No Country for Old Men (Coen & Coen, 2007)

This is, hopefully, the first of quite a few posts you'll be seeing from me today (and maybe over the weekend): I still am planning on reviewing The Golden Door, which really deserves the attention it hasn't been getting, as well as putting up some thoughts on I'm Not There. (I'm sure you're dying to know what I thought) and possibly Across the Universe. I also want to get started on that which everyone else is doing/will be doing: those Oscar predictions. So stay tuned.

-----

There was a strange kind of tension as I sat in the advance screening of No Country for Old Men, no one speaking and only a few rustles of popcorn and a quiet cough interrupting the hush. I got the strong sense that everyone who was in that room, who had all bothered to come in at 12:15 on a Saturday the week before the film is actually released, were all aware that this was supposedly something special, and were all lovers of great cinema. It's a rare thing for me to be in such good company while watching a film, and it did indeed make a nice change. (Except for the rather, ah, portly gentleman who was breathing so loudly near the end I'm sure he'd fallen asleep, the dolt.)

But you've already heard everything about No Country, haven't you, whether you've seen it- in which case you don't need me to tell you how fantastic it is- or not- in which case you really shouldn't want to know, for the surprise is part of the experience. I hadn't really been thinking about the fact that I was going to see the film until the night before, when it suddenly flashed through my brain that I was finally going to see the film everybody had raved about. The thing is, I've never been a big Coens fan. Their previous lauded work like Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, etc. usually seemed too cold, too technically proficient that they lost any kind of connective centre. (Exceptions: I loved Blood Simple, and I really must rewatch Fargo before passing any kind of judgment on it.) So when I heard that No Country was a 'return-to-form' for the brothers Coen I took it with a pinch of salt.

So kudos to them that I really did love it. The whole film itself felt like the images within where psycho killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) shoots someone and then watches the blood seep slowly across the floor. So Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds a drug deal gone wrong and a case full of money and the whole tangled mess spreads out from there.

But No Country isn't a straightforward picture, and its the Coens clever, unpredictable touches that make this film special. Like framing the picture with seemingly unimportant character Sheriff Tom Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), or killing one of the central characters offscreen with an almost glacial impassivity. Or putting the two least connected central characters into a horrifically tense and superbly acted little showdown. No Country is bitingly and sparingly written, but the Coens, not forgetting their lauded technical credentials, also use the crew around them to great effect: Roger Deakins' cinematography is every bit as unnerving as the story, while the use of sound is simply mind-blowing, especially in the opening sequences on the deserted sand plains.

No Country works both as a simple, barebones and nicely tense thriller, but also, as many have noted before, as some kind of subdued social commentary. The controversial (for being so unexpected- I have to say, I wasn't really paying attention, which made me feel rather embarassed when it then finished) ending bespeaks of the entire film's downbeat, pessimistic attitude, but while the body of the film itself puts across the idea that the world is going downhill, the final scene intimates that it's already been there for decades, at least. No, No Country isn't exactly a cheering film, but it is one of the few films this year that feels truly alive- sure, alive with bleakness, death and negativity, but those are human characteristics as valid as happiness and hopefulness, and the Coens have made a gripping thriller that isn't afraid to brace the world's darkest elements. A-B+

Good Grief, Natalie, Take A Bath!

[Spoilers Ahead] Most of those pictures you've been seeing of Natalie Portman in Goya's Ghosts- you know, the ones where she's done up in fragile, dainty dresses with beautiful black hair, like the one on the right- well, they're incredibly misleading. For most of the film she looks like she's been dragged through a hedge backwards, punched in the jaw, covered in shit (a la Carice van Houten in Black Book) and left to rot in a baking hot sun. I'd have no problem with this had it been realistic (hell, her character *had* been chained in a lightless cell for fifteen years), but good god someone on that make-up crew needs firing. She looks like a 150-year-old zombie. Also, surely it's perfectly possible that she could have taken a bath once she'd been released. No? Anyone?

Not that the rest of the film is much better. It's like it's been edited by a three-year-old with crazy scissors- it makes not a lick of narrative sense. It may be named after Goya but the fact that the actor playing him, Stellan Skarsgard (very odd choice), is credited a lowly third should clue you in to the fact that he's not exactly the focus. It may be the most absurdly titled movie we see this year. The film seems to want to be about so many things that as soon as it comes within a mile of them it thinks its job is done and it moves onto the next one. What is this movie about, you may ask? I would struggle to answer that question, although the poster (almost as bad as the other one) might help us out: Javier Bardem, sounding like he's got something stuck deeply in his throat (it's like he's trying to do a Spanish accent, even though he's already got one), is Brother Lorenzo, a Monk who is roped in by Goya to help out when one of his subjects, Ines (Portman), is falsely labelled a heretic (she wouldn't eat some pork) and subjected to "the question" (ie. torture) and so falsely confesses. The early stages of Goya's Ghosts encounter such absurdities that it feels like some kind of farcical medieval play. Lorenzo is invited to dinner with Ines' family and then subjected to the question himself, which is simultaneously unnerving and hilarious; and then there are the grotesque scenes in the underground prison, where Lorenzo suddenly decides to force himself on the naked Ines, for reasons unknown (although granted, rather obvious- he IS a monk, after all). There's also some brief hilarity involving the King (Randy Quaid, for some reason) and his "ugly" Queen (Blanca Portillo) who gets painted by Goya and then proceeds to wordlessly leave both the room and the film when she sees the final product.

Any motivation for the characters to do anything they do seems to have been chiselled violently out. Napoleon turns up, then Wellington, meaning that the monks are imprisoned and then released again, while Lorenzo disappears for a while and turns up again suddenly. And Portman (in easily the best performance) is suddenly employed to play her character's own daughter, who seems to have been invented solely so that Forman (that'd be Milos Forman, once a great director) can show off how pretty she is, actually! Goya's Ghosts skirts all sorts of political and religious and historical and social and emotional issues but doesn't see fit to investigate any of them, instead telling a story that fails to make much sense and leaving most of its performers flailing about wildly. The production is solid enough but it's all in service of nothing so ultimately feels defunct. In a strange way, it reminded me of Peter Weiss' play Marat/Sade- only the chorus here were playing it straight. Grade: D+