Dirs. Joel & Ethan Coen, US, 2007, 122 mins
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin
Review by Carol Allen
This is beautifully made, beautifully shot and very violent – real Coen Brothers style in those respects. Set in the West Texas border country in 1980 and based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, the chilling tone of the film is set from the very effective opening showing the vast, bleak desolation of the landscape with the laconic voice of Sheriff Bell (Lee Jones) ruminating on the soundtrack.
The story concerns three men. Brolin is Moss, a hard up blue collar worker who lives in a trailer with his much younger wife (Kelly McDonald). He thinks his luck is in, when he comes across the mayhem of a drug deal gone wrong in the desert in a brilliantly effective sequence, which is shot for a long time at a distance, so we, like Moss, have to work out just what the situation is. He runs off with the money, which, as it turns out, is a really bad idea. On the trail of him and the loot is psychopathic killer Chigurgh (Bardem), a man of few words, whose weapon of choice is a deadly pneumatic gun, which blows big holes in people. And in pursuit of both of them and lagging some way behind is the ageing Sheriff, who faces the world with an air of laid back but bewildered despair at his inability to control the mayhem around him. Despite the fact that Moss is both greedy and heartless (when he finds the drugs money, he callously ignores the pleas for help of the sole survivor and kills him), Brolin engages our sympathies in his ingenious attempts to escape his pursuer and on the purely human level of not wanting him to be killed. Bardem is totally chilling as the blank faced, gum chewing assassin, who is more an efficient killing machine than a man. It's a surprise when he finally speaks. He doesn't need motivation. He just is. He does though sport a very weird Beatles style hairdo, which is a bit distracting and rather oddly comic. McDonald is effective as Moss's wife, who falls into the hands of Chigurgh, and Woody Harrelson gives the film a lift and makes a strong impression as a dandyish bounty hunter, who gets in on the act. The Coen Brothers trademark dark humour is very present, there are some effectively tense sequences, as when Moss hides the money in the air vent of a sleazy motel, where he is then trapped by the killer and the violence is very explicit.
The film has already been nominated for awards by the bucketful and some critics are hailing it as a return to the quality of the Coen Brothers' best films such as Miller's Crossing and Fargo. What they had though and this lacks is any really interesting and emotionally engaging characters, such as Frances McDormand's Marge in Fargo or Gabriel Byrne's Tom Reagan in Miller. There is much to admire in this movie in terms of style and technical brilliance but like Sheriff Bell, I found myself watching and observing, rather than getting involved with these lowlife characters. And for a thriller it's a bit leisurely in places.
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