NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

*****

Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Featuring: Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Kelly Mcdonald, Woody Harrelson
 

I really wanted to dislike this movie. I hoped it would be bad, as big a turkey as INTOLERABLE CRUELTY or THE LADYKILLERS. While the whole world lavished praise on NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, the perverse in me sought to pick a fight with it and I went to the cinema looking to rubbish it.

I’ve never been part of the EMPIRE-style uncritical adoration of the Coens. For me, their movies have been a decidedly mixed bag. I loved the early one – BLOOD SIMPLE and BARTON FINK, and I think MILLER’S CROSSING is their great masterpiece, never bettered, not even by NO COUNTRY. I didn’t think FARGO was as great as it was made out to be and some of the comedies were plain unfunny. As they became more successful and more mainstream, there was an air of superior smugness to the Coens, a self-conscious quirkiness and irritating chic. Their style of tongue-in-cheek knowingness became increasingly banal. And the rise of innovative indie directors such as David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch made the Coens look shallow and dated. Their uniqueness became tarnished.

Now that has all changed in the most brilliant way with a movie which is not just a come-back but a masterpiece. In adapting and improving upon Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, the Coens have reached back to their roots, to the hard, cynical brutal noir of BLOOD SIMPLE, which opened with a similar montage and interior monologue voiceover as NO COUNTRY, evoking the Texan landscape and attitudes of an insular male-dominated society rooted in its own lore. Both films are neo-noirs and through their titles pay homage to literary heritage – the term ‘blood simple’ being derived from Dashiell Hammett’s novel RED HARVEST describing the addled desensitised state of those immersed in continual violence, and ‘no country for old men’ being a line from the W.B. Yeats’ poem, SAILING TO BYZANTIUM.

I think it is the wry yet hard nihilistic cynicism which links the Coens’ very first film and their latest tour de force. There is a bleakness and a deep pessimism about the motives and actions of human beings and the desolate endgame of humanity which no amount of black humour or offbeat whimsy can assuage. This is the Coens’ heart of darkness and it is a chilling account of the mankind’s lot. Both BLOOD SIMPLE and NO COUNTRY are intensely male films, with only one female character featured in each film. The mess of relationships and the dark chemistry of betrayal themed the Coens’ third film, MILLER’S CROSSING, with exceptional performances from Albert Finney and Gabriel Byne.

These stark labyrinthine themes from the early films find their way into NO COUNTRY, with the addition of the gloom and social retreat of old age woven into the configuration and expressed by the elderly sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones, in a cameo suggesting fragility and disillusion, together with the guilt of failure – a performance light years away in superiority to the glibness of his self-directed role in the dreadful THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA.

NO COUNTRY is a lean and mean movie, fiercely naturalistic with a dry clear-eyed realism. Landscapes are flat and melancholy, festooned with dry grass and burnt-out hills, harbouring dead bodies and wounded dogs, nightscapes which become zones of murder. The aftermath of a drugs shoot-out in the hills provides one of the most powerful sequences when Llewellyn Moss, played with an enviable mix of confusion and bravado by the excellent Josh Brolin, discovers the dead and thereby commissions his own eventual fate. The impact of this sequence lies in its post-shadowing, the still dead corpses telling stories we can only imagine.

The narrative evolves into a chase story cum road movie when Brolin is pursued by a hired killer, enigmatically played by Javier Bardem and his haircut. Much praise has been piled on Bardem for his performance as the quiet menacing killer and his scene with a Texan gas-station proprietor is certainly a classic of its kind and a lesson in the gradual build of tension to screaming point. Part of the grip of the scene is due to the old world bemusement of the ageing proprietor – part of the theme of the film being the collision between old values and the puzzling contemporary world of serial killers and social uncertainties – and Gene Jones as the proprietor contributes a great deal of subtle nuance to the disturbing unease of the scene.

Bardem dominates the scene, of course, but I am somewhat less enthusiastic about this character and performance than others, including the awards committee of the Oscars. To me Bardem’s character is a little obviously sinister, a fictional creation whose literary antecedence haven’t been stripped away. He is a bit of a construction and not wholly believable, too much of a hoked-up thriller device. He takes away from the realism of the film and provides something of a sideshow with his strange pump-action killing machine. I don’t find him terrifying. Things seem to happen a little too conveniently for him and he is too much the android.

There are some great set pieces – Brolin pursued by a 4x4 which takes on the aura of a mechanical dog, then a real hunting dog swimming after him down a turbulent river as the morning light rises. The story takes us through a half-lit world of lonely, anonymous highways and seedy motels where, in Raymond Chandler’s words ‘always the wrong things happen and never the right.’

The opening two thirds are immensely gripping, lagging perhaps in the final third, with Tommy Lee Jones somewhat ill defined in the picture, and a little out of it. There are some weak plot points and places where suspension of disbelief is definitely required. The theme of chance and fate is underwritten by the moody noir atmosphere and strong sense of place. Brilliant lighting and editing and tight authentic dialogue make this a very special movie.

