TAGLINE: Nothing you fear....can prepare you for him.
Based, almost verbatim, on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name, this modern western bridges the gap between the old since of the outlaw west and the modern use of all types current technology to upgrade to the new form of the outlaw west--still outlaw on the range are still outlaws no matter if they are riding a horse, or driving a car. Aside from Miller's Crossing, this is easily the Coen's most violent film before the making of True Grit. Despite that the film is a western, some of the violence appears inconsistent with western crime. But I think that is is point. When Hollywood started the genre of the "Western" in the talky era, it was pure myth. The Coen's in their fascination with western stories, whether they be modern or no, want to bring to the screen the reality that in lawless area, psychos can be found. Such is the case of Anton Chigurh.
At first Chigurh seems out of place. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is understandable enough, I Vietnam veteran, a hunter a big game, a rough and tumble Texan, who as his wife says "he can take all comers." Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is a range officer in the same ilk as the old time Texas Rangers; he has to be told (by Barry Corbin's character Ellis) "what you've got here ain't nothin' new," though through most of the film Bell states that he no longer understands western violence. Then you have peripheral characters like Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) that are involved with the type of organized crime that can only take place in the wildest parts of south Texas and northern Mexico. They all seem to fit. And then there is Chigurh. He snakes his way around, almost looking for someone to strike. He is calm in a way that is unsettling, going about his business in calculated and slow way. Only his "business" is killing people. If he were a serial killer, his actions would make sense--he would be trolling; only he is not really that type of killer, so the turtle like pace of his searching just seems a bit other-worldly. But I thing that is what the Coen's are trying to get at in their choice of source material for their westerns; they are doing the same thing (only in the 19th century) in True Grit. These are westerns in the Sam Peckinpah vein.
The action of the film takes place in the 1970's, which makes the then modern "technology" look quaint by today's standards. There are no cell phones, there is planted tracker, that beeps when you get close to it. There are no Blackberries, iPhones or even early computers--instead there are type writers, filing cabinets and women with bee-hive hair-dos. Yet this point in history is an important one; it shows the beginning of a kind of outlaw gangster activity in that part of the world that we are dealing with in real life in the here and now. This fictionally documents the beginnings of the Drug Cartels. When you watch this film, it is easy to see how, with more and more technology, that sort of criminal activity could grow frequent and go viral. Today, in the real world, it is not uncommon to find mass graves on both sides of the Texas/Mexico border. Truthfully, there are actually more mass graves there, than have been found in Iraq by a large number. This novel was kind of a prediction of the future of this type of crime--the film may seems like a throw back to a time that isn't really connected to the now, but a closer look reveals that this story was a warning shot of what was bound to come.
Trivia:
Heath Ledger was considered for the part Llewelyn Moss, the part that ultimately went to Josh Gates.
Anton Chigurh's hair style came from a photo that the Coen's found of a brothel patron from 1979.
Most of the lines in the film were taken verbatim from the novel the film is based on. Unusual for the Coen's, they actually reduced the amount of dialog from some scenes in book and kept the filmed dialog to a minimum.
Chigurh's first weapon of choice is known as a "captive bolt pistol." It is mostly used for killing cattle at slaughter houses.
As usual Carter Burwell is credited with the soundtrack, though it seems like there is very little music in the film at all; if you listen closely some scored "music" can be heard blending elusively into the background.
The credited editor for the film is one Roderick Jaynes, which is really a pseudonym for the Coen's themselves. They have co-edited all of the films that they have co-directed. Jaynes was an actual Oscar nomination for Jaynes for "his" editing of Fargo.
When the Coen's approached Spanish actor Javier Bardem for the role of Anton Chigurh, he told them "I don't drive, I speak bad English and I hate violence." To which the brothers responded "that's why we called you."
Only the second film in history to win the Oscar for best director shared between two people. The first was West Side Story 1961 shared by directors Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise.
Specs:
Runtime: 122 min
Rated: R
Color
DTS
Filming Locations: Various locals in west Texas, New Mexico and Mexico
Language: English & Spanish
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 (anamorphic wide screen)
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