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NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

I don’t know if “No Country For Old Men” (Miramax/Paramount Vantage), from the 2005 Cormac McCarthy novel, is Joel and Ethan Coen’s best film, or if it’s just the best since their delicious “Fargo.” I can state that it is, deservedly, the centerpiece of this year’s New York Film Festival, and the most successful of Scott Rudin’s three Festival entries (his others are “The Darjeeling Limited” and “Margot at the Wedding.”)
For those with a taste for crime scene gore more ghastly than the CSI shows, the Coen Brothers have been absolute masters since their very first feature, “Blood Simple,” which premiered at the New York Film Festival of 1984.
“No Country”’s narrative involves an appalling death scene in the West Texas desert. An encampment of trucks filled with drugs (cocaine or heroin, the bags are unlabeled) and dead Mexican gunmen are discovered by a shnook, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). Moss, a poverty-level welder who possesses ‘plenty of nothing’ but firearms savvy from Vietnam, makes off with a satchel of drug money filled with $2.4 million. He hopes to make a better life for himself and his wife than their present one, living in a miserable trailer park.
Moss’s theft incites a maniacal Mexican gunman named Chigura (sounds like sugar) played by Javier Bardem who comes after him. Bardem sports a creepy Addams Family member (Cousin Itt) hairdo; a ghastly, pallid makeup; and an odd murder weapon, a stun gun with a deadly cork, used for killing cattle with a blow to the forehead. (The oddity of Chigura transporting the gun’s long, steel, gas cylinder obviously appeals to the quirky Coen heads.) In contrast to the frightful Bardem, the handsome Josh Brolin resembles a younger, dark-haired Nick Nolte.
The furious action of Chigura’s increasingly bloody pursuit of Moss is the film’s central action. The picture’s gun crazy velocity is slowed, sporadically, by the ever-laconic Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell, a decent, Sherlock Holmes-type, West Texas police chief on the trail of a serial killer, Chigura. In the film’s first scene Chigura strangles a deputy sheriff with his handcuffs, which causes his wrists to bleed, showing that killing is demonstrably painful to the Coen Brothers in this pain-filled feature.
Chigura’s signature is to toss a coin to grant life or death to his victims by their calling heads or tails. When he has offed someone, he habitually bends the silver dollar he has tossed to demonstrate his uncanny power.
I will not soon forget the sequence in which Chigura personally doctors the massive gunshot wound to his leg, which Moss has inflicted (they wound each other, actually). First, Chigura/Bardem ignites a car outside a surgical supply store in order to divert attention. Having stolen all of the necessary supplies, he variously perforates the top of a disinfectant bottle with his knife and pours; extracts the bullet with surgical tweezers (the audience is screaming “ow” for him); keeps injecting himself with pain killers; and, finally, pours a bottle of disinfectant into the deep wound after stiching it himself. Mission accomplished! The sequence, filtered in blue light, is a tour de force. This one tops all of the other pain peaks in this excruciating picture.
The picture’s various old coots—a woman trailer park owner; a robbed gas station attendant; a chicken hauler divested of his carrier—are all perfection. Finding the odd-looking creatures to fill these bit parts, as well as selecting the leads, is a real triumph for casting director Ellen Chenoweth and her location associates.
There is one scene, late in the film, between the Sheriff and a bearded, wheelchair-ridden geezer who has many roving cats and is in contact with the Sheriff’s ex-wife. This scene is, quite simply, an excrescence, which I would have cut, except that the film is now in its final form.
Third-billed Josh Brolin was a last-minute choice for the role of Moss, as he was not a name of interest to the studios or to the Coens. But Brolin wanted the part so much, he made a test of scenes from the script of “No Country,” which was directed by Quentin Tarantino and shot by Robert Rodriguez, while they were co-directing Brolin in “Grindhouse.” The Coen Brothers, uninterested in Brolin, inquired, “Who lit your test?” (It was shot, according to Brolin, on a $950,000 Genesis HD camera.) Despite the Coens’ disinterest, when they lost the name actor they coveted, they ultimately gave Brolin the part, for which he was shrewd to campaign. At 39, his performance in “No Country,” as well as a notable supporting role as a bad cop in “American Gangster,” makes Josh Brolin now an A-list player. Even though Brad Pitt may be a producer’s first choice, he can’t possibly do everything that is offered to him. Besides, Pitt could use a little competition, which Brolin can now supply.

