No Country for Old Men (2007)

The long await return for Ethan and Joel Coen ( the Coen Brothers). No Country for Old Men is not their best work but it is, just by the fact that it is them, ten times better than most of the films out this year. It is sometimes hard to be critical on a movie that does so many things right. It pulls you in right at the beginning. It has excellent characterization. It is tense and it has many parallel themes going on at one time. But at the same till, it is has some very loose ends.

In many instances this film is like Fargo. It takes place in an interesting subset of the United States; this time the U.S.-Mexican Boarder. The Coen brothers show many instances of quirky people from South Texas but they seem to lack the overwhelming racism and anger of the real people from Texas. In some ways Texas seems like a normal place, which anyone from Texas knows is just not true.

The film stars Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kelly Macdonald. Bardem is brilliant as a psychopath. Not for one second do you believe that he isn’t a complete sociopath. The cat and mouse game with the Josh Brolin character, Llewelyn, is nail biting and the heart of the film. The good cop and old time Texas Lawman of the Tommy Lee Jones character is underdeveloped and barely necessary to the story.

It starts out seeming to be an old west story brought to a modern setting, but then it loses that, and tries to picked it up again, ultimately failing. Jones is great as he ever is, but he doesn’t have much to work with, and this whole storyline could have taken out of the film which would have improved it greatly.

Kelly Macdonald plays Carla Jean Moss wife of Llewelyn, and you would never know that she was the English preteen from Trainspotting.

There is not much to the story. There is a robbing of drug money. Llewelyn finds it, takes it, and he is hunted. It’s a hell of a ride. It has a bit of a money is the root of all evil moral to it, but you really hope that the film maker are doing more. You think that they must be, but maybe there are not.