NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007)

From a Cormac McCarthy novel, Ethan and Joel Coen’s No Country for Old Men manages to be both repetitious and convolutedly plotted. Still, it has qualities to commend it, surprising at least me, who expected a misanthropic and nihilistic work. I loathed the brothers’ earlier Fargo (1996) for its coldness and meanness and recall with contempt its sight-gag of a human body’s being passed through a wood chipper. But, with its title taken from Yeats’s 1927 poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” this new film moved me. It succeeds in capturing at least a small part of the sad brilliance of Yeats’s revision of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
     Retiring Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, excellent though familiar) is the one hoping here for some safe passage into “the artifice of eternity.” Tracking down a remorseless, near-robotic serial killer, Bell finds himself stranded in an almost inconceivably violent America. There are no “singing-masters” to “[c]onsume [his] heart away,” and no “holy city” for him to sail to. The film locates a space—a series of haunted (supposedly rural Texan) landscapes (the dreamy cinematographer is Roger Deakins); a series of vicious human encounters—where two things cross: the legacy of America’s barbarism in Vietnam (and thus, implicitly, the future legacy of its barbarism in Iraq), including unemployment, hence material want, and also spiritual exhaustion; some monumental loneliness, which Americans fill with greed, violence, whatever they can.
     One passage devastated me: after the road event that half-pops out his eye and pokes a bone through his flesh, killer Chigurh’s encounter with two boys, one of whom freely gives Chigurh the shirt off his back so that he can make an impromptu sling for his shattered arm. Momentarily, Chigurh is refreshened by the boys’ innocence, which, being Chigurh, he corrupts with the gift of too much money, which leads in turn to the greedy quarrel between the boys over the loot as Chigurh leaves the scene. Everything that America touches turns to (what better word is there for it?) unholiness. When one grasps that Bell and Chigurh are aspects of a single character, the film fully weighs upon one’s heart. Bell is the defeatism that Chigurh’s nastiness and murderousness have wrought. With the action set in 1980 and reflecting on the present day, Chigurh is Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush’s America.
     The first forty minutes or more are very tense; later, at least for me, the film drifts into sadder, wiser, even lyrical territory. Most of the film’s later violence occurs offscreen.
     Kelly Macdonald is wonderful as the wife of the hunter, an unemployed Vietnam veteran, who finds the satchel of drug money—two million dollars—and falsely believes that his luck has changed. Alas, the actor playing him is inept, and there are other bad performances out and about, including one by Woody Harrelson. Javier Bardem, who plays Chigurh, has been better; Barry Corbin, barely recognizable (except for his voice!) as Bell’s Uncle Ellis, however, gives the performance of his life.
     Much of the ridiculous story might have been excised. The result would have been a more powerful film.