Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

No Country for Old Men
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
A
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., Nov. 9

After a maddening attempt to make their stubborn idiosyncrasies work inside the cramped parameters of A-list Hollywood studio comedies like Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, Joel and Ethan Coen have at last gone back to their roots, infusing their astonishing adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men with the clockwork meticulousness and parched landscapes of their 1984 debut Blood Simple.

There's probably more white-knuckle suspense sequences and sicko gallows humor than most folks will be able to bear, but there's also something new at work here: a palpable sense of sorrow. For the first time, it feels like the Coen brothers are out to do more than just crack themselves up.

Doggedly faithful to McCarthy's novel, the film follows Josh Brolin's Llwelyn Moss, a resourceful young man who makes the rather unwise decision to run off with a suitcase full of cash he stumbled upon in the desert. A drug deal went bad, and now several interested parties sure would like to get that $2 million back.

Some poor sap has just hired Anton Chigurh (the incredible Javier Bardem) to clean up the mess. This strange fellow might have the mop-top of a Monkee, but he moves quicker than lightning and looms over the picture as an almost supernatural embodiment of death's droning inevitability.

It's 1980, and the Wild West ain't what it used to be. After every hair-raising massacre Tommy Lee Jones' weary sheriff invariably arrives on the scene a day late and a dollar short, surveying the damage and tallying the ruined lives. Jones' magnificently weathered face is a national treasure, but I've never seen it used to such profound effect on-screen before, his clipped diction becoming ever more strangulated as he succumbs to self-doubt. The light behind Jones' eyes actually defuses as the movie wears on, and the movie is haunted by his heartsick resignation.

The Coens have wrestled McCarthy's unpunctuated prose into their patented staccato screwball dialogue rhythms, and Roger Deakins' scorched cinematography captures the vast, rough vistas without a hint of postcard romanticism. The movie is so lean and stripped down, there's not even a traditional musical score--just pregnant silences and overamplified sound effects; a ringing telephone becomes an eerie harbinger of doom.

No Country's final reel is initially perplexing. The simple saga of two tough hombres, a bag of money and everybody unlucky enough to get in their way blossoms into something far more delicate, contemplative and almost mythical. The final moments are deafeningly quiet, heralding a new maturity and grace from these fiendishly talented filmmakers. Emotional resonance suits them. Who could've guessed?

It's a rare road movie that kills its main character before the opening credits are over. Zia (Patrick Fugit, still adorable seven years after his debut in Almost Famous, another excellent road movie) slits his wrists in despair over being dumped. To his surprise, he wakes up in an afterlife inhabited only by suicides.

After a moment to let Zia and the audience acclimate to this new world, Wristcutters quickly veers into road movie territory with a journey across the barren, dirty afterlife: Zia to find his ex-girlfriend, who he hears has also "offed" herself; hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) to find the People in Charge and convince them she didn't commit suicide; and Eugene (Shea Whigham), former frontman of a Gogol Bordello-esque band, because he has nothing better to do. And they're off to see the wizard, if he exists at all.

Director Goran Dukic creates a surprisingly coherent vision of the afterlife by paying careful attention to detail. It's like our world, but "a little bit worse," as it's explained to Zia. All the jobs are menial. All the cars are lemons. All the landlords are passive-aggressive. Although the overall mood is set through the purposely dingy cinematography, the industrial wasteland scenery of the road trip and the characters' inability to smile, it's the little things--like the jukebox that plays only Joy Division, and the lack of stars in the sky--that make the place believable.

Although the titular love story and the ending are a little predictable (I'm not ruining anything here by saying that it's like Chekhov's gun on the wall, except instead of a gun it's a time/space vortex and instead of on the wall, it's under Eugene's passenger seat), that's not really the point. Like any good road trip movie, it's all about how you get there.

Late in the exhaustive doc Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, director Julien Temple makes his most bravura editing coup in a film full of them. As the Clash play "Career Opportunities" in a gargantuan stadium during their superstar '80s period, Temple suddenly cuts to a scratchy 16 mm clip of them playing the song in an intimate, sweaty club circa 1977.

Implicit in the juxtaposition is that, while the Clash never fully surrendered to corporate teat-sucking, they eventually moved so far from their rough-and-tumble roots that songs like that lost some meaning. Sure enough, Strummer would soon gut the band, then--as if to save face before the band became really unrecognizable--dissolve it completely.

That an otherwise fawning ode would make such an un-fawning subliminal comment is one of the major charms of Temple's doc, which, as the title suggests, is not about "the only band that matters" per se, but about Strummer, its iconic co-founder, unspeakably brilliant lyricist and generalissimo, who died nearly five years ago. Make no mistake: Temple's film loves it some Joe Strummer, and doesn't mind whipping out an eventually tedious roster of celeb fanboys (Bono, Flea, Scorsese, Johnny Depp in his Capt. Jack 'do) to prove it.

But it also knows love need not be blind--that adoration means acknowledging, even embracing, your loved one's faults, warts and contradictions. Temple, who chronicled the Sex Pistols in both The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury, is one of the few who knows how to make a documentary look great without skimping on intelligence. He makes history come alive, giving it immediacy--summoning up, for instance, a time when every ghetto blaster in New York was blaring the Clash--and deconstructing it in stimulating ways.