FILM CHALLENGE: 112) No Country For Old Men

112) No Country For Old Men

Director: Joel and Ethan Coen

Year: 2007

Plot Summary: After stumbling across a case of money among dead bodies, Llewelyn Moss thinks he can keep it quiet, but when silent killer Anton Chigurh locates Moss and his money, Vietnam veteran Moss makes a run for it. With bodies falling everywhere Anton goes, it's only a matter of time before he catches up with Llewelyn.

The plot summary above makes No Country For Old Men sound like a simple thriller, but in it's execution, the Coen Brother's Oscar winning movie is a complex crime story rich in symbolism and meaning.

Adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, the film stars three main characters: Llywellyn Moss, Anton Chigurh and Sheriff Bell. While it's the two former characters who make up much of the movie's action, it's Bell who is the core of the story. In the final act of No Country For Old Men, when he reminisces on the events that have taken place, this is when the movie's meaning comes to the foreground.

In the opening narration, he states that he has never had to own a weapon and, during the first hour of the movie, we see that he has an traditional demeanor treating everyone around him with politeness and respect. But this changes over the course of the film as he comes face to face with the violence of the modern world. He feels overmatched by the meaningless bloodshed around him and his naive worldview becomes crushed. Hence the title No Country For Old Men. This change is symbolised by how he, in one of the final scenes, contrasting against his belief that he doesn't need a good, he enters a motel room with a pistol drawn.

The meaningless, brutal violence of the modern world is symbolised through Anton, portrayed in an Academy Award winning performance by Javier Bardem. He's an unstoppable, ruthless force who has not a single ounce of sentimentality about him. In one scene he kills a farmer who innocently stopped to give him a hand with his vehicle and offer directions to the airport while in another he fires at a lonely, harmless bird on a bridge. Much like many of the violent attacks in today's world, there's little motive behind his actions and there's little that can be done to be safe from them.

The Coen Brothers offer no easy solutions in No Country For Old Men either. This isn't a story of how peace and love can overcome violence or anything like that. Here, violence destroys lives and is unfixable and unavoidable. In the two final moments of the movie, rather than a final showdown, we see Anton involved in a horrific car crash which he walks away almost unscathed from and the movie simply cuts to black after Bell talks about a dream he had. These scenes symbolise how unstoppable the violence really is.

Aside from it's messages and motifs, No Country For Men is just an unbelievably well made movie. It's nail-bittingly tense from the first minute and provides so much suspense that you could easily mistake it for a horror movie. This is enforced by the glacially paced yet flawless editing and the jaw-dropping use of sound. Moreover, every frame is so brilliantly composed by Roger Deakins' whose cinematography is up there with the very best in modern cinema. All of these technical aspects come together to make viewing the movie an utterly gripping experience. In particular, the shoot out in the motel scene is one of the most heart-stopping scenes in cinematic history.

Even after many viewings, I still believe that this is Joel and Ethan Coen's masterpiece. One of the greatest movies of all time.

5/5

By Daniel Sarath with 2 comments