PARANOID PARK

Who says you can’t go home again? Not writer-director Gus Van Sant, who keeps returning to his home base, Portland, Oregon, and has now made a second film there about high school adolescents. The new one, “Paranoid Park,” (IFC First Take) resembles “Elephant,” (Van Sant’s 2003 gloss on the Columbine shootings), in the age of its’ teenagers, although its violence is decidedly more freakish–showing a railroad guard cut in half when he falls in the path of an oncoming train, though his trunk continues to crawl forward after the severance. (As I recall, Van Sant was very discreet about showing little of the Columbine bloodshed.)
Now, Van Sant, whose attraction to young males has been manifest from “Mala Noche” (1985), his first feature, to “My Own Private Idaho” (1991) and beyond, has turned to the work of a Portland, ‘young adult’ novelist, Blake Nelson, whose “Paranoid Park” is actually a graffiti-filled playground for the city’s adolescent skateboarders. Several of these board kids are characterized more vividly in an initial voice-over narration than by most of the figures we subsequently meet. These include the film’s introverted protagonist, Alex (Gabe Nevins) a scrawny, moon-faced high school skateboarder who is being hunted by the police for the death of the railway guard. The distinction between the director and me as voyeurs is that Van Sant lingers on Nevins’ lean torso when he disrobes, while I have no wish to ogle it.
The mutilated railroad guard had been beating Alex and a skating buddy with a lead pipe in order to get these stowaways off of an arriving freight train. In retaliation, Alex hits the guard with his skateboard, only to have him fall backward into the path of a passing train. (I believe that I heard Van Sant say that the severed torso was that of the film’s noted cameraman, Christopher Doyle, but since Van Sant is so soft-spoken, I am not sure of that. It certainly is the most surreal shot in the film.)
Alex, while guilt-ridden, cannot confess the deed, although a police detective twice questions him and suspects his complicity. After the inspector tells him they will be able to trace the weapon that the guard was struck with, Alex throws his trusty skateboard off a bridge and buys a new one. (I did marvel at the amount of disposable income the unemployed high schooler had, as he eats most of his meals at beaneries far from home cooking.)
The skateboarding sequences in the park of the film’s title are disappointingly unspectacular, as shot by a Portland figure in the skating scene, Rain Kathy Li, in Super 8 (which, blown up, looks curiously like video) as well as in 35 mm., presumably by Doyle. Paranoid Park is composed of cement slopes littered with lettered and colored graffiti. It appears to be a playground for derelict teenagers, but I’ve always thought that the dedicated bands of skateboarders I see around New York were mere empty-headed druggies.
Larry Clark, another directorial devotee of bored, board boys, has covered skateboarding with much greater virtuosity in his “Kids” (1995) and “Wassup Rockers” (2005). But I sense that Van Sant, despite his and Clark’s common interest in the young, has not bothered to study Clark’s films. My god, snow boarding is now a Winter Olympics event, but I sense Van Sant believes we have never seen any spectacular board work before. You won’t find anything so dazzling in “Paranoid Park,” even though the film is shot in the old, 1:85 to 1 format, possibly to accommodate the 8 mm. footage.
I appreciate that Gabe Nevins, age 16 or so, is natural in his film debut, but he is equally unformed and non-empathetic. If there is truly no one and nothing to look at in the picture, and there isn’t, the sound track is a wonderfully eclectic combination of a croaking, frog-voiced folkie, hip hop, and lavish strains from Nino Rota’s lush score for Fellini’s wondrous “Juliet of the Spirits.” (1965). The excerpts from Rota’s score serve to remind us of that magical color film, in which Giulietta Massina and the other old pros are truly accomplished, as Van Sant’s high school kids are not.
In introducing “Paranoid Park,” the Festival’s Program Director, Richard Pena, said that Van Sant takes us, each time out, to mysterious realms. I fear that I have been to those realms with him often before, and wish he would forsake adolescents and pseudo-amateur filmmaking and act his age, which is now 57, or too old for kid stuff.

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