No Country For Old Men

What’s up in the Wild West?



The sun is rising on the plains of Southwest Texas. The old sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who finds the recently increased crime rate in the world quite ungraspable, narrates the good old days when sheriffs would not have to carry even a gun. The sun is rising on the village, where he has been the sheriff since his twenties. As sheriff Bell counts down to retirement, he philosophies his job.
Coen Brothers’ ‘No Country For Old Men’ – winner of 4 academy awards – starts with this lyric nostalgia.
Ed Tom Bell, apparently, is not a man of his age. He is an old style western character from the films of Sam Peckinbach, John Ford, or Sergio Leone, where the good and the bad, the criminal and the innocent are two separate entities whose borders are definable.
However, ‘No Country For Old Men’ positions itself in the misty quarters of the postmodern 80ies, when people do not kill any more for a bunch of dollars but just for fun. Or, like Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), live the matter of life and death to a toss up.
Anton Chigurh, one of the main characters of the film, is a total anti-hero with his funny haircut; cool, empty, and frightening face, and an effective air pressure gun he carries with himself. Chigurh does not need a reason to kill – he kills the ones he has to, and tosses up for the ones he cannot decide.
We first see Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), another main character, a veteran soldier fought in Vietnam, hunting deer in the desert. He is younger than Sheriff Bell but older than Chigurh. Running after his hunt, Moss falls into the afterfight of a drug deal. He discovers a few dead bodies, a truck full of heroine, and the money – 2 million dollars – after a quick search. As Moss evolves from hunting to gathering, he remains unaware of the easy-money troubles.

Postmodern Western
Coen brothers, tracing the three characters on a multi-layered story, tell a postmodern tale of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. However, in the picture by the Coen Bros., we do not find the sort of good, bad, and ugly that we see in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western classique. Here we have a bad, who is a principled bloodspiller; an ugly, who messes up his life with a trace for easy money but who has a conscience; a good, who does not care.
In this film, Coen Bros., whose filmography is a blend of film noir and comedy, set out to re-produce, re-think, and re-locate the Western.
To the common knowledge, Coen Brothers love crime stories. One should not forget, though, that a Coen movie is always-and-already authentic – regardless of its content, it is told in a particular Coen-style language.
What makes a movie a Coen movie? First come the characters – meticulously worked from tip to toe. Coen characters are hardly outstanding or unusual; quite the contrary, they are ordinary characters, usually inept, and even clumsy.
Talented as they are to create exciting characters, Coen Brothers are equally successful in constructing atmosphere. It is possible to claim that the Coen Bros. cinema is atmospheric above all. ‘Barton Fink’ successfully conveys the depths of human psychology, while ‘Fargo’ effectively depicts the small-scale life of a North American village, and ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ extraordinarily renders a Kafkaesque atmosphere.
In this sense, ‘No Country For Old Men’ conveys an authentic atmosphere and successfully created characters, though not so satisfyingly compared to other movies by Coens. Highly charged with a high tension from the first moment till the last, the film does not bring a Hollywood ending but keeps the tension at stake. Whether the reason behind is a Brecthian critic of the catharsis, or a favouring of shock end, remains a mystery.
Unfortunately, the most powerful weapon of ‘No Country For Old Men’, which tries to reposition the masculine world of the wild west, turns out to be its sole point of vulnerability – the film cannot establish a balanced narrative. Nostalgic and local, Sheriff Bell is portrayed as an old man who is born into a wrong age of which he does not want to be a part. Psychopathic and austere murderer Chigurgh stands as a metaphor for the coming age that is defined as cold and meaningless. Moss, on the other hand, is a hyphenated character who cannot belong neither to the good old days nor to the coming age. His sole aim is an escapist gesture – to take the money and live a happy life at home.
The film cannot escape a narcissistic failure that is triggered by the Chigurh character, which is stunningly enacted by Javier Bardem. Therefore, the story is not developed satisfactorily and the audience is left alone to float in the cat-and-mouse sort of plot.
As it is always the case with the battles of old and new, the lost generation turns out to be the one who suffers. Moss dies; Bell retires, whereas Chigurh walks his way down the road. A new era begins, and the realms of this new era is ‘No Country For Old Men’.

