No Country For Old Men is a great small movie in large boxy clothes. It's a cross between Fargo and Kill Bill 2; the best I've seen in a long time.
It is a classic Coen Brothers film. There is death. There is greed. There is relentless connivance. There is mystery. It is a slow chase across Texas that begins in the aftermath of a drug deal gone horribly wrong and ends completely out of the plot.
NCFOM becomes a kind of reality film in that there is no clever plot that whips you around like a rollercoaster. Instead it actually goes off track and fulfills unexpected expectations, defying the convention that a movie controls the audience. Death is a mystery. Human brutality is a mystery. We know it when we see it, but we don't know why or exactly how. This film shows us deadly pursuit and its implicit brilliant survival. It shows the oddments of gumshoe reckoning. But all of it happens and none of it is resolved. It creates a pattern in that intellectually odd way of listening to the silence in between the notes of a symphony, of clocking trajectories of objects that never land, of making meaning of lives that end abruptly before they finish their purpose. In all these ways No Country becomes great, by not telling a story, but recounting the logic of an accelerated death.
Death in this film is played with chilling sangfroid by Javier Bardem. He is the killer who kills because it's Death's job to be deadly. It's what he promises to do. It's his trick. He has no other purpose, no sublime motivation. He uses a cattle ram. He uses a silenced shotgun. He uses mysterious weapons that come and go. He is only deliberate and devoid of mercy. He is the best symbolic bad guy ever played, because he ceases to be a bad guy with a character arc. He is merely the bringer of the ultimate, unforgiving pain. Everyone in the film keeps trying to figure him out - to find him, to thwart him, to survive him. Nobody does.
No Country promises to be a film to be rewatched. It promises to reward a second look, to offer connections to the prose which fails to be expository or prescient the first time around. It is not so much a story as it is a framework as big as Texas. It's a framework for wondering what evil looks like today.
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