***Once Upon A Time In Texas- “No Country For Old Men”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film No Country For Old Men

DVD Review

No Country For Old Men, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, directed by the Coen Brothers, written by Cormac McCarthy, Miramax Films, 2007

Cinematic studies of murderous psychopaths have a long and honored position in film history. Early on in the gangster movies of the 1930s, in such films as The Petrified Forest (with Humphrey Bogart as Duke Mantee) and, perhaps more famously, White Heat with true stone-killer mad man James Cagney ready to blow up everything (and throw an off-hand grapefruit or two), audiences got to confront truly banal (thanks Hannah Arendt) evil characters. Remorseless, if not always efficient. The psycho (played understatedly by Javier Bardem)in No Country For Old Men carries on that tradition, although as we are now a little more inured to mass murders and odd-ball methods of killing on the screen that those earlier audiences, the methods have been ramped up. In short, take no prisoners. None. Moreover, the Brothers Coen want to, around the murder and mayhem, squeeze in a little tale about how this country (well, Texas, great American West country, Larry McMurtry Last Picture Show country, anyway) has gone to hell in a handbasket since the old western frontiers vanished into, well, civilization.

Of course no savage tale of the New West, the border New West, would be complete without some drug deal going south (no pun intended), going south badly. The action of this film is centered on a discover of some dough, some serious dough, just waiting to be plucked like taking it from the low branches of a tree by the first guy (played by Josh Brolin) who comes on the scene, the first hungry, break-out hungry guy who comes along. Now if you or I, maybe not hungry enough, came upon a desert scene with a bunch of stone shoot-out dead bodies, a truckload of dope, and a satchel of dough, we would walk, hell, run away, right. There would be no story then though. So our lonesome hungry cowboy grabs for the brass ring. Unfortunately said dough belongs to those who have hired a bad-ass stone killer ready, very ready, and very willing to exterminate whatever number it takes to get said dough back. And throw in a few innocent by-standers and others for laughs.

But this is Texas remember and so once the chase is on the local law, in the person mainly, of one wised-up, old-timey sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, a little out of his element in these new times when there is no honor among thieves (there really never was) and the crimes pile up more quickly and haphazardly than in the old days, is on the hunt. But age and world-weariness have taken their toll and old Tommy Lee is always about a step, maybe two steps, behind the central action. Needless to say things cannot turn out well here, and they don’t. Ya, this is no country for old men. Got it.

***When The Wild West Really Was The Wild West- “Wild Bill”- A Jeff Bridges Retrospective

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Wild Bill Hickok.

DVD Review

Wild Bill, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Barkin, John Hurt, directed by Walter Hill, 1995

Those of us who grew up in the 1950s in the early days of television, black and white television, got our heroes, our Western heroes strictly in white hat, and our bad guys strictly in black. And the Indians (a.k.a. Native Americans) well, the less said about the treatment of those benighted and betrayed people the better. Of course this view was all hokum, or worst. It took the likes of Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCormack and others in literature to give us a more realistic view of the rawness, untamed rawness of the Old West. And the likes of Walter Hill to give us a more truthful cinematic view, a view with muddy streets, whiskey breathe, fistfights at the drop of a hat, or less, treachery among enemies, treachery among friends, many social diseases and all. And that was on the good days. The good director here has taken on the legend of Wild Bill Hickock, generally given the better of it in Western lore as an associate of Buffalo Bill, a civilizing influence, and a king hell gunfighter.

Of course, the subtext for this review is that the actor playing Will Bill is none other that last year’s Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges for his “modern” cowboy role (singer-songwriter, okay) in Crazy Hearts. My argument underlying the choice of subtext is that Bridges was born to play theses good old boy Western parts and has done mainly stellar work in the genre ever since he cut his teeth on the modern Texas good-old-boy-in-the-making Duane Jackson in the film adaptation of McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. And at the acting level that is true here, although the existential characterization and the Bridges cool wit is perhaps a little over the top for the nitty-gritty West of the late 19th century.

One comes away from this film feeling, and maybe not incorrectly, that the distance between hero and villain (here in this contrived concoction about the manner of Bill’s untimely end, as villain, the son, the driven son of “spurned” mother whom was once Wild Bill’s lover) is who is left standing at the end. And for most of his life from his service in the Union Armies during the American Civil War until that fateful day that Bill was just one step too cool Will Bill was the last one left standing. But, see there was that little matter of the spurned woman, and that driven son to lay old Bill low. In any case if you have not seen a Western since the 1950s (although I guess I would want to know where you have been) you will be hard-pressed to sort out the heroes from the villains here. The Indians (a.k.a. Native Americans) as usual, in real life or fiction, get short shrift.