No Country for Old Men

I adore the Coen Brothers. Fargo is my favorite movie. The first time I saw it I really didn't know what to think. I sat in the middle of my living room and didn't move. When it was over I continued to sit there. My mind couldn't really wrap itself around the whole thing. A month or two later I watched it again with some friends. I swear it was a different movie. It all clicked. It flowed. I was able to notice things I hadn't before--mainly the cinematography. One of my favorite scenes is when Steve Buscemi's character stops to bury the money. The starkness of snow covered ground--the horizon is almost lost as the paleness of the sky blends with the white of the snow. The crunch of the snow under his feet. When he looks up and down the road and it all looks the same.... It is so dead-on it is amazing. The rural midwest in the winter is almost desolate yet still beautiful. The score is haunting. And, of course, the Coens' capture the absurdity of the people in the midwest. The "Yah, okay," "Ya don't say," and all the other weird things upper midwesterners say. I laughed my ass off. (Although, seriously, you would be hard pressed to find accents that think in Minneapolis/St. Paul, but outside of the Twin Cites, hell yeah.)

The Coens (and the rest of their filmmaking crew) did this again with No Country for Old Men. The cinematography was amazing, and you could see so many similarities to Fargo in the shots of the road and the landscape. But you know, west Texas is kind of desolate like the upper midwest--just brown as opposed to white. The characters are awesome, the dialog can be quirky. I've never read Cormac McCarthy's book, so I don't know if the snappy dialog is from the book or the screenwriting. I have read that the final speech from Tommy Lee Jones is word for word from the book.

But what was almost better than the cinematography? The score. Because there wasn't one. Awesome.

I don't deal will with violent or tense movies. And this film is violent and tense. Very. The lack of score added to that. There wasn't anything to tell you when something bad was going to happen. Every scene had the potential to be violent. There is one scene in particular I didn't see--I had my eyes covered. At one point I could feel myself shaking. At another I thought, "I should've gone to a matinee--I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight." But I knew this film would be worth it; I knew it would be good. An ohmygod it was. I am still thinking about it, still mulling it over in my head.

There was an audible reaction from the audience to the end of the film. I don't think there was any other way it could have ended. And it was brilliant.