Classic Flicks: The Coens' No Country for Old Men

By Joseph Allencherril     8/19/10 7:00pm

No Country for Old Men is the 12th studio film by movie-making duo Ethan and Joel Coen, and their first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. The Coen brothers are known for producing intelligent, humorous and stylish films, but No Country for Old Men stands apart from the other films in the Coen brothers' oeuvre. Adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, No Country for Old Men is the brothers' first literary adaptation into a film. Yet surprisingly, almost scene for scene, the Coen brothers modified relatively little of McCarthy's story in writing their screenplay, although the motifs of chance, freedom and destiny that appear in many of their previous films are also explored here.

The story centers around the parallel lives of three different men in 1980s West Texas, allowing viewers to easily contrast the three characters. When Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin, Jonah Hex) discovers a suitcase containing $2 million in the vicinity of a drug deal gone wrong, he is forced to flee his home in order to keep the money from the many hands that desire it.

One of the men after Moss is psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh, played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem (Vicky Cristina Barcelona). In the ensuing cat-and-mouse chase, Tommy Lee Jones (In the Valley of Elah) portrays the aging Sheriff Ed Tom Bell who does his best to protect Moss from the other men who are after the money, despite Moss's stubbornness.

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With No Country for Old Men, the Coens once again teamed up with the familiar talents of cinematographer Roger Deakins and film composer Carter Burwell, who worked with the Coens on previous films The Big Lebowski and The Hudsucker Proxy. No Country for Old Men is essentially a crime thriller film, placing it in the same genre as earlier Coen films Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing and Fargo. But even with the shared genre elements and the returning production team, upon first encounter with the film, No Country for Old Men doesn't appear to be a typical Coen brothers' film.

Film at its best is the seamless integration of separately defined arts: the written word, the photograph, the theater and the music. The imaginative synthesis of these different elements is much of what makes a great film. In particular, a film's soundtrack, though frequently overlooked, often has the magical ability to powerfully affect the emotions of the audience.

In the case of the standard Hollywood film soundtrack, bigger and louder is better, but in No Country for Old Men, less is more. The adept use of silence brings to mind composer John Cage's unorthodox theories and musical compositions - most of the sound heard throughout the film arises from the natural environs: the bark of a dog, the cattle killer hitting its mark, the footsteps of an unknown enemy.

The minimalist soundtrack is at times almost unnoticeable but nonetheless augments the image onscreen and maintains a Hitchcockian suspense during pivotal moments. Any addition to the score would be excessive, while any subtraction from the score would leave a void in the atmosphere of the film. In this respect, the Coen brothers once again challenge Hollywood convention, in which most movies rely on music in order to play on the audience's emotions when the story and the image alone are not strong enough to bring about sympathetic feelings in the viewer. In such instances, music serves as a weak crutch, a substitute for masterful storytelling.

Another hallmark of the film is the Coen brothers' attention to their characters. They bring to light even the tiniest nuances of their characters' inner lives. It is in the omissions and slight modifications from the book that we note where the Coen brothers have been free in interpreting McCarthy's work, especially with regard to characters.

This attention to detail is especially noted in a scene halfway through the film. After Chigurh's bullet-ridden encounter with Moss, he must stitch his wound. After stealing medication from a local pharmacy, Chigurh cleans his wound in the bathtub of a hotel room. As he exits the bathroom, Chigurh turns off the TV, seemingly without reason. However, this simple action underscores Chigurh's extreme alienation from the rest of mankind.

No Country for Old Men is at once an homage to the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and a philosophical treatise on fate and choice. No Country for Old Men, released when Joel and Ethan Coen were nearly 50 years old, is essentially the mature, reflective statement of two filmmakers on the morality of good and evil.

Joseph Allencherril is a Will Rice College sophomore. Classic Flicks is a new column reexamining and rediscovering the best that cinema has to offer.

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