I first heard about Coen brothers when a close friend of mine told me about The Big Lebowski; I watched the movie at his place. Before I saw The Big Lebowski, I only knew about movies that had a definite plot and the ending usually resolved the plot, often with a moral at the end that said bad things happened to the character X because he did Y, or good things happened to character Z because he did A, and so on and so forth. Then I watched The Big Lebowski. I'd seen Payback quite recently and I'd loved the movie. As I saw the first fifteen minutes of the movie, I wondered if it was going to be similar to the Payback, may be adding a comic element as well. As we all know, The Big Lebowski is nothing like Payback. It stands by itself. As such I didn't really understand the movie then - I didn't really get it. My friend explained that the movie was not about the plot, it's about the characters. This "about the characters" part was new to me then. Bollywood movies that has been my stable visual diet until then didn't really have really revolve around characters; they of course had heroes and villains, the former good people, the latter the bad guys. And there were other supporting cast like the mother, the sick father, the house maid who either got abused or got into a romantic affair with the hero's sidekick, the good but jealous brother prodded into the dark side by his vile wife and so forth, but again all of these were very one dimensional - stereotypes might be a better word. So watching The Big Lebowski was in a way an eye opener for me. I owe my friend a big thanks for that!
Now to the main point of this post:
No Country for Old Men is not about the plot, it is about the characters. Keep that in mind when you see the movie and you won't be disappointed. And if you keep what I said in mind, you'll be fascinated by the characters in the movie, especially the character of Anton Chigurh, played brilliantly by Javier Bardem. The name Chigurh sounds almost like 'sugar' as in the heavy Texan accent of the characters - pay close attention to Woody Harrelson (as Carson Wells) pronounce his name in the second half of the movie. Roger Ebert described the movie as "an examination of how its people meet and deal with a man so bad, cruel and unfeeling that there is simply no comprehending him." Charlie Rose in an interview with the Coen brothers and two of the leading actors - Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin, described Chigurh as a latter day Hannibal. I don't necessarily agree with the comparison with Hannibal, but yes, the character was certainly interesting and dark enough to send a chill down your spine. After watching the movie, the door lock doesn't look the same anymore. You'll have to see the movie to understand what I mean by that! :-)
The movie and a few of the reviews I read about it made me think about dark fictional characters, or atleast the ones that have made a transition to movies. Some of the characters that come to mind are (apart from Anton Chigurh), Tom Ripley (created by Patricia Highsmith), Jean Baptiste Grenouille (from the book and movie Perfume: Story of a Murderer), Hannibal. One reason I liked Hollywood movies - especially dramas - is because the characters in these movies are not one dimensional - they cannot be labelled simply in terms of white and black - or good or evil. All of them have a shade of grey - their actions are dictated by the circumstances they are in - in this respect they are very human. But then some of the dark characters listed above have this other-worldly attribute to them. They don't seem to be part of this world we live in - in that sense they are mystical. I wonder if that is one of the reasons, viewers are often awed by them. I've written about the character of Grenouille from the movie Perfume... in an earlier post. If judged solely based on his acts, his character is dark. But then if one considers his motivation for his actions, which was his obsession with capturing the perfect fragrance, it's hard to be certain anymore - more so because the though processes of these characters are so extreme from what we see in everyday life. They can't be judged purely in terms of "good" or "evil", because for that - to steal a quote from Morgan Freeman who says this about another famous villain in The Shawshank Redemption - "you have to be human first. They don't qualify."
Ironically, these characters remind me of the villains in the Bollywood movies of the 90s. The only difference was that in the case of the latter, the villains usually had funny names like Mogambo (Mr. India), Dr. Dang (Karma) and made cliched statements. They were opaque characters with no background provided about them; they simply existed. But the audience remembers them for their idiosyncrasies...
