No Country For Old Men - or for me

It doesn't seem like Omar is the only one I disagree with about this movie; it seems the entire Academy and I have different tastes. Originally I had no interest in seeing the movie, but after it got such acclaim at the Oscars, I thought maybe I was missing out on something. But what I saw was exactly what I expected from the preview: violence, and violence that has no true motivation at that.

I have no understanding of how one (or many) can find entertainment in such depravity. Certainly Tommy Lee Jones, as always, did a superb acting job, and the director and cinematographer deserve the rave reviews the film has gotten. The opening scenes are elegant shots of a gorgeous landscape that I have long had a major crush on, as the sagebrush-covered, mesa-backed, dry hills of New Mexico give desolation a rich feel. But does good film-making make for a good film? In my book, no; the story has to stand up to the quality of its production, and in this case, I don't see the elements of a well-told or well-formulated story.

I think back to 3:10 to Yuma, a film I did love that also included a lot of murder set against a stark but stunning western backdrop. That film, however, rang with meaning; there was a moral, and even if it was a clichéd lesson in the fight for human dignity, it was meaning; it gave the characters and the plot a driving purpose. The man under pursuit was the bad guy, not the other way around. The lone figure, accepting a task that was a test of his true character, gained knowledge of himself and knowledge of right behavior—as opposed to our lone thief in No Country, who expresses no ethics, no vision, no respect for his own life or those of his family; he simply hungers for money he has not earned, and he stupidly places himself in the path of every bad guy possible. And don't even get me started on the character of Anton; the psychopath with no purpose but to annihilate everyone who has laid hands on, seen, thought about, or imagined his money. What about that character is intriguing? Perhaps, if he had died in the car crash, the movie would have paralleled the absurdity of the character, and I would've found some grain of interest value there.

But as a ghost that cannot be killed, Anton became farcical to me; impossible to take seriously. Trying to understand how the character has any grab on the American psyche, I compare him to Daniel Plainview, another dour Oscar-winning character of 2007, and I think that at least with Plainview we understand his psychology; we understand the urges that drive him deeper and deeper toward loneliness and anger. I didn't like that film much either, as its plot moved a little slowly, but at least it was about something, it had an underlying point to make about the generation of the oil industry and money-hungerers in general. We know nothing similar about any character in No Country; we know nothing of what pushes them toward their decisions except in the lone case of the one old man, the sheriff, whose decision to retire we can understand absolutely, though we know, as he knows, that soon he'll be joining his late father in heaven. And from that knowledge, what of worth have we gained?