Once again the Coen brothers produce an interesting and rather un-nearving story with unforgettable characters. And all around great movie. However is it all that the critics have made it out to be over the past weeks? I would be inclined to say no.
I would agree that it is their best work since "O Brother, Where Art Thou?". And that it shows a back track to their beginning "Blood Simple" which is one of my favorite movies. But the question people are silently asking deep down even now is, 'Best picture'? You're gonna say that it is still early but this movie has gotten allot of hype on all the the major film blogs and papers, it's every where people are talking about it allot.
It's not the best movie of the year.
It is very very good but it is not the best movie of the year. And for several reasons.
It is long. Well not really there have been allot of much longer movies. "American Gangster" (also out right now) is almost three hours long. "No Country for Old Men" is a whole 44 minutes shorter but it is really long. What I mean is this. The movie is really allot of beautiful shots of Texas dotted with scenes of some plot and high intensity violence. Well that is not really true. Allot of it is people doing their thing in the story without talking. Well how can they the two main characters never really meet face to face and both spend most of their time looking for each other in the desert. So we spend allot of time just kinda watching stuff happen without really knowing where or why. We ask questions like "What was he thinking going back there?!?" only because he didn't tell us.
One could debate that the actions of the characters are supposed to be presented in this way because it may just be that they are doing them simply for doing them. Or for the obvious reason of greed which needs no exposition like a character does. The point is that there is allot of just stuff we see and nothing to tell us that it this is what is happening.
Then there is character. The characters the Coen brothers make are always great. And the characters in this movie were great but they were certainly not the best the Coen's have done. The Tommy Lee Jones character does nothing. He isn't really even trying to find them. He just is. His role seems to be to make some comments about the world the actions take place in at the beginning and then occasionally make a remark about them. His characters meaning is to be the point at which things are pivoting in the story, he is the old and the people acting are the new. He makes reference to this when he remarks about the change in the slaughtering of cattle. How it has changed. They used to kill cattle with a bullet, and it had some problems that come with it, and that now they use a compressed air piston to kill the cow and the cow "...doesn't know what him him". Now the sheriff he plays has to face a man killing people the way they kill cows and the people he kills don't know what hits them with they do.
All this is very interesting but Tommy Lee Jones isn't doing anything else but that. There is no "Fargo" police man here. While Tommy Lee Jones is sitting about and not interacting with the action the other players in the story are doing things. Shaping their next day and all that. Facing trials and having to deal with their decisions. All the other characters are classic Coen. Classic Coen without that slight humor they bring into even their bleakest movies. That fact also somewhat lessened my liking for the film.
So I left the theater with mixed feelings about it. But on the whole a very good movie, one defiantly worth seeing. But it is not everything that the critics have cracked it up to be. Will it win best picture? I doubt it very much but it is far and away one of the better pictures I have seen this year. I look forward to its DVD release because I will buy it and watch it again.