Eventually the film becomes an anti-thriller when we are taken away from Moss, the character with whom we most identify, root for and wish to see succeed, and his doomed narrative occurs off-screen. In avoiding the predictable, the Coens very effectively cheat audience expectations and leave a feeling of deep disquiet.

I don’t think the movie should have won all those Oscars, an accolade which surely should have gone to THERE WILL BE BLOOD (reviewed separately). But a formidable piece of morally complex laconic cinema. The Coens have come home.

 

LUST, CAUTION

****

Director: Ang Lee
Featuring: Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Lee Hom
 

The wealth of exciting and provocative movies in cinemas lately as has meant that Ang Lee’s new film earned something of a lacklustre reception.  Well liked and respected, the movie didn’t have the impact of his previous exceptional film BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN.  Compared with THERE WILL BE BLOOD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, the strangely titled LUST, CAUTION is perhaps a little flat, but it is nonetheless a compelling piece of work with some disturbing sequences.  Had it not been for other current cinematic riches, I’m certain Lee’s film would have been far more highly regarded.  It is a fine piece of work. 

Tony Leung is one of my favourite actors, mainly because of the melancholy roles he has played in Wong Kar-Wai films such as IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE and 2046: he plays a very different part in this movie, Mr Yee, a wartime collaborationist specialising in interrogation and torture, a feared and hated man during the Japanese occupation of China.  There is something off-key about Leung playing such a brutal and ruthless character, given his more well known languid roles, but Leung – although we do not witness him personally inflicting violence upon his suspects and prisoners – manages to convey a tight-lipped menace and suppressed violence in his taut uptight persona.  Leung makes a smooth reptilian thug. 

However, the acting honours really go to newcomer Tang Wei, who plays Wong Chia Chi, a young student who becomes involved in a political group plotting to assassinate Mr Yee.  Based on a short story (as was BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN) by Eileen Chang, the story charts Wong’s development from naive partisan to subtle seductress as she becomes the instrument by which Mr Yee will be compromised and lured to a location where he will be killed.  Unfortunately Wong and Yee fall in love with one another, or at the very least develop a deep empathy and mutual sexual dependence.  She appears to be mesmerised by him and him by her.

Tang Wei plays the part of Wong with great sensitivity and distinction.  There is a stillness about her which is beautiful, bewitching, yet unnerving.  Her persona suggests a sense of destiny, a tragic destiny, she is haloed by sadness.  In a very moving and evocative scene, she sings the song A SINGING GIRL AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD to Mr Yee and afterwards he weeps.  Her sensual hovering presence in scenes, silently watching the world, suggests someone who knows more than her mandarin surfaces suggest.  She seems to quietly absorb the life around her. 

On one level the film is a love story, on the other an espionage thriller.  It is a very gripping narrative, at times real edge of the seat stuff, although the first third is quite slow-burn.  The centre of the film is the love affair between Wong and Mr Yee, which evolves in an apparently violent loveless liaison.  The sex scenes are frank and without any coyness whatever.  Mr Yee’s lovemaking to Wong verges on the sadomasochistic and there is an emptiness to the sex, a cold mechanism to their movements, a lack of eroticism in their intercourse.  Seemingly devoid of emotion, the contorted positionings of their bodies express the twisted agonised subtext of their intimacy.  A rough tenderness develops between them, a dark kind of love. 

Lee was put under pressure to edit the sex scenes by the distributors but he refused to do so, and quite rightly.  These scenes, though curiously erotic, are neither titillating nor pornographic.  There is chill to the nudity, a feeling of frigidity. 

Yet a tentative love between the two emerges, creating the main tension and thematic motif of the film – and some dramatically absorbing conflicts for Wong.  This is a dangerous love, yet you can’t help who you love.  You may love a monster – and Mr Yee is a monster – and yet love is love.  You can’t deny love without destroying yourself and perhaps destroying yourself if you do not.  A situation which results in Wong’s loyalties and emotions being brutally torn.  Both are transgressive lovers just as the couple in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN are, their carnal precarious affair a guilty secret, their doubles lives hidden from the society. 

It ends badly and painfully, as you would expect.  Personal loyalty is not returned, a life saved is not repaid in kind and others suffer the consequences of fidelity to the heart.  Some of the concluding scenes are difficult to watch. 

Set in the turbulent era of the Sino-Japanese war, this is a visually arresting film with imagery which remains imprinted on the memory.  The arena of film is depicted in great depth and detail, some of the images resembling photographic prints.  Even so I missed Wong Kar-Wai’s jazzy atmospheric touches, the soft warm breeze of his moody Hong Kong streets.  The visual surface of Lee’s film is as cold as the sex.  Hong Kong remains Wong Kar-Wai’s city.