Poor Man’s High Noon. The monster movie as a western trope has been reviewed here before, and I think it worked better.

★★★☆☆

Ok, so the first thing I need to say is hear me out. A lot of you are already texting me, slacking me, or heading to my front door to tell me how wrong I am. I get it, you love your Coen Brothers and everything they’ve made since Hudsucker Proxy has been a masterpiece. But at least read the rest of this review before you tell me how wrong I am.

No Country For Old Men is the Best Picture winning 2007 Western directed by the aforementioned Coen Brothers. It stars Josh Brolin as the trailer-park living everyman (Llewellyn Moss) who stumbles upon a busted up drug deal and finds himself in the possession of two million dollars in cash. He spends the rest of the movie being pursued by escaped Javier Bardem who plays the psychopathic escaped convict hired to retrieve the money. Wrapped up in all of this is the old-school sherrif played by Tommy Lee Jones who is trying to put the story together and get Brolin home safe.

Just like in its predecessor, High Noon, this western serves as a clever dress up for a classic monster movie. Bardem’s Anton Chigurh (the psychopath from the last paragraph) is not as much a man as he is a force of nature. He is an unrelenting supernatural figure who can not be stopped by any conventional means. It is his ever looming presence that carries this movie throughout and what hooked me through the first two acts of this movie. But to really get to my complaints about this film, I need to talk about the last third of it. If you have not seen this film, you should. Consider this my official recommendation, because it is an incredibly dense well crafted movie that I just think falls off the rails at the end. It should be seen by most people, if for no other reason than you can consider the last part of this review. So, reader beware, spoilers abound.

At the end of the second act of this movie, Bardem and Brolin finally talk to each other. Threats are bandied about, and we have the setup for our final showdown in El Paso. But, finally, Bardem’a time and space warping powers wear off and before he can make it to the Desert Sands motel, Brolin is killed OFF-SCREEN by the so-far incompetent Mexican gangsters. These gangsters have basically served as fodder to build up the terrifying image of Bardem. Now, I understand that this is one of the most Coen-y things to ever happen in a movie, but I hate it. And I think it detracts from the overall message of the film.

This is very much a movie about fate, destiny, the inevitability of death, or whatever you want to call that strange force in the world that pushes us along our path. Brolin’s story is one of hopelessness. Jones remarks early on the film about how he will never be able to escape the mess he is in because “when would you stop lookin’ for your 2 million dollars”. Bardem embodies that cruelness and seemingly randomness of fate by pulling a full on Harvey Dent and having a coin toss decide rather or not he murders the people in his wake. To have the inevitable showdown robbed from us, off camera, weakens the message about inevitability.

That missing showdown  also wasted the opportunity to subvert the genre established by Gary Cooper and High Noon. If our protagonist (Brolin, or even Jones if they wanted to take it post-Brolin’s demise) was to fall at the hands of the monster that could not be stopped, it would help drive home one of the second themes of the movie. Jones final few scenes are all about how the world is changing and moving past people like him. Jones represents the old school wild west sheriffs who managed to triumph over the bandits and monsters of the past. Here in 1980, the monsters are still here but they are more wicked, violent, and harder to defeat then ever. In High Noon, Frank Miller wants revenge. In The Magnificent Seven, the bandits are after food and money. These are things we can understand. But Chigurh is just a monster. He can’t be understood. And what better way to show the difference than to thrash our expectations and have the monster triumph.

And after all of that, we get the car crash. After (probably) fulfilling his promise to the late Moss and killing his wife. Bardem walks out, gets in his car, and is immediately involved in a car accident. He breaks his arm badly and bribes two kids to say nothing to the police as he flees the scene of the crime. This scene seems to have absolutely zero purpose in furthering any part of the plot. It happens too late in the movie to show us that Bardem is not supernatural and can be harmed. And besides, he is shot earlier in the film and we watch him patch himself up. Bardem is never seen again. It’s a totally pointless addition that just serves to detract from the overall message.

The ending of this movie is Jones discussing a few dreams that he had. It feels so important because of how strange and profound these dreams are. But honestly, I think people latch on to it too fondly. If Jones was the protagonist for the whole film and the main message of the movie was about “No Country For Old Men” (which is just the title and last 20 minutes of the movie) then maybe this hits home harder. But it tries to reinforce the message of fate and inevitability that was already trashed for me by the end of this film.

I expect that this review will be met with harsh words from David, Billy, and most of my other film loving friends. Unlike most Coen Brothers movies, I was actually invested in this one throughout. I can articulate more easily my problems with this movie, because I honestly wanted to love it. But in the end, the Coen Brothers continue to make movies for people who aren’t me, and I’m almost ready to finally close the book on them.