Movie: No Country for Old Men
Filmmaking siblings Joel and Ethan Coen introduced themselves back in 1984 with Blood Simple, a hard-boiled thriller about blackmail and murder deep in the heart of Texas. From there, the Coens traveled all over the genre map: screwball comedies (Raising Arizona), metaphysical noirs (The Man Who Wasn’t There), the greatest stoner-bowler story ever told (Lebowski). With No Country for Old Men (5 stars), the Coens return to the scene of Simple’s crime—a Lone Star state filled with gun-toting hombres and mucho corpses. But while their first movie was a fun, flashy piece of pulp fiction, No Country is a profound work of art.Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men starts like a lot of tales about good people and bad choices. A man (Josh Brolin) stumbles across dead bodies and a bag of loot. He ends up being pursued by a hired killer (Javier Bardem, who instantly earns himself a spot in the Badass Villain Hall of Fame) with a void where his conscience should be. Meanwhile, the sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) tries to figure out who’s responsible for the carnage.
You’d expect the Coen Brothers to use McCarthy’s book as a starting point for their usual deadpan black humor and virtuoso camera moves. While there’s bravura filmmaking in No Country, the directors are more interested in translating the author’s stark prose to the screen than in showing off. And though the violence is presented in the amoral, exciting way that’s still in vogue, the Coens use it to underline the fact that the modern frontier (the film is set in 1980) is as brutally Darwinian as it was in the past. This film marks the Coens’ maturation from gifted stylists into real storytellers. They’ve finally made their masterpiece.
One day, someone will chronicle the criminal empire of Harlem’s 1970s heroin trade with as much rigor and substance as the Coens do for Reagan-era Texas. Until that happens, we’ve got two films on the subject that only skim the surface. The first, American Gangster (3 stars), mythologizes the rise of real-life smack kingpin Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), as well as offering hip-hop stars like Common, T.I. and RZA a chance to pad their acting résumés (all fare decently). But given that this is a story about race that takes place during a turbulent period in American history, such an epic docudrama should have been more than a series of elaborate set pieces. You go in craving a GoodFellas in uptown Manhattan. Instead, you get something with a grand scope yet almost no sense of vision.
That’s still more than you can say for Mr. Untouchable (2 stars), Marc Levin’s documentary about Nicky Barnes, a flamboyant contemporary of Frank Lucas. (Barnes is a bit player in American Gangster, played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) Though Levin scores a rare interview with the former criminal bigwig (he entered the Witness Protection Program in 1998), the filmmaker seems far more concerned with making sure the Curtis Mayfield songs sync up with the archival footage of outrageous fashions. Thanks, but we already have Superfly for that.
Documentaries of the rock variety usually adhere to a fairly conservative structure (talking-head interviews, old concert footage—rinse, repeat), but Kurt Cobain About a Son (4 stars) proves that going off the beaten path can yield something even more insightful. AJ Schnack’s film tackles Cobain’s life from an oblique angle, playing excerpts from interviews Michael Azerrad conducted with the late rock star for the 1993 Nirvana book Come as You Are over dreamy shots of the Pacific Northwest. Sounds pretentious, yet it works far better than you would imagine: Hearing Cobain talk candidly about his childhood over poetic images of his Podunk hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, drives the point home. Although you see the songwriter only at the end (in photos), you feel as if you finally have a clue as to what this talented enigma might really have been like.
If you prefer your tributes to dearly departed punk heroes on the conventional side, there’s Julien Temple’s The Future Is Unwritten: Joe Strummer (3.5 stars). Rather than concentrate solely on Strummer’s role in the Clash, the director devotes equal time to the late guitarist’s life before and after “the only band that mattered.” The Future is not nearly as good as The Filth and the Fury (2000), Temple’s film about the Sex Pistols, and the testimonials from actors Johnny Depp and John Cusack in front of campfires are laughable. Still, even Clash scholars will pick up revealing information about both Strummer the man, and his myth.
