Movie Review: Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men

An element of film directing that brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have perfected is the global art of dialogue. This is complete film conversation from the choice of written material to screen writing to regional dialect and colloquialism to an almost magically appropriate choice of actors to employ said regional dialects and colloquialisms — the whole enchilada. In this realm, the Coens have no peers, not Peckinpah, not Coppola, not even master Scorsese can touch them.

The proof of the Coens’ ear for regional natural speech is no better illustrated than in the Irish-American brogue of Miller’s Crossing, the interrogative density of the North Central States in Fargo, and the mouthful-of-grits-‘n-greens salt pork drawl of pre-Depression era Mississippi in O Brother, Where Art Thou. In each of these films, the Coens carefully choreographed speech patterns and usage that seemed to make them sound more than authentic without making them sound stereotypical. The result is crystalline satire expertly clothed in the patois of the chosen region.

Add to the these films the brother’s adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy’s story of fate and destruction, No Country for Old Men. Deriving its title from the opening line of William Butler Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” No Country for Old Men embraces its setting of the unforgiving Texas-Mexico border region circa 1980. There is no mistaking this dialect and accent; it is 100% Texas. It is a sound of a strange alchemy of American Southern cotton bowl stirred with the piquant chilies of Mexico and spiritual cadences of Native America with heavy hints of the anvil dissonances of Germany and points east.

In the audio-narrated book version of No Country for Old Men, actor Tom Stechschulte (Fields of Freedom [2006], The Manchurian Candidate [2004]) expertly dispatches the narration with a clean efficiency, capturing the panorama of Texas-Tejano linguistics. It is challenging enough for a single performer like Stechschulte to adopt an array of characters. This challenge multiplied for the director filling these multiple roles with just the right actors — and this is what the Coens do best. In the film, McCarthy’s and by proxy, the Coens’ Hamlet is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). He is a 25-year veteran sheriff from a long line of veteran sheriffs who haunted the Texas border for better than a combined 100 years. He acts as the nominal narrator, the soliloquist for McCarthy’s hot, stale breath of Hell.

The leitmotif of No Country for Old Men is the chance of a coin toss. The act represents both the real and metaphorical existence of chance. In the case of the plot, the chance  that Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) would come upon a Mexican heroin exchange gone bad, whereby he stumbles upon a half dozen dead bodies and 2.4 million dollars in cash. Moss purloins the cash, setting in motion the employment by an un-named executive (Stephen Root) of one Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Chigurh is a very bad man, who, at the very least is a socio-psychopath impossibly far beyond any form of rehabilitation, which naturally makes him a perfect assassin.

Article Author: C. Michael Bailey

Arkansas son C. Michael Bailey has been in hiding since he revealed his family's abolitionist position prior to the War Between the States. He is a Senior Reviewer for All About Jazz and publisher of the webblog Kultur. Michael’s day job is spent as a clinical data analyst.
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