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Antonioni & Bergman

The White Screen Has Blacked Out

Another film giant has passed away following the death of Ingmar Bergman who was coined as the “greatest director alive” by the Time. From now and on, Michelengelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman will be remembered as the “greatest directors ever”.


Ingmar Bergman, who followed a unique path of his own through the labyrinths of feelings, passed away on the 29th of July. It was only a day after, on the 30th of July, when the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni died: a director who beautifully embellished the alienation of men from men with the ironies of the age of miscommunication, and projected all of these on to the white screen with a poetic understanding of aesthetics.
Without any doubt, and happily, we still have great directors breathing with us and whom we follow closely. However, Antonioni and Bergman are not here anymore. They were the last representatives of the 'auteur' generation known for their remarkable contributions to the film industry, that is growing further apart from arts and transforming rapidly into an object of consumption.

We are more alienated than ever...
Antonioni was narrating the feeling of alienation, which emerged with the industrial revolution and reached to a climax with the rise of capitalism, and the pains of the early modern individual follwing the depression of the world wars and the psychological traumas reflecting onto the social.
He was a film maker who preferred telling stories through images rather than situations. In fact, most of the time the situations in his films would not follow a cause and effect relationship. However, most importantly, Antonioni had managed to establish a film language of his own by bringing images together in a poetic fashion and by using the feeling of emptiness created via space. Perhaps this was why he was interested more in location than scenario.
Antonioni was in the effort to “bring our hearts and eyes to the same level” just like the way the great photographer Henri-Cartier Bresson did. Drawing a line from our eyes to our hearts through camera angles, locations and images, he was delivering 'humanly feelings' by giving us a smooth rather than a big slap on the face.
Masterpieces such as L’Avventura (The Adventure, 1960), La Notte (The Night, 1961), L’Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962), Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert, 1964), Blowup (Blow-Up, 1966), Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975) narrated the problems of the modern individual, male-female relationships, problems in communication, the inner feeling of emptiness created by the world and alienation. Although he will not be able to create new ones, his existing masterpieces will keep on explaining 'men' to 'men'...

'The Magic Lantern' has gone out...
Another film maker who passed away in july was at the same time an actor, a playwright and a philosopher: Ingmar Bergman... Coined by the Time in 2005 as “the greatest director alive”, Bergman focused on issues of death, religion, solitude, the indiviual, identity and memory in a joyful, yet more often a pessimistic way. This pessimism was at such an extreme degree that he once said “When I watch some of my films, I feel my nerves wreck; tears grow in my eyes... This is so scary...”
However, there are moments when joy and melancholy melt into each other in the cinema of Bergman... For example, whereas one of his most 'joyful' films, “Wild Strawberries”, was marked by a deep melancholy, it was possible for a character in a rather noire scenario to crack into laughter. Perhaps what defined Bergman was a lyrical melancholoy; or maybe, his characters were in love with melancholoy in a lyrical fashion...
The possibility of mentioning both Tarkovsky and Woody Alen in the same sentence while giving an example to the directors influenced by Bergman might also be a sign of this fact.
Despite focusing on a variety of matters with his camera, the great director was actually reflecting the mirror to his very own self the whole time. Sometimes, his films were psychoanalytical narratives projected on to the white screen. Was it this commonality which brought Tarkovsky and Woody Allen into the same sentence?
Having directed such masterpieces as Sommarnattes Leende (The Smiles of a Summer Night, 1955), Det Sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1956), Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957), Tystnaden (The Silence, 1963) ve Persona (Persona, 1965) Ingmar Bergman directed a sum of 54 films, produced 126 plays and wrote 39 radio dramas.
It was the 70th birthday of Bergman when Woody Allen said that “Bergman is the greatest artist that came about since the invention of the movie camera”. The movie camera is still recording images in the hands of others. However, Bergman who dealt with existential dilemmas on the editing desk with the coolness of a Scandinavian, played chess with death, confronted his body in his own coffin and embodied other faces in the mirror, will not be able to hold the camera in his hands ever again.
We can only find comfort in believing that the cinema of Bergman, which gave meaning to existentialism, will keep on shedding a light on the 'human' like a 'magic lantern'...

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