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 Heresy, I know, but thanks to dodgy projection, No Country for Old Men looks better to me on Blu-ray than it did at the cinema. Not just better, though: almost unfathomably good. The 2.35:1, 1080p presentation is so rich in texture that even in wider shots, you can tell the characters are wearing finely-woven straw hats to combat the scorching temperatures. Blacks reach down deep but never crush detail while whites evoke the heat without ever getting "hot." And although the image is crystalline, the baby (i.e., grain) has not been thrown out with the bathwater. It's a first-rate transfer that could not have happened to a more deserving film. Similarly astonishing is the DD 5.1 audio (640 kbps), an outstanding showcase for Skip Lievsay's intricate sound design; every thwap of buckshot makes you wince and the dialogue is remarkably clear. Hard to believe there's any room for improvement, but an attendant PCM 24-bit option, inaccessible to yours truly for the time being, implies that such is indeed the case. Typical of a Coen Bros. title, extras are meagre and largely unsatisfying. You get three featurettes (4:3 letterboxed in 480i)--"The Making of No Country for Old Men" (24 mins.), "Working with the Coens" (8 mins.), and the less-than-Bressonian "Diary of a Country Sheriff" (7 mins.)--that all essentially say the same things, i.e., that the Coens comprise a hydra monster with a pleasant disposition and a touring company of technicians; that No Country for Old Men adds new wrinkles to the chase formula; and that setting a movie in West Texas circa 1980 is a hell of a thing. I did like one bit of B-roll where Ethan (who does most of the talking in the Brothers' interview segments) asks Tommy Lee Jones to drop "the" from a line of dialogue--it's not fussy micromanaging but rather losing a bum note, and Jones really takes to the suggestion. Blu-ray propaganda and an HD trailer for Gone Baby Gone cue up on startup.-
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The Film
There aren't any heroes in the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men save author Cormac McCarthy. His The Crossing is probably the best American novel since Faulkner was writing in high heather, and Blood Meridian, due as a picture with Ridley Scott at the helm, is the most exhilarating, devastating read against that same bellwether. With this film, the Coens have distilled the essence of McCarthy's gash-deep nostalgia for the illusory, ephemeral past--complete with his sparse language and uncompromising way with violence--and packaged it in the very best moments of their own well of extraordinary visions: the hotel Hell of Barton Fink; the folksy voiceover and panoramic shots of the dying West from Blood Simple; the failed assassination attempt of Miller's Crossing; and the procedural (sans mercy) of Fargo. Each of these tried and true tricks is redeployed in a year of redeployments to create something that's not of the past, but rather very much of the present. No Country for Old Men is about what one character late in the piece calls "the dismal tide." This picture I have now in my head is of our moral universe digging a hole in the sand: you stop and it fills, and you're left with a smooth surface made up of countless little compromises and failures. Elsewhere, an old sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) tells his wife of a dream of his father, riding on ahead on a cold night with a fire in a horn to make camp somewhere in the black. Whether it's a dream of Heaven or Hell, the certainty is that it's a dream of death--and in this world, there's nothing left to hope for but the dead faith that men of fibre can hold fast against the blood-dimmed tide.
Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) does a dumb thing--at least, that's what he tells his wife--and ends up with a suitcase full of money and psychopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) on his trail. Others will follow: the sheriff, Ed Bell (Jones); a bounty hunter, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson); and bands of random Mexicans looking to reclaim that which they consider theirs. Chigurh is one of the great screen bogeys. When he engages a gas station proprietor in a conversation about fate (see: Raising Arizona), flipping a coin for "everything," the sense of menace is almost unbearable. It's pivotal, this idea that life is nothing more than a coin flip (Chigurh: "I got here the same way as the quarter") and not worth much more than two bits in any case. Where Se7en ends with Somerset's assertion that the world is a beautiful place and worth fighting for, this season has already seen Morgan Freeman in another cop role (Gone Baby Gone) offering that the world is a sty beyond saving--and now Tommy Lee Jones, in his best performance ever, hangs up his gun because the solution to the problem is that there's nothing to solve. The world as we know it is ash--it was always ash. Not a thriller despite resembling a particularly well-constructed one, No Country for Old Men is a reverie for the loss of the dream of security. I think it's interesting that McCarthy's follow-up, The Road, is set in the post-apocalypse--in a broad sense, each of his books since All the Pretty Horses has followed a rough chronology, making No Country for Old Men (and the film of it, and all the great films of 2007) a chronicle of Armageddon: all whimpers and no bang; I hardly noticed it happening, and now it's done and there's no helping it. No Country for Old Men is a fucking masterpiece.- (excerpted from a longer review found here)
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author. |
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DVD GRADES:
Image A+
Sound A+
Extras B- |
DVD VITALS:
Running Time
122 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
2.35:1 (1080p/MPEG-4)
Languages
English 5.1 Uncompressed,
English DD 5.1
Subtitles
English SDH, French, Spanish
BD-50
Miramax
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Published: February 25, 2008
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