No Country For Old Men-Sheer brilliance until last 20 Minutes go off the tracks

****1/2 (Out of 5)


I snuck in a bag of Dirty Chips (Sour Cream and Onion) and for the first time in a long time, Cracker Jacks. I used a 7-11 gift card that my wife Barbara bought me for my birthday. That way I wouldn't have to waste money at the candy counter. Loud, crunchy popcorn doesn't make a bit of difference in a large-scale Hollywood blockbuster, but in a quiet film like No Country For Old Men, it can be very distracting. The movie starts you off with the kind of inspiring, quiet you might hear deep in the woods. The kind of Zen-like quiet that makes you not want to disturb it with chip crunching.
Well quiet might not be the right word, but I don't believe this movie has any background music. That is just one of the amazingly simple, realistic touches that draws you into this film and almost never lets go. This hard country is Southern Texas, right near the Mexican border and the river Rio Grande. So many great, tough westerns have been filmed in this part of the world, but this is a Coen Brothers movie and it takes place in 1980. I'm not sure why the date is so important, because if it wasn't for the cars, it would be hard to tell when it takes place. This is the kind of place where time stands still.
But one thing is for sure, they don't make tough men like this anymore, at least north of Texas. No credits, the camera peers out over a large, beautiful and yet desolate country and you hear Tommy Lee Jones talking about being a third-generation Texas sheriff. His voice, folksy and tired, this is Tommy Lee's second great Texas film this fall, the other being In the Valley of Elah, and he's finally toned down that Fugitive overacting that won him his Oscar. I love him, but he was starting to drift off into that Al Pacino land.
We see Tommy's deputy picking up a killer for some unknown crime and before we have our first Milk Dud this killer, played by the great Spanish actor, Javier Bardem, has killed the deputy and is onto his next killing spree. You might have heard about Bardem's Beatle/Monkee haircut, he looks like an Iberian John Denver, but it's his eyes that make him look crazy. I believe he is a man who could make you poop yourself from just looking at you. Best eyes on a killer since Hannibal Lector.
James Brolin's son, Josh, is fantastic here as a welder/everyman, who happens to come across a drug deal gone bad in the desert and takes the money that's left behind. He's basically a good man, but an opportunistic one and an exceptionally smart and capable fellow as well. The movie is overflowing with smart moves and old action pieces set on their ear and told in new ways. A man waits in a hotel room with a shotgun pointed at the door, he turns off his light so he can see the other man's shadow through the bottom crack of the door. But the other man takes off his boots so he won't make noise and unscrews the hallway lightbulb so the first man doesn't see the shadow anymore. Cat and Mouse, Mouse and Cat, the kind of thing people credit Hitchcock for. My only problem throughout the movie is why the killer doesn't use gloves, his fingerprints are EVERYWHERE.
But while all this builds to a wonderful crescendo, suddenly the Coens have to become the Coens again.
(Note--I like Coen Brother movies, but I only love two--Raising Arizona and O Brother Where Art Thou. Not because they are comedies, but because they hold me in their thrall despite their "watch me I'm a movie" idiosyncrasies. I hate being reminded by filmmakers that I am watching a movie and the Coens are very guilty of that. Another thing they do that annoys me is that while they have the tempo and style of American voices and mannerisms down, they appear to dislike these people and use them for derision. I hated Fargo for that. It was hard to root for anyone, because the Coens seemed to delight in mocking everybody. That kind of ironic detachment is great for a 5 minute skit on Saturday Night Live, but hard to keep up for an entire movie without making the audience question why you should care about these characters at all.)
Okay, so the crescendo is building and with 20 minutes left in the film, along comes Tommy Lee Jones as if he's driving in from another movie and something HUGE happens and we're left to be spectators from across the road, not sure what just happened. It took me 10 minutes to realize someone important died and then Tommy Lee starts talking to people we don't know, about other people we haven't seen and having dreams about nonsense and poof the credits roll. Another Sopranos-type ending.
Eastern Promises also ends in an abrupt Sopranos style and this was something I was afraid would happen. Some numbskull director thinks he has a bright idea and now other top directors who don't know how to end their stories take this cheap way out as well.
Very, very frustrating. I loved, loved this No Country movie, up until the last 20 minutes. I was ready to roll it up the flagpole as the Best of 2007, and I have 4 or 5 others that have been vying for that spot. But instead of it being a 5 Starrer it falls back to 4-1/2 Stars. And what really perturbs me is that I read several wonderful reviews of this movie, which got me excited about seeing it, but none of them mentioned this horrible ending.
Don't endings count anymore? Whenever I see these crippled endings I'm drawn back to one of the greatest endings of all time. Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Ark of the Covenant being packed into a crate and mysteriously packed into a huge U.S. Army warehouse, to supposedly help us win the war. Oh, I wish I could walk out of a theatre with chills like that again.


The Freditor