NOCOUNTRY FOR OLD MAN
The Coen Brothers and Cormac Mccarthy are not an obviously heavenly match. The directors, even at their most serious, are poets of absurdity, while humour is about the last thing you associate with the black-souled characters of Mccarthy’s gorgeous, violent novels. But look closer and there are common threads between the two works. Both Mccarthy and the Coens delve into the tragic ironies of human existence and the universe’s lack of concern for our little plans, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the match turned Mccarthy’s book into a Best Picture oscar-winner and fuelled a trend for warped, reimagined Westerns.
We know what to expect from this story, or we think we do. Josh Brolin’s resourceful, basically decent Llewelyn Moss is clearly our hero, so he’s probably going to get away with the money he lifted from a dead gangster. Tommy Lee Jones’ level-headed, experienced small-town sheriff ed Tom Bell will surely figure out the mess of bodies in the desert and bring the bad guys to justice. And Javier Bardem’s psychotic fixer Anton Chigurh will not prosper. That’s how these things work. except that they don’t.
That’s the point, of course. All the signs wrong-foot us, as the Coens play out the genre conventions of the Western and the thriller, only to subvert each in turn. Jones’ laconic narration bookends the film and his anecdotes pepper it: he’s even become a meme, the endlessly unimpressed authority figure peering at you from over his newspaper. Brolin has rarely been as charismatic, or as desperate — and cruelly, he might have gotten away with it but for the impulse to do a small kindness for a dying man. But it’s Bardem who steals the show. Almost Chigurh’s first act is to strangle a sheriff’s deputy to death despite his handcuffs: the killer’s eyes bug out ecstatically and he wears a demonic grin. From there, he gets worse: his confrontation with a convenience store owner who offends him by asking about the weather is bonechilling. That coin toss may not go Chigurh’s way, but there’s a sense that he might yet lash out despite his own rules, an edge of unpredictability as disturbing as his haircut.
Admittedly, the store owner’s question was a silly one. The weather must have been dry, and hot, because vast, empty desert landscapes shape the film. With nowhere for Moss to hide, only to run, life out there looks impossible. And, ultimately, it is — for Moss, killed ignobly and off-screen by a stranger, and for his wife, and for almost everyone that Chirgurh meets.
But that violence is only half the story. What the Coens found in the novel is that there is absurdity everywhere. It’s in Moss’ stoic underreactions (“Yup,” he grunts when he finds that suitcase full of cash) and Chigurh’s elaborate code of honour. And there’s the same dark fatalism that underpins Blood Simple or A Serious Man underneath, the idea that man’s best-laid plans fall apart in this capricious universe. This may be a comedy that’s desert-dry and black as night, but you have to laugh.