it feels like a contemporary retelling of the story of Job (but without the special fx heavy ending).
The answers to such questions, when they come, point to overarching truths hidden and divine, beyond our mortal understanding and out of view in our waking state but revealed to us partly in dreams and visions.
To quote Tommy Lee Jones’ character;
“It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past… and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. ‘Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.”