“No Country for Old Men” and “Juno”

Young Americans

“No Country for Old Men” and “Juno”

What country is the Coen brothers, or, more accurately, Cormac McCarthy, referring to? Adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from McCarthy’s novel, “No Country for Old Men” seems inhabited by plenty of old men. One such man opens the film, or at least, the voice of him does: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), his baritone accompanying a pre-dawn Texas landscape, musing about how times have changed. What exactly that change is is served right up, in the form of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). He kills four men, in memorable fashion, before we even see Bell’s face. Bardem’s haircut has suffered many a reviewer’s descrīptions; I will add mine: It looks like He-Man’s do. No matter how bad it makes Bardem look, you can’t say it doesn’t make him more unforgettable than he already is. Chigurh is a menacing — no, ghoulish — killer laying waste to the country of “No Country.” Chigurh is the Master of the Universe’s alter-ego from hell, and he’s been hired (which raises the question: Who would dare to ask him to even take out the garbage?) to retrieve some lost drug money.

That drug money has been snapped up by Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran played by Josh Brolin. In tandem with most good, honest American crime stories, “No Country” mandates that Moss is not smart nor ruthless enough to get away without being noticed. He is an average Joe, although in suggestively non-average-Joe fashion he didn’t think twice about strolling onto the scene of a drug deal gone wrong, coolly surveying the aftermath of a carnage where symbolic imagery is placed about the set like sponsored candy bars in a child’s movie — a few Latino corpses here, a dead pit bull there, a truck bed full of heroin, and a dying Mexican. He leaves the Mexican (and the heroin) and follows a blood trail to find a dead man under a tree with some spare change that he couldn’t take to the grave with him — two million dollars.

As TV game show hosts would ask, what would you do with two million dollars? If, like Moss, you live a not-altogether pleasant life in trailer with your wife, you would disappear to start anew somewhere, away from Texas. But this being a Cormac McCarthy book, the farthest that Moss goes is just across the Mexican border. For the McCarthy narrative, Texas has always been the ugly wife you can’t leave, and Mexico the even-uglier affair who made you miss your spouse. For “No Country,” McCarthy added Chigurh, your wife’s psycho brother who won’t rest until you’ve paid. With your life.

Brolin is the only one of the film’s main actors who didn’t have to take himself too seriously. Moss is really the only character who could decide anything on a whim — say, “Alright,” and resolve to go back to the crime scene with a jug of water for the dying Mexican. Only Brolin can afford to be a little lighter on the audience. Don’t get me wrong — Bardem’s performance is impressive. But if he played Chigurh with even a slight hint of gaiety I get the feeling he would throw up his arms and bitterly laugh at his coiffure. And his motif — deciding life and death on a coin toss — is the very opposite of whimsical and fatalistic to the extreme. “You've been putting it up your whole life,” he says. “You just didn’t know it.” Bell is a one-dimensional elder who has little left except his incorruptible memories. Moss is the easier-on-our-nerves guy, just the type whom we need to make a country out of “No Country,” the young man among the old men. It’s fun seeing him run. He plays a capable mouse to Chigurh’s cat, and the whole game is so thrillingly and expertly done by the Coens that you’ll really dread a fate worse than death: a third act collapse. Why stop the game three-fourths of the way? Why not keep up the suspense until we reach a climatic hell-raising battle? That’s, after all, the essence of a good crime flick or a classic western. The answer is that, as theatrical the novel is, McCarthy didn’t set out to write a screenplay. He wrote a book. And meandering monologues that wrap up books have been all the rage since “Ulysses.” Unfortunately, they don’t work so well in movies. The Coens came close to delivering a rich and gripping movie for buffs who like their action flicks soaked in a mythological aesthetic. Too bad “No Country” is a book with what you could hardly call a finale and even less of a finish. We are only left to ponder: What might have been if they’d gotten their hands on “Blood Meridian?” How would they put that hair-raising, haunting ending on screen? Would, or could, any one? All eyes look to Mr. Tommy Lee Jones, who has bought the rights to adapt the book. We could only wait.

“Juno” is an ode to single mothers. That is what hit me two-thirds of the way into the movie, as a bright-eyed Jennifer Garner, playing one-half of a well-to-do Gen-Y couple, the ones who get into The New York Times’ Vows page, looks so longingly at the bulging belly of the titled heroine that she really seems to be looking into Juno’s belly, at the son or daughter whom she wants so badly to raise. She and her husband, played by Jason Bateman, are adopting the yet-unborn baby accidentally begot by teenager Juno, played with spunk and delectable confidence by Ellen Page. That scene convinced me that Garner could be a very good actress, albeit a supporting one — she is too pretty as a leading lady, but she is utterly convincing and subtly moving in this role, tapping into the deeper, more sentimental desires of the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, than are exhibited in the other cutesy characters of the film. Juno is a cheeky 16-year-old high school girl who is too smart to be a 16-year-old high school girl. Or at least that’s what we thought, fooled by her quick-witted sarcastic remarks for everything. “You should’ve gone to China, you know, ‘cause I hear they give away babies like free iPods.” Soon we find out that she really does need some lessons on how to deal with the adult situations she finds herself in — say, pregnancy. Her sarcasm is and has been what she hides behind. This being a light-hearted comedy where there is only one type of character — an independently charming human working for the good of the movie — Juno, of course, learns to let down her guard, but not before delivering (besides an infant) dozens upon dozens of smart-ass lines like: “Excuse me, I am a sacred vessel, alright? All you’ve got in your stomach is Taco Bell.” Like 2006’s “Little Miss Sunshine,” this is a movie for our times, a thoroughly contemporary pop flick that plays up our collective quirkiness. In the middle of that lies a strongly beating feminine heart and a long-overdue breakout performance, both likely to whisk by most viewers too busy laughing along with the jokes.