Cinema Vitæ

(NOTE: mild spoilers ahead)

I’m cinematically challenged. This truth has been bubbling up toward my consciousness for many years, but the Coen Brother’s latest film No Country for Old Men has finally brought it to a nice rapid boil. With critics falling all over themselves with praise for No Country for Old Men, I went into my viewing of the film fully padded and prepared for my cinematic praise plunge. It never came. I tried to visualize my falling for the film . . . and I even tied my shoe laces together, but alas . . . nothing.

No doubt, the film’s wide-lensed view of the Texas landscape was stunning. Equally jaw-dropping was the Coen brothers’ choices in the casting room (where do they find all those wonderfully unique supporting players?). The actors shone. The choice to eliminate the film score seemed right. Those working on this piece clearly understood that film is a visual medium and that if the story doesn’t succeed there it won’t succeed.

Still, I question the value of telling this particular story. I will attempt here to encapsulate the two main points of this film:

(1) The world is violent, is becoming more so, but actually has been so since the dawn of humankind.

(2) Life is a craps game. Things happen by chance. We may or may not be able to change this.

That’s it. Millions of dollars spent and hours of time invested to try to shed some light on these two rather murky ideas. As for point #1, there is nothing revelatory here. I don’t need to watch more people being killed and multiple soliloquies from an aging sheriff to awaken me to this reality. Everything I need to know here, I learned from the Bible and the 6 o’clock news.

Concerning point #2, this is where the Coen brothers have a chance to shine. Is life all chance or do we have a choice? Can we control our circumstances or do they control us? The directors made the bold (and correct!) choice to have the Javier Bardem character walk out of Mrs. Moss’ house (she is the wife of the Josh Brolin character) without revealing whether he killed her. Javier represents chance, she represents choice; in the end we don’t know who wins . . . that is, until the next scene with the car crash. Whether intended or not, this crash tips the scales toward chance and the film is lost.

In the end, No Country for Old Men is an unsatisfactory story that marks no new territory in a discussion on human violence nor does it provide us the opportunity to answer the question of free will vs. determinism for ourselves. The Coen brothers have made here a beautiful, well-crafted film that lacks courage of voice and trust of its audience.

If my review of No Country for Old Men decisively proves that I’m cinematically challenged, I willingly accept my handicap if the alternative is to rave about a film that does not value its viewers — old, young, male, female, child, dog, or otherwise.