Feb. 29, 2008 — Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen must have been getting leg cramps after their several trips to the stage at Sunday's Oscar ceremony where they picked up three of the gold statuettes including best picture for "No Country for Old Men."
The Coens also garnered Oscars for best directing and best writing of a screen play based on previously published material, while Spanish actor Javier Bardem took home the best supporting actor Oscar.
Not only does the film have the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in thrall; virtually every critic worth his or her ink is left in awe, almost (but not quite) speechless.
Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun Times says, "It is as good a film as the Coen brothers have ever made, and they made 'Fargo.' It involves elements of the thriller and the chase, but is essentially a character study, an examination of how its people meet and deal with a man so bad, cruel and unfeeling that there is simply no comprehending him."
That man is Anton Chigurh (Bardem), one of three men in deadly pursuit of an ill-gained $2 million. The film is adapted from Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel of the same name.
"That name," says Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly, "describes a contemporary American West (the action is set in 1980) where drug trafficking dirties the parched, wide-open landscape that was once home to cattle rustling.
"In that landscape," Schwarzbaum says, "where the value of honor has steadily declined, an average chump named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is out doing a bit of unsuccessful hunting when he happens upon a huge cash haul at the scrubby site of a drug deal gone bad. And it's here that Moss makes his first wrong wager: He thinks he can take the money and run.
"But," she continues, "a simple plan is never simple. Two others are tracking the whereabouts of the windfall, one the meditative lawman Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), worn out by what he has seen of the evil that men do, and the other, Chigurh, the singularly psychopathic hitman."
Mat Pais in the Chicago Tribune says, "The movie is so ferociously acted and executed that it practically takes a bite out of you. 'No Country' is the kind of movie that if you miss a moment, you've missed it all. Not because it moves quickly — the Coens know exactly when to linger and when to pounce–but because everything about this chase is in the eerie stillness that hangs in the air, the calm before the storm that defines life on the run."
Schwarzbaum agrees about that stillness. Although Bardem took home the award, she says, "The leading character in this reverberating movie is silence, save for the sights and sounds of air and breath. Silence deepens the horror of the drug-deal massacre that the lone hunter Moss first glimpses through his binoculars — he spies scuttled pickup trucks, sprawled bodies, even a slain and rotting dog…..Silence heightens the exquisite tension as Chigurh tracks Moss, on the run, from motel to motel."
Javier Bardem in person is far less threatening. Interviewed by Charlie Rose on his PBS TV talk show last week, he appeared shy, a little disarming. Smiling when Rose asked how he managed to handle the heavy role of the psychopathic killer, Bardem didn't answer directly, or at all, but he did allow that he's happy to have his own hair style back again. In the movie, he wears a bowl pageboy cut, which somehow makes him even more menacing.
Ebert concludes, "Many of the scenes in the film are so flawlessly constructed that you want them to simply continue, and yet they create an emotional suction drawing you to the next scene."
Schwarzbaum says, "This is the first Coen script that respects its own characters wholeheartedly, without a wink. And it's no accident that this measured yet excitingly tense, violent yet maturely sorrowful thriller marks the first time the filmmakers have faithfully adapted somebody else's work to their own specifications and considerable strengths."
The movie also features Kelly Macdonald as Moss' wife, Carla Jean, and Woody Harrelson as bounty hunter, Carson Wells.
It runs 123 minutes and is rated R for strong graphic violence and language.
It is playing at Market Square East.