Review: No Country for Old Men
It's almost impossible to write about No Country for Old Men without giving spoilers, so if you do plan to see it, wait until afterward to read my review. In fact, the big surprise in this movie is so big that I'm not even going to take the risk that you'll look farther down on this page accidentally and see it. So until around the bottom of this page (or well below it, if you're reading this on an Asus eeePC), I'm just going to write about the subject of spoilers.
I'm sensitive about spoilers because of a couple of childhood traumas. Or maybe just dramas. Dramas, to me. One time on my dad's birthday, I deliberately blurted out what his gift was right before he opened it. Don't ask me why. No one excessively browbeat me over this, but it only took about two seconds to realize how stupid that was.
That wasn't the main one, though. The incident that really made me obsessive about spoilers involved The Sting, one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater. (Incidentally, and just to further insulate you from the spoilers farther down in this review, I used to work at a newspaper with an older guy who was really into being an old-time newspaper guy. We were all talking about our three favorite movies one day, and he said his favorite movies were "The Sting, The Sting, and The Sting." At least he has closure on that.) There's a big surprise in The Sting, but it was never a big surprise to me. That's because my friend told me about it in advance. No idea why. In retrospect, he could be kind of a jerk sometimes.
It wasn't that I didn't enjoy The Sting. I even saw it again and bought the soundtrack album. But it just irked me that part of what I'd paid for when I bought my ticket the first time was lost to me forever. So when I know I'm going to see a movie, I don't really want to know anything about what happens in it. So much so, in fact, that sometimes I torture myself by looking down at the part of the review that gives stuff away. But that's just because I'm slightly nuts.
By now we're probably down below what appeared on your screen when you first came to my site, so I'll start writing about No Country for Old Men.
With SPOILERS.
No Country starts out about a guy (Josh Brolin) in the West Texas desert in 1980 who finds a bunch of bodies, one half-alive guy, and a bag of money from a drug deal gone bad. There's also a guy (Javier Bardem) who seems like just a psycho killer but ends up trying to track down the lucky guy with the money to kill him and get the money back. Meanwhile, the local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) tries to figure out what's going on and protect the lucky guy as he gets increasingly unlucky. But the sheriff's kind of an old guy, and he never really gets too far with the case. Then the lucky guy gets killed by someone else entirely, the psycho killer knocks off some more people and walks away alive from a car crash, and the sheriff retires. The sheriff tells his wife about a couple of dreams he had, and that's it. Silence. Fade to black. Titles.
If you've seen the movie, can I just say, "Was that the best ending ever, or what?" If you're not going to see it, let me just say, "It has the best ending of any movie, ever." And by ending I mean the very ending, not the conclusion of the story. It's better than the ending of Boogie Nights. Or The Godfather, Part II. Or Mahjong, for the 18 other people who've seen that. Even better, in a sense, than the ending of Yu Tu Mama, Tambien. Yes, I know that's a bold statement.
Because this ending makes the movie. The last dream the sheriff tells about is a beautiful allegory about death, and knowing his father is waiting for him on the other side. (Jones tells it so well, I won't even try.) So this whole modern Western that seems to be about solving crimes and catching bad guys and restoring justice and so on ends up just being about death. In fact, Death itself, in the form of the "psycho killer." It undermines all our expectations about suspense, catharsis, and the Western hero. He'll just die when his time is up, and even if it's with guns a-blazing, death itself is a peaceful thing, and there's something larger than the cares of this world. That's a direct contradiction of the motif of life-or-death struggle that forms the backbone of traditional Westerns, and action movies as a whole.
For me, this ending redeemed a movie I'd admired, but hadn't loved. And there's no way you could ever predict it. Unless your friend told you ahead of time, that is.
I'm sensitive about spoilers because of a couple of childhood traumas. Or maybe just dramas. Dramas, to me. One time on my dad's birthday, I deliberately blurted out what his gift was right before he opened it. Don't ask me why. No one excessively browbeat me over this, but it only took about two seconds to realize how stupid that was.
That wasn't the main one, though. The incident that really made me obsessive about spoilers involved The Sting, one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater. (Incidentally, and just to further insulate you from the spoilers farther down in this review, I used to work at a newspaper with an older guy who was really into being an old-time newspaper guy. We were all talking about our three favorite movies one day, and he said his favorite movies were "The Sting, The Sting, and The Sting." At least he has closure on that.) There's a big surprise in The Sting, but it was never a big surprise to me. That's because my friend told me about it in advance. No idea why. In retrospect, he could be kind of a jerk sometimes.
It wasn't that I didn't enjoy The Sting. I even saw it again and bought the soundtrack album. But it just irked me that part of what I'd paid for when I bought my ticket the first time was lost to me forever. So when I know I'm going to see a movie, I don't really want to know anything about what happens in it. So much so, in fact, that sometimes I torture myself by looking down at the part of the review that gives stuff away. But that's just because I'm slightly nuts.
By now we're probably down below what appeared on your screen when you first came to my site, so I'll start writing about No Country for Old Men.
With SPOILERS.
No Country starts out about a guy (Josh Brolin) in the West Texas desert in 1980 who finds a bunch of bodies, one half-alive guy, and a bag of money from a drug deal gone bad. There's also a guy (Javier Bardem) who seems like just a psycho killer but ends up trying to track down the lucky guy with the money to kill him and get the money back. Meanwhile, the local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) tries to figure out what's going on and protect the lucky guy as he gets increasingly unlucky. But the sheriff's kind of an old guy, and he never really gets too far with the case. Then the lucky guy gets killed by someone else entirely, the psycho killer knocks off some more people and walks away alive from a car crash, and the sheriff retires. The sheriff tells his wife about a couple of dreams he had, and that's it. Silence. Fade to black. Titles.
If you've seen the movie, can I just say, "Was that the best ending ever, or what?" If you're not going to see it, let me just say, "It has the best ending of any movie, ever." And by ending I mean the very ending, not the conclusion of the story. It's better than the ending of Boogie Nights. Or The Godfather, Part II. Or Mahjong, for the 18 other people who've seen that. Even better, in a sense, than the ending of Yu Tu Mama, Tambien. Yes, I know that's a bold statement.
Because this ending makes the movie. The last dream the sheriff tells about is a beautiful allegory about death, and knowing his father is waiting for him on the other side. (Jones tells it so well, I won't even try.) So this whole modern Western that seems to be about solving crimes and catching bad guys and restoring justice and so on ends up just being about death. In fact, Death itself, in the form of the "psycho killer." It undermines all our expectations about suspense, catharsis, and the Western hero. He'll just die when his time is up, and even if it's with guns a-blazing, death itself is a peaceful thing, and there's something larger than the cares of this world. That's a direct contradiction of the motif of life-or-death struggle that forms the backbone of traditional Westerns, and action movies as a whole.
For me, this ending redeemed a movie I'd admired, but hadn't loved. And there's no way you could ever predict it. Unless your friend told you ahead of time, that is.
Labels: reviews
posted by Steve at
8:55 PM
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