No Country for Old Men

The Coen Brothers make their most accomplished film. There is a lot to recommend in the mis en scene and composition of the film. The technical achievements are there because Coens are able to make a violent film suggestive of even more violence.

The Coen Brothers even come close to telling an organic story. The accents aren't heightened to make everything comedic like in Fargo. Only a few scenes play out to the Coen irreverence, but the characterization is still misguided. The film is very similar to the original novel, but the film takes the characters and interprets them as running cliches of tough pulp novels. Brolin's character in the novel is more defined by his fears and weaknesses, but in the film he is an out and out killer with the same disconnect to humanity that the psychotic killer posesses. The Coen Brothers are fascinated by genre and do everything to associate this film with noir attributes. Like other bad interpretation, the noir perspective here is just based on look and feel. The Coens could care less about a psychological subtext to noir.

The Coens have always been interpretive with their stories to make them fit their personality, but this is the first film they did that has an original source and shows that the Coens made all the choices to reduce the original story. The themes are watered down. In the novel, Tommy Lee Jones' character is the main figure who guides the themes and perspective of the violence. In the film he is a supporting one whose scenes are cute ancedotes than anything else. The film tries to make up for it by showing Jones late in the film as he was in the novel, but it's to little too late. His scenes come off as apologies to a film that designated too much story and time to an elaborate chase subplot.

The Coen Brothers are criminal filmmakers to me. Pure stylists that relate their films to nothing more than amateur fodder. There are interesting themes within No Country for Old Men, but the Coens show their talent to take a story and allow it to play out to cliche interpretation. The noir look has been overdone. Even if people interpret this film as a Western, it's still a hollow redux of a genre that had deeper meaning.