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Category: Movie Previews, Movie Reviews, Movie Trailers, Movies
NO Country for Old Men” is the first movie I’ve seen in a very long while that deserves to be called a masterpiece. It’s such a stunning achievement in storytelling that, when the DVD comes out, I’d wager you could even turn off the sound and hardly miss a thing.
This really isn’t a movie to watch on DVD, though.
You need as big a screen as possible to savor Roger Deakins’ sweeping cinematography, which is as integral to the movie’s triumph as the edge-of-the-seat direction by Joel and Ethan Coen - or a trio of unforgettable performances by Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones.
Adapting (and, if you ask me, surpassing) a 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy into their best-ever movie and their first Best Picture contender since “Fargo,” the Coens deliver a classic, neo-noir Western of innocence lost set in 1980 Texas.
The film’s moral center is Jones’ Sheriff Bell, about ready to retire after watching the Mexican border turn red with drug trade. With a face as deeply etched as Mount Rushmore, Bell surveys the massive carnage from a heroin deal gone bad on the Texas prairie with disgust and resignation.
We’ve already seen an earlier visitor to the same shootout scene, a hunter named Llewelyn (Brolin) who discovers $2 million in cash in a satchel and is foolish enough to think he can keep the money and live to tell about it.
Bell has been around long enough to know Llewelyn is a gravely marked man. One of his deputies who arrests a man looking for the money ends up garroted by his own handcuffs.
The killer (Bardem), who sports a Prince Valiant haircut and invites some of his victims to flip a coin to determine their fates, is dubbed a “ghost” by the baffled sheriff.
Not only is he virtually impossible to track, but it takes quite a while for Bell to even figure out this psychopath is grotesquely killing people with a compressed-air gun normally used to slaughter cattle.
Bardem’s character, Chigurh, is by contrast ruthlessly efficient at tracking down not only poor Llewelyn but his understandably terrified wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald).
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Category: Movie Reviews
