Best film of 2007? At least until I see There Will Be Blood, or re-watch Zodiac. This film is excellent. I wrote this review on Facebook:

[SPOILERS WITHIN]

This is no country for old men: Tommy Lee Jones narrates in nostalgic reminiscence over empty sunsets and desolate landscapes, to the subtle crescendo of the faintest of choral drones, a soundtrack which, atop of the blowy Texan winds, invokes an anticipation and foreboding which lingers, which hovers, which resonates without ever really being present. And nothing in this film explodes; deathly carnage comes, deathly carnage goes, and the world - as it does in Fargo - resumes its equilibrium in spite of now being a few inhabitants less.

It is worth noting, in light of the title, that Jones is an old man. An aging sheriff about to retire, he responds to a call early in the film; when warned by his wife not to get hurt, his reply is simple: "Never do". It's a telling and convincing line: throughout the film thereafter, he shows the same reluctance to get his hands dirty as Morgan Freeman's Detective Somerset in Seven. Like Fincher's film, this depicts a running relationship between a nearly-retired veteran authority and a young and naive apprentice. And even if Jones's Sheriff Bell has a far less reliable apprentice in the goofy, rather slow Wendell than Somerset does in Brad Pitt's Detective Mills, the relationship between the two, besides offering comic relief in a film full of wince-worthy violence, is fitting. Wendell (Garret Dillahunt) is enthusiastic and dumb, in way over his head as he reports back with glee to his higher-up on their case's progress; Sheriff Bell, meanwhile, knows better. "I laugh myself sometimes," he remarks with resignation at one point. "There ain't a whole lot you can do."

He's right: there's a strong sense of fatalism operating throughout the Coen brothers' latest and most mature film. From early on - no doubt due to the lack of music and the elongated, tense silences - there's a feeling of desperation about this entire story, a narrative from which very few (if any) are going to emerge. A typical take-the-money-and-run narrative is invested with strong characters and complex philosophical ponderings.

The fatalism,for instance - epitomised, perhaps, by Javier Bardem's wonderful turn as Anton Chigurh - is continually undermined, or at least challenged, by a sense of chance. Throughout, it seems, this world is forever in conflict, at the mercy of antagonising forces of determinism and hazard. People make choices in life; sometimes they turn out good, sometimes they turn out bad. When Llewelyn Moss, the film's lowly anti-hero (more of a desperate everyman), chooses to go hunting, he happens across a drug deal gone wrong. He also chooses, by his own responsibility, to take the remaining money and run. True, the satchel has a tracking device on it, and so he and his wife may have been dead sooner than expected anyway, but the fact that he chooses, once again, to return to the scene of the crime in order to bring water to the massacre's sole survivor, turns out, in retrospect, to be the dumbest choice he could have made (he admits as much before hand).

Two key, dialogue-heavy scenes involve Chigurh flipping a coin in order to decide whether or not to kill people. The first, a shop-owner, plays along (and wins) without ever knowing his life's on the line, but the second - a widowed wife who has just buried her mother (and so she's no stranger to death) - decides not to play the game of chance. The implication is as deadly as it is silent.

Fate hasn't the last say, though (and indeed, quite paradoxical, death sometimes comes down an allegorical coin-flip). If Chigurh had left the Moss home any sooner - or indeed later - his car may well have eluded the violent, earth-shattering crash of the penultimate scene. With his elbow protruding from his arm, he soldiers on, desperate to get away... and away he gets, thanks to the hospitality of two neighbouring kids-on-bikes - who, incidentally, may have been casually murdered if it hadn't been for this unexpected collision. This moment, subtle and affecting, mirrors a similar one earlier in the film, in which a bloodied Moss, on the US-Mexico border, encounters drunken youths who are stopped and awestruck by the bloodied man before them. "Hey," one of them asks, "were you in a car crash?" Their greed gets the better of them, and they only give their jacket up once Moss pays them sufficiently. It's a cyclical gesture - he could have easily come across less anal kids than these - say, those who help the film's villain at the end.

But, in fitting with cycles, it is Jones's sheriff that ends the film (and indeed, the subdued climax could be an extension of the opening voice-over). He relates two dreams he's had of his father. The first, he recalls, involved a meeting in town, and his father "was gonna give me some money; I think I lost it". The second is more obscure: his father carries a flaming torch, on his way to "fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there". Significantly, before digressing, he reveals that he is now over twenty years older than his father ever was.

Bewildering to some, this short monologue is integral: moments earlier, Bell himself narrowly escapes death at the hands of Chigurh, that always-lingering presence of doom. It wasn't his time to die, some law of determinism (the impossible-to-beat Chigurh?) has made it so. But Bell isn't prepared to get overly confident - Moss did, and he's dead. No: Bell must retire, to give him the fullest chance of survival in a land where survival depends entirely on the fine balance between Hazard and Fate. His time will come.

-----

I think I'm seeing it again tomorrow.

Capo, did you post that on FCM? I couldn't find it.

Whisper, did you watch There Will Be Blood?

No i haven't seen it.Should i??

