It’s won four Oscars, best movie, best adapted screenplay, best director and best supporting actor for Javier Bardem. While I’m not sure if this film is quite as incredible as many critics make out, it is rather wonderful in that it manages to exist successfully on two levels, the popcorn and the philosophical.
On the one hand, sitting squarely in the universe of entertain-me-while-I-scoff we have a super tense, perfectly paced, bleak ‘chase’ movie where our ‘hero’, Llewellen, played by James Brolin, stumbles upon $2 million, part of a drug deal that went wrong, decides to make off with it and is pursued by the menacing, psychopath Anton Chigur, played by Javier Bardem complete with scary, floppy hair and faintly bloodshot eyes.
On the other hand, if you prefer, and I certainly do, you’ll have something else, a very, very deep and essentially dissatisfying experience …in an existential way, which is to say this is exactly what the Coen brothers were hoping you’d feel, because, like, that’s what the human condition is like. Man.
It’s inevitable then, that main protagonists and a plot evolve into anti-climax and a sense of ‘huh?’ Those dastardly Coens know exactly what they’re doing and, while it’s exciting and thought provoking, ultimately I found the ending bloody annoying. Just like life, I guess.
When you leave the cinema, you’ll be asking those questions which, for Parisian waiters at least, are every day ones: are our actions dictated by Fate? Or, you might say as you munch on posh food, peut etre, life is meaningless and we are engaged in haphazard meanderings where each decision we make, every action isn’t pre-ordained and we can be easily, randomly thwarted by chance, by accidents, by…?
So we have a bloody, tense, modern (set in the 1980s) ‘western’; life and death struggles, gritty, visceral themes set in hideously modern buildings; trailers, motels – essentially fragile, ugly shoe boxes perched on the barren, unforgiving landscape of New Mexico, a terrain which will outlive the main characters no matter how muscular and brutal they are. The place names are familiar, El Paso, Rio Grande etc, they are the names of Western legend and movie mythology and while the struggles in this film are for life and death, and the bad guy, Chigur played with terrifying lack of humour by Bardem, is memorable and the perfect amalgam of every hitch-hiking, relentless, psychopath you’ve ever seen on screen, you’re never in any doubt that this all means nothing. A conversation between Tommy Lee Jones, the sheriff and his retired from law-enforcement uncle outlines the philosophical heart of the film. His nephew talks about how things have changed, how the criminal has become almost untouchable and his uncle says simply, in that tobacco chewing way of westerns,
Whatcha got ain't nothin new. This country's hard on people, you can't stop what's coming, it ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.
We cast ourselves as the heroes, the principal characters, it seems the Coens are saying, yet we’re not.
In this blank view of human existence and purpose, there’s a smattering of humour, plenty of desperate, painful violence and a relentless tour of the interiors of one Texan motel after another. In this film, everyone is on their own and vulnerable to sudden death. There are huge spaces between people physically and long moments of silence, no traffic, no other people – it’s a huge country. There is no perceptible soundtrack in the film yet the use of sound puts you right there in the protagonists’ shoes so you can hear their breath, feel their reactions to an ominous footfall. It’s extraordinarily tense and self-assured work. Special mention has to go to English cinematographer, Roger Deakins, who has found beauty somehow in the angular plains and ugly architecture.
The three main protagonists are played with agonised intensity: Tommy Lee Jones cracking dark jokes and filled with blank wonder at the horror of the crimes he’s witnessed, his face a barely contained wrinkled mask of horror with only the eyes showing how he’s lost the heart and belief in what he’s doing. For this character, the good guys are too small, too weak to fight the modern evil; Josh Brolin is amazing; he looks like Nick Cave without the hair dye and his determination and virile fight against evil is both superhuman and human. He struggles against this Terminator style bad guy and has all our hopes pinned on his success. The actor’s struggles with mediocrity and his own personal demons before this role add poignancy to the experience. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a much deserved rise to the top for him. Javier Bardem won an Oscar for his part which, apparently, wasn’t fleshed out in the novel where all we told is that Chigur has no sense of humour. Unlike the actor who, in his acceptance speech said,
"Thank you to the Coens for being crazy enough to think I could do that, and [for putting] one of the most horrible haircuts in history on my head!"
The exchange between Chigur and a hapless gas station proprietor will go down in cinema history as one of the most agonizing moments you’ll witness – on a par with Joe Pesci’s “In what way do I amuse you?” in Goodfellas. Chigur believes in fate and he has constructed his own fucked up rules and moral code about what has to be and what must happen. The man with all the power believes, ironically, that every action he takes is down to fate.
It is a testament to the casting in this film that everyone, from the main characters to one-line speaking bit parters have such real personalities, so much history, such uniqueness that their deaths, if that’s how they’ll end up, hurt you. These aren’t the faceless victims of a serial killer, no; these are real people with real aspirations, real outlooks on life, coming up against a genuine monster and all we can do is cross our fingers for them.
Whether or not you’ll ‘enjoy’ this film is questionable. It’s shockingly violent, unexpectedly visually beautiful, epic in theme but ultimately rather depressing. And it makes no sense – which is the point. You’ll be unsettled and haunted by it for days.I want to watch it again just to make sure, after all, what was all that stuff about the dreams at the end…?
No comments:
Post a Comment