OK, y’all. So, C.C. just checked out the Academy Award-winning movie for “Best Picture”, No Country For Old Men, by the Coen brothers. Disclaimer: we watched in on DVD. But, we gotta say that this movie did not do it for us.

A few things…

So, violence in film isn’t necessarily bad. Treatment is everything, especially when you’re dealing with ultra-violence. And the only two things people ever said about this film, before I saw it, were “It’s amazing” and “It’s really violent.” I think there’s something to the fact there there seems always to be a disconnection between the two comments; people rarely seem able to reconcile the former with the latter, and the admission of the film’s violence always seems like a retroactive critique.

The bottom line is, Javier Bardem’s character is a sociopath, meaning, in terms of psychoanalysis, he is literally incapable of feeling empathy for other humans, or really, any emotions at all; that’s why he can kill the way he does, which is liberally and even for pleasure. So, as an audience, you have no chance to empathize with the character because the character is, in the end, merely a lunatic. And, you know I’m going to go there, this was the exact problem The Met’s production of “Peter Grimes” fell into; they made the character Grimes deranged from beginning to end, and when a person is clinically insane, you quite literally cannot sympathize with their actions because you know those actions come from a place of utter irrationality. So a relationship with the character is not determined by a desire to understand and empathize with them, because there is nothing to understand, and, likewise, nothing to feel.

Now, maybe you could argue that Bardem’s character is a stand-in for the irrationality of mortality–it will come to all of us, when we cannot know, but death is certain–except for the fact that, in the film, Bardem’s character is essentially on a revenge trip. He’s chasing money and the man (and the man’s family) who stole it. The difference, and what makes him crazy, is that he’s ready to kill any old person he happens to come across. But he’s still driven by the same libido that all the “regular” killing humans (in this movie: drug traffickers, thieves), it’s just that he can’t differentiate between when a kill is necessary and when it’s just gratuitous.

The attempts to make Bardem’s character appealing via aesthetic quirkiness–the bowl haircut, the air-gun death machine, the embarrassing flip-of-a-coin trick–expose the Coen brother’s fundamentally passive relationship with, and failed attempt to rationalize, the violence of their own film; Bardem is supposed to appeal to a contemporary taste for odd-ball serious characters while dolling out one punishing death warrant after another. “No Country” comes across as a slicker, less successful remake of “Fargo”, possibly their best film and a more humane survey of just how much people are willing to risk destroying other people’s lives–and ultimately their own–for nothing more than the age-old motive of greed. But the Coens try to dress up the violence in “No Country” in stylish accoutrement and the oblique philosophical ponderings of the reincarnation of Frances MacDormand’s deceptively shrewd take-her-time country cop from “Fargo,” now played nearly by rote by the veteran Tommy Lee Jones, whose cookie-cutter performance doesn’t do anything to help a script that has so many holes in it (philosophical and structural) that you begin to wonder what the fuck the Coens were smoking when they wrote the screenplay (for which they also won an Oscar).

From the outset, Jone’s character is embattled in a crisis with the history of law enforcement, made evident in a voiceover, where Jones is heard expressing bafflement at the kinds of crimes his law-enforcement predescessors had to manage (often without guns) to the kind of grisly massacres of modern-day drug-culture. The attempt at reminiscing to the older, less-bloody days of yore is touching, but ultimately empty when you consider the other kinds of violence that have always plagued society (thinking The Crusades, thinking lynchings, thinking The Holocaust). Advanced cruelty between human beings is not new, only the incarnation changes over time and between cultures.

Quentin Tarantino does a much better job of treating these kind of subjects, both ensconced in violence, than the Coens do here. In “Pulp Fiction,” Tarantino fashion’s Bruce Willis’s character as a good-at-heart bad guy who decides to risk everything for to help him and his girl escape to a chance at a better life. In “Pulp Fiction” you are rooting for Willis, whereas, in “No Country,” you’re not sure whether or not to root for Brolin. Then, in “Kill Bill,” Tarantino invents (with Uma’s help) a undeniably sympathetic killing machine: a mother done wrong. But “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill” come across as more sincerely heartfelt–even through all the violence–than the Coens’s latest flick.

And “No Country”’s philosophical/emotional shortcomings make it’s stylistic flair all the more annoying. In “Fargo,” the rural folk came across as charming and stoic, maybe simple people (in terms of the scope and magnitude of their worldly desires) but not stupid and not without a sophisticated sense of judiciousness, but in “No Country,” the attempt to use southern (or south-western) stereotypes as conveyors of the Coen’s relentlessly cynical vision comes across as a kind of country condescension, launched long-range from the Hollywood Hills. The simple (as in ignorant) wife of Josh Brolin’s character, who happens to work at Wallmart, is the epitome of this condescending narrow mindedness; and in the end, she pays the price for simplicity. But her acceptance of her fate doesn’t seem to bestow her with any dignity, which, I’m guessing, the Coen’s meant to do. Instead, she’s just another pointless victim in a never-ending series of casualties. Oh, is that the metaphor? Is that the point? Is that why the film ends with Bardem’s character getting in a pointless car crash? Is that why Jone’s character ends the film in an unresolved (and terribly boring) monologue, not getting to the vindication of tracking down the bad guy and stopping violence from happening? I’m annoyed at even having to unravel the series knots that seem pointless and, ultimately, without meaning.