Best film of 2007? At least until I see There Will Be Blood, or re-watch Zodiac. This film is excellent. I wrote this review on Facebook:

[SPOILERS WITHIN]

This is no country for old men: Tommy Lee Jones narrates in nostalgic reminiscence over empty sunsets and desolate landscapes, to the subtle crescendo of the faintest of choral drones, a soundtrack which, atop of the blowy Texan winds, invokes an anticipation and foreboding which lingers, which hovers, which resonates without ever really being present. And nothing in this film explodes; deathly carnage comes, deathly carnage goes, and the world - as it does in Fargo - resumes its equilibrium in spite of now being a few inhabitants less.

It is worth noting, in light of the title, that Jones is an old man. An aging sheriff about to retire, he responds to a call early in the film; when warned by his wife not to get hurt, his reply is simple: "Never do". It's a telling and convincing line: throughout the film thereafter, he shows the same reluctance to get his hands dirty as Morgan Freeman's Detective Somerset in Seven. Like Fincher's film, this depicts a running relationship between a nearly-retired veteran authority and a young and naive apprentice. And even if Jones's Sheriff Bell has a far less reliable apprentice in the goofy, rather slow Wendell than Somerset does in Brad Pitt's Detective Mills, the relationship between the two, besides offering comic relief in a film full of wince-worthy violence, is fitting. Wendell (Garret Dillahunt) is enthusiastic and dumb, in way over his head as he reports back with glee to his higher-up on their case's progress; Sheriff Bell, meanwhile, knows better. "I laugh myself sometimes," he remarks with resignation at one point. "There ain't a whole lot you can do."

He's right: there's a strong sense of fatalism operating throughout the Coen brothers' latest and most mature film. From early on - no doubt due to the lack of music and the elongated, tense silences - there's a feeling of desperation about this entire story, a narrative from which very few (if any) are going to emerge. A typical take-the-money-and-run narrative is invested with strong characters and complex philosophical ponderings.

The fatalism,for instance - epitomised, perhaps, by Javier Bardem's wonderful turn as Anton Chigurh - is continually undermined, or at least challenged, by a sense of chance. Throughout, it seems, this world is forever in conflict, at the mercy of antagonising forces of determinism and hazard. People make choices in life; sometimes they turn out good, sometimes they turn out bad. When Llewelyn Moss, the film's lowly anti-hero (more of a desperate everyman), chooses to go hunting, he happens across a drug deal gone wrong. He also chooses, by his own responsibility, to take the remaining money and run. True, the satchel has a tracking device on it, and so he and his wife may have been dead sooner than expected anyway, but the fact that he chooses, once again, to return to the scene of the crime in order to bring water to the massacre's sole survivor, turns out, in retrospect, to be the dumbest choice he could have made (he admits as much before hand).

Two key, dialogue-heavy scenes involve Chigurh flipping a coin in order to decide whether or not to kill people. The first, a shop-owner, plays along (and wins) without ever knowing his life's on the line, but the second - a widowed wife who has just buried her mother (and so she's no stranger to death) - decides not to play the game of chance. The implication is as deadly as it is silent.

Fate hasn't the last say, though (and indeed, quite paradoxical, death sometimes comes down an allegorical coin-flip). If Chigurh had left the Moss home any sooner - or indeed later - his car may well have eluded the violent, earth-shattering crash of the penultimate scene. With his elbow protruding from his arm, he soldiers on, desperate to get away... and away he gets, thanks to the hospitality of two neighbouring kids-on-bikes - who, incidentally, may have been casually murdered if it hadn't been for this unexpected collision. This moment, subtle and affecting, mirrors a similar one earlier in the film, in which a bloodied Moss, on the US-Mexico border, encounters drunken youths who are stopped and awestruck by the bloodied man before them. "Hey," one of them asks, "were you in a car crash?" Their greed gets the better of them, and they only give their jacket up once Moss pays them sufficiently. It's a cyclical gesture - he could have easily come across less anal kids than these - say, those who help the film's villain at the end.

But, in fitting with cycles, it is Jones's sheriff that ends the film (and indeed, the subdued climax could be an extension of the opening voice-over). He relates two dreams he's had of his father. The first, he recalls, involved a meeting in town, and his father "was gonna give me some money; I think I lost it". The second is more obscure: his father carries a flaming torch, on his way to "fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there". Significantly, before digressing, he reveals that he is now over twenty years older than his father ever was.

Bewildering to some, this short monologue is integral: moments earlier, Bell himself narrowly escapes death at the hands of Chigurh, that always-lingering presence of doom. It wasn't his time to die, some law of determinism (the impossible-to-beat Chigurh?) has made it so. But Bell isn't prepared to get overly confident - Moss did, and he's dead. No: Bell must retire, to give him the fullest chance of survival in a land where survival depends entirely on the fine balance between Hazard and Fate. His time will come.

-----

I think I'm seeing it again tomorrow.

I wondered about that, too. I think it was a directorial device: a way to introduce Anton's inhuman, fiendish determination by showing how he got out of the handcuffs, killed the deputy tout-suite, and then whacked a motorist for the sheer sake of whacking him--to say nothing of using that ridiculous air tank as a murder weapon.

to say nothing of using that ridiculous air tank as a murder weapon.