No Country For Old Men

Offers a wheelchaired, wrinkled sage late in the film: “You can’t stop what’s coming.” And you can’t. No Country’s not so much a hell of a film as it is a living hell trapped on film for the characters involved. Thankfully, as evidenced by this 3-disc collector’s edition’s special features, it wasn’t as much as hell – more a horrific, comedic purgatory of sorts – for the people involved in making this film.

When it dropped on us in 2007, proceeding to win a quartet of Oscars, No Country For Old Men bulged with bleak humor, powerful performances, and a decided spareness, much like the 1980 Texas desert its story took place on. There was next to no music until closing credits, and so you heard every gun click, every footstep, every crinkling wrapper, everything. Simply unnerving stuff. Novelist Cormac McCarthy created a real monster here: The depiction of dispassionate, glassy-eyed evil manifested in the face and acts of Anton Chigurh was akin to Hannibal Lecter for our already-brutal young century.

And he lingers. It turns out this land isn’t one for young gents, either. I for one would rather face down Hannibal.

At the heart of this collector’s edition remains the Cormac McCarthy story brought to life (and death, scads and oodles of death) by the writing and directing of those so-quirky Coens, Joel and Ethan. This may have been their first pitch-perfect film since Fargo in 1996, a lean, mean, nuanced ride at two hours that sets standards for tone and execution (and executions). No swelling strings here, and when late in the film someone finally stands up to the central coin-flipping psychopath in a way he doesn’t seem to understand, you sigh with relief at a non-violent blow struck for the sake of humanity. Let him who would raise the sword recognize that he also has to own it.

No Country has nothing to do with nihilism. It’s author and auteurs meshing as they so rarely do. It’s complex and tightly wound and nuanced where some (a very few) would try to write it off as a dust-bowl drug caper-chase tale, no more and no less. But it reverberates with the great good and terrible evil inside each one of its subjects, even if the latter gets the most play. The Coens’ attention to detail – boots’ scuff marks left on a linoleum floor, two men limping after one another and dressing their wounds – is commendable in this age in which cinematic injuries hardly seem to hobble characters anymore. Rest assured, James Brolin’s Llewelyn Moss and Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh do not bounce back from being shot like X-Men’s Wolverine.

Disc 2 contains a litany of interviews and media promo pieces, which can be hit or miss. Those with Peter Travers of Rolling Stone and one Charlie Rose, two Q&A stalwarts, are best, most meaty. The NPR pieces are suitably snoozy; this film simply packs too much wallop for those hushed radio voices. A Brolin-produced behind-scenes featurette serves mainly to regurgitate the well-known word that the brothers Coen can be bears to work with while also letting the actors back-pat each other’s talents and performances. Then there’s director Spike Jonze’s roundtable quizzing with the Coens and crew members involved on the film’s cinematography, score, and sound, among other elements. That’ll be worth it to both the mavens and wannabe filmmakers out there. In short, this 3-disc edition two years removed from the film’s theatrical release comes brimming with mostly worthy extras.

For a Western noir film – it’s the Coens, after all, and it defies conventions – it’s atypical for the fact that the three principals in this chase film do not directly cross paths for the duration of it. (This is pointed out a few times in extra materials.) And yet one feels their human heat – and certainly Chigurh’s heat – throughout. Javier Bardem hangs over every physical scene, whether he’s in it or not. Truly an incarnate evil.

“Just how dangerous is he?”
“Compared to what, the bubonic plague?”

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