Rating of
3/4
Tense? Chew rawhide.
Beyond Chaos - wrote on 06/12/10
Joel & Ethan Coen's latest is easily an improvement on their sorrier, more recent offerings (Intolerable Cruelty, Ladykillers). But it's harder for me to tell you if it's the brothers' strongest since their magnum opus, The Big Lebowski (I at least half-liked O Brother, Where Art Thou? & The Man Who Wasn't There).
No Country For Old Men comes up short for me in one crucial area: its third act. This is one of those movies that doesn't really have a climax and yet putters along anyway for quite awhile before finally exiting stage right. The wind-up is unsatisfying and seems like it's married to the source novel too close for comfort (though I haven't read the book to be sure).
The dialogue remains tight and clever throughout but I didn't feel like the movie really delivered any kind of payoff. It's fine for a film to gloss over what would normally be the logical endpoint of its story and search for a higher meaning, but I didn't feel the Coens achieved this. A rewrite of the ending would have elevated the whole film to another level, because the rising momentum of its tension was strong and well-earned from the beginning. This is a composition that's quiet (almost no background music whatsoever) and still. Characters talk only when they need to. The excellent Roger Deakins cinematography is draped in shadows, looking natural yet striking. There's no special f/x sleight of hand or plot twist trickery to distract you from the meat and potatoes script. Like the Bourne spy yarns, you're shown all the steps a character takes to pull off an escape, retrieve a briefcase under siege, or blow up a car without explosives.
Until the last 20 minutes or so you're not left with any lingering questions and there aren't any plotholes to speak of. It's not a weak, messy finale so much as it feels deflated and almost dull compared to what came before. Thrillers like this one are most memorable when they save the best for last.
Tommy Lee Jones is actually the star of this, not Josh Brolin (who still gave a captivating performance despite getting shortchanged near the end). Tommy Lee is a towering actor as usual and Javier Bardem hits all the right creepy notes as the existentialist killer hunting down Brolin (he manages to be a real world version of Two-Face in his coin toss scenes).
This is definitely one of the better movies of the last few years but not good enough to win my vote for 2007's best. I'd recommend seeing it eventually but unless you can figure out a better explanation for the end than I could come up with, you also might think it falls short of greatness.
