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By Cole Smithey

‘No Country For Old Men’

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After a string of disappointing projects (“The Man Who Wasn’t There,” “Intolerable Cruelty” and “The Ladykillers”) Joel and Ethan Coen have hit cinematic pay dirt with Cormac McCarthy’s 2003 western crime novel “No Country for Old Men.” Adapted, directed and edited by the Coens, the film was widely accepted among critics at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as worthy of the Palme d’ Or, even though another film took home the prize.

Vapors of Hitchcock, Cronenberg and Tarantino permeate a dusky ‘80s era Texas-Mexico borderland where retiring hardscrabble Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) hunts bizarre serial killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) who is busy chasing married Army vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). The three characters form a cross-generational chain of variously disaffected men spiraling down a whirlpool of blood and cash. Painful laughs accompany gut-twisting suspense as McCarthy’s side-winding story swings out of control in increasing arcs of succinct violence.

Chigurh, in an unflattering Dutch Boy haircut, is temporarily arrested before he strangles the officer with his handcuffs and continues on his way, leaving a trail of corpses behind. The archetypal human killing machine embodies a black heart of the borderlands’ drug trade that has infected large swaths of Texas and New Mexico. Bardem thoughtfully creates the most daunting illegal immigrant any U.S. politician ever dreamed about.

While out hunting, Moss has the apparent good fortune of coming upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong in a remote desert area. Amid bloodied bodies, spent rifles and five shot-up trucks, Moss finds 2.4 million dollars in cash and a mother lode of heroin. Hiding the suitcase of cash at home momentarily brightens Moss’s dream of providing a good life for his loving wife Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald). Chigurh waits at the scene, and Moss becomes his running target, as well as a person of interest for Sheriff Bell, who correctly reads the tea leaves of the crime scene the next day.

Brolin’s recent career comeback, with solid performances in “Grindhouse” “In The Valley of Elah” and “American Gangster,’ is more than validated here. Of his recent roles, Moss is the leading man part that allows Brolin to trust his instincts in creating a conflicted character living on his wits alone. To say that Brolin’s acting comes as a revelation in the film is an understatement.

There’s an impression here that, just as they achieved with “Fargo,” the Coen brothers have perfected a dry-witted version of their self-blended modern noir cocktail. The title, “No Country for Old Men,” is an opinion pulled from the philosophical mind of Sheriff Bell, an honest Texan broken-hearted over the drug and border crossing violence that has consumed his home. Bell dreams of spending his remaining days with his patient wife Loretta (Tess Harper), but too much has changed in the region. The new American West is fueled only by greed and a thirst for retribution, if not preemptive slaughter. It’s not a place that Bell can abide.

The Rio Grande River, which Moss temporarily escapes across, becomes a barbed wire filter for his cash. McCarthy’s source material insinuates symbolic ideas about an American society where western life has turned far more violent than the blood-soaked days of the Old West. Justice and honor are foreign words unrelated to modern survival and accumulation of wealth. Suspicion is the coin of trade that must necessarily gravitate toward bitter death. And yet, there is a sense of hope, in the face of such brutal truths, that back cycles across the movie when its deceptively ethereal ending resolves the motivations of everyone involved. You can’t always get what you want, and you can’t always keep what you have. The Coen Brothers have gotten their mojo back. CV

The 2007 Wild Rose Independent Film Festival produced by AriesWorks Entertainment culminated in an Awards Ceremony Saturday Oct. 27 at the Fleur Cinema and Cafe. For a list of the winners, visit www.dmcityview.com under the film section.

‘American Gangster’

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Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe deliver inspired performances as rivals from opposite sides of the law in director Ridley Scott’s restrained true-crime epic about ’70s era Harlem drug king Frank Lucas (Washington) and Richie Roberts (Crowe), the honest cop who brings him down. Before smuggling 100 kilos of heroin from Southeast Asia with help from the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, Lucas usurps his respected crime boss mentor Bumpy Johnson when he drops dead from a heart attack. An upstanding Harlem community figure, Lucas undercuts his competition’s drug prices and builds a cartel that enables him to marry Miss Puerto Rico, and move his family to New York from North Carolina. Although entertaining “American Gangster” fails to rise to the level of movies like “Scarface” or “The Godfather” due, in part, to a lack of vision by cinematographer Harris Savides and Marc Streitenfeld’s underachieving musical score.

There’s never any question that Scott’s Americana-now gangster movie will pay out in deep character dividends from Washington and Crowe — two brilliant actors working at the height of their powers. However, this objectively gritty movie never makes the electric emotional connections to make it sizzle.

Crowe’s detective Roberts is the “Serpico” of his day. He wears an indelible reputation of honesty from turning a huge amount of drug money in to the police department after finding it in a car trunk. Roberts is also a womanizer willing to confront his own inability to function as a partial parent to his son. His ex-wife hates him with a ferocity that only comes from passion. But Roberts’s ardor lays in breaking up the drug cartel that’s eating Harlem like cockroaches on steroids. Though committed to his undercover work Roberts is also an aspiring attorney, and it strikes the movie as false when Roberts nebbish trail demeanor seems at odds to his poise as a cop. Crowe’s decision to overplay Roberts humility in this instance carries a snake-in-the-grass affectation that further splits the film’s arc.

A movie entitled “American Gangster” should be about one man. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian doesn’t heed the distinction, as evidenced in his misguided attempt to give equal time to Lucas and Roberts. Lucas is the underdog protagonist hero that the audience wants to see win. Washington plays the character as cunning, fair and generous. There’s nothing to connect Lucas to the mean streets of Scorsese’s ’70s era Manhattan. It’s here that the screenwriter and director conspire to some narrative sleight of hand by substituting Washington’s spotless leading character for Crowe’s ethically-willed cop. In doing so, the true-crime-epic gets relegated to a standard issue police procedural, rather than the soaring tale it hints at but never achieves.

Supporting performances from Josh Brolin, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding Jr. Armand Assante, John Hawkes and RZA add a wealth of character texture and emotional color to a movie that should be better than it is. That said, “American Gangster” is a great movie to go see. CV

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