Film Review: No Country For Old Men

By Restless [Originally on goofyblog 3.8.08]

In December I watched the new Coen Brothers film, No Country For Old Men, which has gone on to win the Academy award for Best Picture. It is a tragedy, a work of unremitting violence.

As I left the multiplex, I was moved by what I had seen, but I wasn't sure why. I thought: What are these guys saying here?

I mean, the Coens, the actors (Josh Brolin, Javier Bardim), all the artists who put this together, who made this considerable effort to construct something far more substantial than the usual meaningless mish mashes of action and mayhem like others (Tarintino’s Kill Bill 1 & 2, Rodriguez’s Sin City and Scorsese’s The Departed being the most notable examples) have done recently.

The best art reflects society back on itself, revealing the underlying reality by peeling away the white noise, the static (American idol, anything Britney/Lindsey/Paris, “reality” shows, Fox News, happy “news”) that clogs understanding.

So what reality was revealed by this film? For help, I consulted Aristotle’s Poetics, the 2000-year-old tome still considered the Bible of dramatic construction.


The film opens in the late 70’s with what passes now-a-days for a Greek chorus in the guise of Tommy Lee Jones' aging Texas country sheriff, which as Aristotle says serves to comment on and reinforce the central idea of the work: things ain't what they used to be. Or, to be more clear, decent people can’t stand up to or stop the ruthless, sociopathic evil unleashed by the unwinnable “War on Drugs” initiated by Nixon, who was then reeling from his failures in the Vietnam War.

This idea is reiterated throughout by Tommy in voice over and on camera as well as by other secondary characters--another type of modern Greek chorus (for true Greek choruses in modern film, see Jonathon Richman's guitarist-in-the-tree in “There’s Something About Mary” or the full-on Greek chorus used by Woody Allen in "Mighty Aphrodite").

We catch first sight of this ruthless evil just after Tommy Lee’s first soliloquy in what Aristotle calls a Parode, a "parody" of the action to come, a preview, a warm-up that sets up the action in the film with the thunderously violent escape from custody of the film's villain, Anton Chigurh.

From there the film moves directly into what Aristotle calls the “Complication,” – Lewelyn Moss, a Vietnam vet out hunting antelope on his day off, comes across the violent remains of a drug shoot-out with one-half of a survivor. He recovers a satchel full of money and makes it back to his trailer-park wife with no one the wiser and his fortune seems assured.

But, Aristotle teaches there would be no drama at all without a reversal of fortune. He writes in Poetics that this reversal must come from an error in judgment, not from depravity. And finally, said error must instill pity and/or fear in the audience (not disgust and/or revulsion).

Thus, when Josh Brolin's Llewelyn decides that the right thing to do is to take the sole survivor the water he so desperately had requested, it sets up the roller coaster of action of the rest of the film. Aristotle calls this the "denouement,” our hero’s tragic reversal of fortune. But, this is just the first of several misjudgments Llewelyn makes, always however stemming from his basic decency and goodness.

From then on, every scene in the movie hammers home the single idea: Decent men and women don’t stand a chance against amoral evil. They are either destroyed by it, or corrupted by it. There is no escape.

But, Aristotle writes that the denouement in a story must build up a well of pity and fear in the audience that will finally lead up to catharsis, a release of the built up pity or fear.

In this film's case, as in the only other masterpiece of the first decade of the 21st century, David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” catharsis comes at the end when we finally realize that the urge to decency, to goodness, can never be completely exterminated by corruption or evil.
This makes for mature, modern entertainment!

No Country For Old Men is the place our country has come to inhabit.

Check it out!