nan | 楠木

The Coen brothers’ latest work, No Country For Old Men is a technically superior thriller that offers an intense viewing experience, and is probably the best thriller I’ve seen in a long, long time.

It’s Texas in 1980. A Vietnam veteran, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is out hunting where he stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad and $2 million cash lying around. He grabs the money, which puts him right in the target sights of a psychopath named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, in a role that he’ll be remembered by for a long, long while), who is on a killing spree across the state. Finally, local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), whose years have given him the nose of a wolf, quickly apprehends what’s going on, and tries desperately to track down Moss before Chigurh does.

The film has the look and feel of a modern day western, and I found I could easily relate to spaghetti westerns such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, both in terms of the atmospheric settings (a cold, humorless world where it’s every man for himself) and in terms of the characters (there isn’t your standard protagonist – Moss has a good heart, but he just wants to keep the money regardless).

What is really fascinating about the film, though, is how the suspense is so deftly crafted. In many ways, this could be seen as textbook material on movie-making. The Coens used no music score (which is of great help in conveying suspense – just refer to any horror film), but instead relied only on great editing and superb ambience. And they show that they don’t need on-screen violence to strike terror into the audience – once the credibility of the killer is established, they only need to show you scenes where killings are inferred to make your blood tingle.

Finally, the film has a somewhat unexpected ending, which some audiences would probably hold against – indeed there could even be a certain feeling of being cheated. But I think that just goes to show how skillful the Coens are at this game: the whole point (of many of their films) is that what you expect to happen doesn’t happen. Every man who laid eyes on the $2 MM thought he could keep it; you thought you were going to see a classic showdown. Enough said.

9/10