I just saw the latest Joel and Ethan Cohen movie, No Country For Old Men – the one that won the academy award for best picture as well as a pile of other awards as well. As somebody who has liked a number of their films, Blood Simple, Intolerable Cruelty, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? And the first half of Barton Fink, I had fairly high hopes for this film.
However I have to say I really did not like it.
To explain why, I have go into the ending, so be warned, a lot of plot spoilers to follow.
The first problem with the film is that it does not resolve the main theme of the film in any satisfactory way. The film centers on an unemployed welder – Josh Brolin – who happens on the scene of a drug deal gone bad and finds $2,000,000, and a terminator-style hit man sent to recover the money. This theme can be resolved two ways: a happy ending, when the protagonist – Brolin – wins; and a pessimistic ending, when the terminator (the hit man has a name, but it is mostly not used, so in the interest of simplicity I will call him the terminator, though he is not called that in the film) wins. For adequate resolution, either Brolin or the terminator must suffer a suitably Wagnerian demise. In this case, the climatic scene (where Brolin dies) happens off-screen so that one is not sure whether Brolin is really dead or not. The film them meanders anti-climactically for a while until it abruptly ends. That’s it. Presumably Brolin’s character is dead though one doesn’t really know. Personally I felt cheated. Where is Aristotle when you need him?
This movie is the type of guy’s film where the main pleasure derived is that of following the protagonist and solving his problems with him as he moves through the film, as Steve Sailer pointed out:
"Finally, Joel and Ethan Cohen … have figured out how to bring the pleasures of a problem-solving first person shooter game to the movie theatre. … For reasons I don't fully understand … most of us guys, no matter how blameless our lives, enjoy doing some contingency planning about how we'd handle it if we ever had to climb into that white Bronco and make a run for the border. Thus, many men hated the great Chick Flick "Thelma and Louise" less for its supposed feminism than for how dopily Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon let their feelings botch up their escape from Arkansas to Mexico. I quickly worked out for them an itinerary for their getaway over the Rio Grande to Matamoros, but they weren't equally serious about route selection and ended up in northern Arizona, where they fell, deservedly, into the Grand Canyon. You can rest assured that the hero and villain in "No Country for Old Men," a Guy Movie if there ever was one, wouldn't miss Mexico by 500 miles."
By this standard, the movie is a failure. That is the second problem. There are a number of scenes in the movie that are sufficiently slow paced, internally consistent, logically even-handed and sufficiently detailed where one could follow along and think things through in parallel with Brolin. These mostly occur in the first half of the movie were the film really shines. When this happens there is plenty of suspense. The problem is that this atmosphere is not sustained through the film. The internal consistency of the film breaks down, coincidences just happen (always a sign of a weak script) and the logic of the plotline breaks down.
The film is at its best in the scene that occurs at a seedy motel where Brolin has hidden the cash in an airshaft in one of the rooms. The maneuvering between Brolin, who is trying to recover the cash without being ambushed by the terminator, while the terminator stalks him, is a masterpiece of strategy and counter-strategy, just like one of those World War II movies that pit a U-boat against a destroyer.
However even here, a critical loose end is left dangling. Because not only are Brolin and the terminator at the motel, but so is a roomful of submachine gun-armed Mexicans (whom the terminator promptly dispatches). Presumably they are there looking for the cash too (we are never told for sure), but why do they happen to be in the same hotel at the same time as Brolin? Is it a coincidence? If not, how did they track Brolin and what do they know? None of these questions are ever answered.
Another problem with the film is that it has a bit of the coyote vs. the roadrunner feel to it. That is, the terminator is just too unstoppable for the ending to be in doubt. He walks through the film like he is Brolin’s supernatural nemesis. Nothing wrong with that, but that is a different film (see 1985’s much underrated Hitcher with Rutger Hauer). It would be much more suspenseful if the terminator was more fallible and is shown to have more limits on his abilities. Then the strengths of the two characters could be played off against each with unpredictable yet thoroughly logical results. (Incidentally, The Terminator with Arnold Schwarzenegger was good precisely because Arnold’s character was shown to have limitations and weaknesses as well as strengths). Not coincidentally, the one scene when the terminator is shown to be vulnerable (when Brolin was able to wound him in the leg with buckshot) is also one of the film’s best. If they had kept it up in that vein, with a tit-for-tat between the two, the film really would have been great.
Unfortunately, the terminator barrels through the Texas landscape like a panzer division, leaving a trail of mayhem in his wake, but somehow none of it ever catches up with him. Witnesses never stumble in at awkward moments (the streets are remarkably empty); he uses the same weapon for most of the film without regard for police forensics, and he never wears gloves to hide his fingerprints. When things look too easy, they don’t raise your blood pressure. This may be a manifestation of the lefty Cohen’s disdain for the ultimate red state -Texas, but somebody should tell them, even in Texas, even back in 1980, police had forensics, just like they do in Beverly Hills today.
Another example of the terminator’s invincibility: at one point of the film, Brolin gets away from the terminator and crosses into Mexico, hiding the money beforehand. He leaves no paper trail, doesn’t call anybody (because he doesn’t even know himself where he is going) and there are no witnesses who know him. And yet, the terminator and another hit man, played by Woody Harrelson, find him in no time flat. How did they do this? We aren’t shown or told. It is assumed they were able to do so because they are Good At What They Do and Brolin is in over his head. This is another one of those plot devices employed by weak scriptwriters who couldn’t be bothered to flesh out the script.
One of the things I liked about The Terminator was that Arnold’s character was not evil, just ruthlessly efficient. When he walks into the Tech Noir to find Sarah Connor, he swats the doorman aside by crushing his hand because the doorman isn’t his goal. With the Cohen’s terminator, he is one part ruthlessly efficient and one part psycho. However, these two facets go ill together – a subject the Cohen’s never explore. For instance, as the terminator follows Brolin, he gratuitously kills dozens of people. His schtick in the film is that every time he kills, it is for some ‘principle’, and he has lots of ‘principles’. However murder is messy. Evidence is left behind. Victims resist. Other people see things. The police become restless. All of which interferes with his goal of recovering the money – or should, but doesn’t in this film.
A few technical details that doubtless didn’t bother the artsy craftsy types who reviewed the film but do bother the type of guys that are the movie’s natural audience:
The first is that the terminator is able to track Brolin thanks to a matchbook-size transponder left inside the suitcase of money. The terminator is able to find Brolin all the way from a different city using a receiver the size of a cigarette pack with a 2” antenna sitting on the passenger seat of a car. This in 1980! Anybody with even the most cursory understanding of communications technology can tell you this is flat out impossible – even today. The reason people are able to speak to each other on tiny cell phones is because of the intervention of large cell phone towers every several miles. Even state of the art military walkie-talkies have trouble if the intevening distance is several miles and there is no line-of-sight.
Another technical impossibility is that the terminator’s favorite weapon is a suppressed 12-gauge shotgun. A shotgun produces such a large volume of gas, that one would need a suppressor the size of a pail on the end of the barrel to acieve any adequate moise suppression.
With a good movie, technical faults like this would be forgiven, but with a mess like this, these things grate.
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