Chad Betz reviews No Country for Old Men

No Country For Old Men

In which the Coen Brothers erase the memory of their past few colossal flops and apply their strengths (dark humor, blunt editing, remarkable plotting focus) and the strengths of their cinematographer Roger Deakins (stark lighting, precise composition) to the most poignant thematic material they've yet handled, the apocalypse now jeremiad of Cormac McCarthy's wonderful little book. But the Coens don't just show a formally near-perfect handle on McCarthy's cinema-ready prose...for the first time I feel like they've fully grasped the emotional potentialities of the story they're telling, and their relatively straightforward adaptation of the book makes only the deftest tweaks to enhance the shuddering impact of their film.

From the introduction of the idea of the "dismal tide," the inevitable erosion of ourselves and the world in which we live, to the way the sheriff's monologues are integrated, sculpted, and emphasized, the Coens don't just "get it"; they're as moved by these things as we are, and their detailed work here conveys it, dare I say, heartbreakingly. One of the smartest changes is the removal of an episode between the sheriff and Llewellyn's father late in the book; this ensures that the film remains a landscape of boys, desperate men, and Chigurh's violent nihilism incarnate (tapping into the most hopeless form of male machismo) all fatherless, left to drag down their wives and mothers into the same pit. Just as it's a story without fathers (when Llewellyn tells Carla Jean to say goodbye for him to his dead mother, it's like his father never even existed), it's a world without a Father. This is a damned bleak scene to paint. The faint, almost completely stifled hope of the film lies in the sheriff's stories about his predecessors, about his father who died young, in the sheriff's dream of his father that closes the book and the film with one last quiet but resonant note of grace. Maybe it is just a dream, the light which we cling to, but it's absolutely necessary in a reality that spews up darkness to tear away at every earthly love and possession.