Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

As I announced last week at the end of the post, there’s only one more full month before I conclude this blog. I had this exit planned for months and in that time I’ve been trying to cover a lot of movies that I had always meant to get to, maybe for the entire fifteen year run. This month is for the most highly acclaimed films that I’ve come close to reviewing many times, only to decide they were too heavy to get into.

I never really absorbed much about the plot of this movie. I know Javier Bardem’s character is a monstrously cold blooded, unstoppable killer whose weapon of choice is a pneumatic cattle bolt, and I get a sense of a “dark Western” atmosphere. I suppose the title is something about how this isn’t a hospitable place for the sensibilities of the aging.

After watching the movie:

A hitman is arrested in Texas but garrotes the deputy with his own handcuffs to escape, then uses a stolen police car to stop a motorist, kill him with a cattle bolt to the head, and take his car. Llewellyn Moss, an unemployed Vietnam veteran, wanders into the aftermath of a drug deal gone sour while out hunting. Circled trucks full of bullet holes, dead men scattered around them, and one dying man in the cab of a truck, too far gone to do much more than beg for water. Following a blood trail, he finds another dead man with the missing case of money, millions of dollars. He takes the case home, then later that night decides to go back to bring the dying man his water, and gets spotted by some very alive drug runners and has to flee on foot. Knowing he’ll be identified by his truck, Moss tells his wife to pack everything she wants to ever see again and go stay with her mother. Anton Chigurh, the hitman, gets hired to pursue Moss and recover the money. Meanwhile, the county sheriff Ed Tom Bell, arrives on the scene of the drug shootout and deduces that multiple episodes happened at this disturbing scene. Moss stays at a hotel and hides the money in a vent, then gets an adjacent room to retrieve it later, getting out just before Chigurh finishes mowing through the guests in other nearby rooms after the signal of the tracker device in the briefcase. Ed Tom muses about how this region is getting too evil for a man of his years to keep up with, and ponders retirement. But first there’s a man on the run who won’t admit he needs help.

The pacing is slow. Unhurried. Often meditative. The focus is on the themes, not the plot. Tension is key, not action, and so much of the movie is undercut with dread and simmering horror. Chigurh is a force of nature. To be targeted by him is a random act of the universe but once he decides to kill someone, that person is going to be dead. It’s no wonder Bardem was the only cast member I heard anything about in a movie where the protagonists are Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin.

I was unaware until the end credits that this is based on a book by Cormac McCarthy, but that made a lot of sense. I hated The Road, but that was also very much about how sick other people can be and what it means to try to preserve your humanity in the face of it, and how impossible it is to change anything but your reaction to this twisted world.

There’s no thundering big finale, no victory, only quiet conversations leading the viewer in the direction of the philosophical questions about patterns of violence that the writer wants to consider. Chigurh comes into the narrative as an unknown quantity and in the end he only leaves because his business is finished and the good guy decided it’s not his fight anymore. The story is compelling all the way through when it’s asking questions, but in the end it seems like all along it was an argument for nihilism, and that lesson leaves almost as bad an aftertaste as The Road, but with less actual depravity and more complaining about disrespectful youths being the downfall of civilization. The execution was magnificent, but I’m not fully happy with the destination.