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THE
portable oxygen pipe will never be regarded the same way
again after being carried like a mortar by a man running
after a bag of money. In the film No Country for Old
Men, motels and murders also share heritage. The
film is taken from Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same
title. With the film retaining the title, it is almost a
foreboding of what is to come if we are to follow one of
the things said by the author: “There’s no such thing as
life without bloodshed.”
Accepting that dictum that bloodshed is always present
in humanity’s sweeping bio, the film follows the trails
of men and a few women who are part of this story about
failed deals and botched relationships. As bodies get
strewn along the way, with birds and dogs not spared
from the shooting, the viewers are convinced more and
more that the difference between being a bad man and
being a good man is merely the difference between the
sides of a coin flipped. The rule is you make the call,
and when the head comes and it is your call, then, that
makes the difference between surviving and perishing.
THE Prince Valiant hair
notwithstanding, there is nothing valiant about Javier
Bardem’s forbiddingly amoral character in
No Country for
Old Men.
It is a
bleak proposition and the film is indeed bleak. The
desert provides much of the landscape. It is turgid
yellow now and mushy orange next. The mountains turn
blue and purple. A terrific beauty looms over the men
whose bodies are left rotting in isolated areas. Men of
justice, for lack of a better label for them, come late
into the scene. Ordinary men stumble upon treasures and
become extraordinary men. The sight of shadows will not
stop a man from getting the loot around instant
graveyards.
Moss is
one such person. Hunting for animals in the desert, he
comes upon a discovery: vehicles stranded and dead
bodies. He sees danger signs all over, but he also sees
the treasure in a hard bag containing wads and wads of
bill. The sight of money makes him forget the lesson of
stolen treasures: they leave trails and they bring
curses.
Moss
goes home but returns to the site. They say criminals
return to the site. Moss is technically not a criminal
but because he returned to the site, he is, to the eyes
of those who believe they own the treasures, the
ultimate criminal. Moss spends the better part of the
tale running away, the bag full of money his only
companion outside of the daring that is ultimately
pushed by the most effective motivator of all times:
greed.
Moss
does not realize that behind him follows Anton Chigurh,
whose theology is money and whose faith is in killing
people. Anton searches for Moss in what I believe to be
the most searing and suspenseful chase in the history of
cinema. It is also a unique chase because it does not
entail fast movement and cars.
The
narrators tell us where Anton is going and where Moss is
hiding. Both are equal to each other in ineptitude and
smarts, as if God himself created a game for sinister
peers. The two men are devoid also of deeper complex
psychological urges, making them the most basic and, at
the same time, the most mysterious criminals of all
time. They do not print footnotes, only droppings of
their own hatred and fear.
Between
Moss and Anton is Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff of the
desert. Glum and jaded, Ed leaves his life almost to
fate and time here. He joins in the chase and we feel he
is doing that merely because that is his job. There is
tiredness in his movement; it is partly a weariness
brought about by long years in the service. It is good
to call Ed Tom Bell’s languor existential fatigue. He is
so caught up in the inactivity of his life that we are
forced to create big labels for his mood. Where Moss and
Anton are egged on by a force that appears to be outside
them, Ed seems to wallow in the smooth listlessness of
the surroundings.
It is
with Ed that we feel this country is no country for old
men. Strong men outrun each other and all the slow old
men, as well as aged women in their path, are meant to
be shot and killed. The air in this country does not
allow guilt and its companion moods of mercy and
understanding. Rough, the country is only for those who
can smell the sense of fear in others.
The
violence in the film No Country for Old Men—and
there are so many they are almost gratuitous—derives not
really from the shootouts, the wounds and the copious
blood flowing from them, and the tenacity of men to lick
their own scars like animals, but from the sensual
silence that precedes each mayhem and the nearly
celebratory survival that follows each homicide. This is
a film where it is difficult to take sides. Evil and
Good are on equal footing in this film.
The
actors here have been lauded and awarded for their
performances. The ensemble, in fact, was considered the
best by the Screen Actors Guild. In a presence that is
almost buried under the weight of the other actors’
company, Kelly Mcdonald as the wife who does not know
what her husband is into proves that the screen loves
those who disappear magnificently into their roles,
however small those roles are.
Tommy
Lee Jones provides the soft, slow scenes. He is
compelling as a man whose laidback air belies the fact
that he thinks too much about his place in the order of
things. He makes existential posturing credible and
sexy. The film, however, belongs to Javier Bardem who,
despite the Prince Valiant hair, has nothing valiant
about him. He is scary because he is unadulterated evil.
The purity of his badness is proven by the quiet
confidence he brings to his malevolent actions. No
diabolic character has ever been casual as Bardem’s
oxygen-toting criminal.
Bardem
won practically all the Best Supporting Actor plums this
year for that role. Interesting how an actor in a role
suited to him can embarrass us with his genius. When the
role, however, is forced upon the actor, nothing—not
even his potency as a performer or the power of the
narrative—can be done for the lack of fit resulting in
that poor, misguided choice. I am referring to Bardem
condemned in a role as Florentino Ariza in Mike Newell’s
direction of Love in the Time of Cholera, the
film based on the novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Made
to mouth impetuous lines, Bardem as a man in love with
his woman for more than 50 years never gets to be
convincing. His passion is stuck in his pouting and
crying.
In No
Country for Old Men, the title taken by McCarthy
from the poem “Sailing to Byzantium” by W. B. Yeats,
the poetry is all over the empty space that comes alive
when someone dies, sometimes without much premonition
and, sometimes, because it seems the right thing to
happen. No Country for Old Men is the Best
Picture winner in this year’s Oscars, and also won for
Ethan and Joel Coen the best directing and best adapted
screenplay honors. |
