No Country for Old Men (2007)
Directed by Joel Coen
Llewelyn Moss stumbles upon dead bodies, $2 million and a hoard of heroin in a Texas desert, but methodical killer Anton Chigurh comes looking for it, with local sheriff Ed Tom Bell hot on his trail. The roles of prey and predator blur as the violent pursuit of money and justice collide.
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What critics say influenced No Country for Old Men
The incursion of relentless evil on jus' folks' decency recalls Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter."
After Moss notices a briefcase containing two million dollars, he absconds with it in a gesture highly reminiscent of the characters in the 1998 “A Simple Plan,” a much more successful essay on the moral and physical hazards of appropriating ill-gotten gains.
As usual, original music by Carter Burwell ("A Simple Plan," "Miller's Crossing," "The Ladykillers"), who has scored the bulk of the Coens's oeuvre, is pitch perfect.
He tries to summon Hemingway rather than Faulkner, and the page-turning text reads like a movie treatment — say, A Simple Plan meets The Terminator .
His main pursuer, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem in Robert Wagner’s haircut from “Prince Valiant”), is Death, without a pale horse.
It's telling that in Sam Peckinpah's 1972 film of The Getaway, the entire El Rey ending is junked and replaced by a scene where Peckinpah has Steve McQueen blowing away scores of bad guys in the director's trademarked slow motion.
I kept expecting something like the conclusion to the wonderful 1972 Sam Peckinpah movie “The Getaway” based on a Jim Thompson novel.
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The dry Texas landscape recalls Blood Simple, the quietly measured menace recalls Miller's Crossing or Barton Fink.
Skip back past their recent fluff — not that Intolerable Cruelty and especially O Brother, Where Art Thou? are not as sublime as fluff gets — and recall how Fargo and Miller’s Crossing and Blood Simple simply Blew.
As they have done while romping through the cinematic crime catalog - "Blood Simple," "Miller's Crossing," "Fargo" and with "Raising Arizona" - the Coens find, and open, a rich vein of humor amid the spatter and sputter of blood.
The hat in Miller’s Crossing bears more than a passing resemblance to Forrest Gump’s feather, just as The Big Lebowski’s tribute to Busby Berkeley makes one wish for a Busby Berkeley number instead.
It makes Miller’s Crossing feel like The Big Lebowski.
"No Country for Old Men" is more "Miller's Crossing" than "Fargo," cinematographer Roger Deakins shooting "Blood Simple's" Texas clime through the heated palette of his "O Brother."
Texas has always been a popular myth for directors, from the Texas-in-Utah of John Ford’s The Searchers to the Texas-in-Canada of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.
Vibrant amber tones during the day give way to a doom laden blackness at night and in between is some of the greatest "magic hour" dawn/dusk shots since Days of Heaven.
If Bardem is nothing else, he is certainly the scariest actor in a pageboy haircut since Bette Davis made "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"
Miller's Crossing was a sly, unacknowledged blend of two Dashiell Hammett's tales, Red Harvest and The Glass Key; and O Brother Where Art Thou? transferred The Odyssey to the American south in the 1930s.
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In Bardem, the Coens give us the coldest serial killer since Richard Attenborough's turn as real-life murderer John Christie in 10 Rillington Place (1971).
He basically did that to Warren Oates in his later film, Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia.