The film which has already won a slew of awards including the Academy Award for Best Picture no less, was released last week to DVD. we approached this viewing experience thoroughly ignorant of those impressive achievements - we had only glimpsed part of a trailer and heard a few jokes about the show on late-night TV. In short, we had no idea what the movie was about. Most of the time that doesn't make that much of difference, but somehow that ignorance helped to set the stage for a sort of armchair epiphany.
We honestly can't recall ever having been so pleasantly surprised by a movie in my life. We was already acquainted with most of the movies produced by the Coen brothers and while many of those were interesting and few quite enjoyable, none of them to date had been truly remarkable. Perhaps the characteristics that I had associated with the Coens were the very things missing from this film - the dark humor, the not so realistic personas.
As goofy as Bardem appeared in the movie, he seemed frighteningly real. Josh Brolin seemed like someone I had met before, just couldn't place him and Tommy Lee Jones, a great actor in search of the ability to not mimic his prior performances, wow - this was his most realistic character to date, bar none. Even Woody Harrelson's somewhat under-defined role seemed vivid and sympathetic.
As the DVD progressed, we found ourselves transfixed, getting knotted up with suspense in places during the plot. This isn't some sort thrill a minute, twist & turn till you throw up action nightmare like National Treasure 2, this is in many places a very slow moving picture - but it works. The story creates its own sense of time outside of time, the kind of thing we hope every movie does for us, building that virtual hideaway where our minds are transported into the director's dimension for 90 minutes or so.
When you try to deconstruct a film like this where do you start - it isn't following a standard movie-making formula - at least not in an obvious fashion. The story is rich, the landscape is bleak and forbidding, the characters play it small but come over big and like life - we find no real parables or easy cliches to help us cope with reality. In our mind, we saw Bardim with his sinister coin toss as a sort of Anti-Gump, throwing his actions into the hands of unfathomable destiny.
We loved every minute of it - a classic in every sense of the word.
Trailer for No Country for Old Men
Copyright 2008, Raving Reviews™
