Quickie: Country of No Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2007). Written and directed by the Coen Brothers, from the novel of Cormac McCarthy. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly McDonald. -- Imagine if in Fargo, fresh from the wood chipper, Peter Stormare was able to fiddle with the locks of his cuffs as Sheriff Marge prattled on about how she just couldn't understand it all. Then he kills her of course. Thematically defensible, logical even perhaps, the film still being all about evil, yas's notwithstanding. But still a bummer. Well, No Country for Old Men is for their Coenheads and film fans who felt Fargo fatally flawed by its bonhomie.

No Country is technically impeccable, like a Swiss clock or Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Those merits will probably win the film its Oscar Best Picture award in a few hours. And it isn't without joy, if one finds such a thing in the tics and ironies sputtered by a hapless extra unknowing of his imminent death (SPOILER ALERT: Not a woman is slain onscreen. Chivalry perhaps). But the thought I grappled with all throughout the film was whether this was ultimately but the most proficient slasher film ever made, with the quirk of eschewing nubile teen victims for nameless Mexicans and ancient Texan truck drivers.

But people die in the slasher flick for the perverse thrill of the viewer, while people die in No Country for the perverse thrills of Fate, if one believed, or for no meaningful reason at all, if one didn't. No Meaningful Reason (Chirgurh) is portrayed in the film by Javier Bardem, who physically resembles Caligari's monstrous Cesare, monodrones as if in sleepwalk, kills with certainty any obstacle, and kills with discretion any incidental encounter. It is one of the all-time great movie villains, and early on, I learned to assume for my piece of mind that if anyone else showed as much a pinkie finger on the same screen as Bardem, that person was surely going to die.

Ostensibly, it is the chancy "noble" impulses (Josh Brolin returning with the drink of agua, the Mexican in the suit helping Kelly McDonald's mother) that sets of the machinery of death, setting proof to the truism that a good deed will not go unpunished. But because deaths in the film are plainly animated by Chirgurh's will, it is he, utterly evil he, rather than any fickle finger of fate, that dictates the fate of the people in that movie universe, guided either by the depth of his proximate causation or by the coin in his hand. It is a universe where Godly good is helpless, humanists are neutered by the delusion that the world is merely absurd, while evil steals away a cool two mill, plus plus lives.

No Country is, in a fundamental way, the anti-Schindler's List. The latter featured an unflinching smorgasbord of death at the hand of evil, yet ended on a note of uplift for evil was conquered and many were saved from martyrdom by an act of good. In No Country, evil voluntarily exeunts from the dirty deeds, held together by a sling made from the shirt of an innocent child. One may applaud the audacity of it all, and it is a film I will probably see again but with no joy in Mudville. They kill Casey with a cattle gun, you see.

(Note: I'll be liveblogging the Oscars in a few hours.)