filmland / By Charlie Myers

‘No Country ‘ Thrills, Chills

Bravo to the Coens’ masterful Cormac McCarthy adaptation

(Dec. 6, 2007) Previews

Once again, there are only two films opening locally on Friday, Dec. 7, which makes my life easier. The Golden Compass, the first installment of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, stars Nicole Kidman, the most recent “Bond Girl” Eva Green, Daniel Craig and Sam Elliot in a fantasy tale involving alternate universes and kidnapped children, all helmed by writer/director Chris Weitz (About a Boy). Rated PG-13 for sequences of fantasy violence. 123 m. At the Broadway, Fortuna and Mill Creek.

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Directed by Sidney Lumet, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a crime thriller where the crime is a family affair. Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a broker without money, so he persuades his younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) to help him rob their parent’s jewelry store. Of course, things go horribly wrong. On top of that, Andy’s wife (Marisa Tomei) is having an affair with Hank. As much a morality tale as crime story, this film, with its fine cast, looks promising. Rated R for a scene of strong graphic sexuality, nudity, violence, drug use and language. 127 m. At the Minor.

Reviews

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN: Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium” begins with the line “That is no country for old men,” which provides the title for Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel now made into an impressive film by Joel and Ethan Coen. The second verse continues, “An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick.” Indeed, the stark, terrifying and violent universe that McCarthy creates in his novel is no place for old men or for hardly anyone else, including dogs.

The novel is told primarily in a dispassionate third-person voice with intermixed passages of the sheriff’s reminiscences of his past. What is remarkable about the film adaptation of No Country for Old Men is that, more than most films, it recreates the voice of the novel not with dialog but with precise and effective composition, editing, lighting and sound. Any film, of course, operates with images, but seldom have I seen a film where those images are so artfully employed in the service of capturing the essence of the original material.

Set in New Mexico near the Mexican border, the narrative follows three interconnected stories: that of hunter and Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin: Melinda and Melinda,Grindhouse), about-to-retire Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and the eerie sociopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem: The Sea Inside, Love in a Time of Cholera). The event that connects these three lives is a drug deal gone bad.

While hunting, Moss comes across the dead bodies from the attempted drug transaction and discovers two million dollars, which he takes. The sheriff investigates the crime. The wild card, though, is Anton, who is hired to recover the money and it is his chillingly implacable hunt and the path of destruction he leaves in his wake that animates the story.

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