Joel & Ethan Coen
Non E' Un Paese Per Vecchi

Beginning of the year. The usual wave of Hollywood films in the throes of the Oscars arrives; Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd" with his protégé Johnny Depp (and with my fellow citizen from Macerata, and Italy’s greatest production designer, Dante Ferretti), and rightly so, "No Country for Old Men," marking the return to directing by the Coen brothers.

To analyze the film, one must forget the negligible Coen comedies of the new millennium (Intolerable Cruelty, and The Ladykillers) and return to the muted tones of "Fargo", the noir of "The Man Who Wasn’t There," or the cinematic debut of the two prodigies, "Blood Simple." The novel by Cormac McCarthy from which the story is drawn seems to fit like a glove with the Coen brothers' directing technique; a grotesque staging, and at times almost humorous (or at least to me).

A realism that highlights how the greed and avarice of an ordinary man can make the situation go overboard.

Texaco, 1980. The ordinary man, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), goes hunting for pronghorns. He observes the horizon. Three battered pickups lie on the arid soil of the Texan desert. A thirsty shadow, a carcass of a rogue, and an uncountable quantity of drug bricks. It’s a deal gone south. But did Llewelyn know he would soon find a suitcase full of money? No. And this is the time bomb that will leave a trail of blood covering the entire Texas, from Texaco to Dallas, passing through Mexico. Indeed, Moss is not the only one aware of the suitcase. On his same path is also Anton Chigurh (an extraordinary Javier Bardem, but I had already praised him for The Sea Inside) who fully represents the stereotype of the mad and psychopathic killer, cold as ice. Events unfold and Llewelyn knows he's risking his life and goes on the run. Greed, cunning, and cowardice mix at the film’s peak suspense moment, the chase that drags on from hotel to hotel. Here the Coens excelled at mounting that dense psychosomatic web of characters created by McCarthy: each character is as sly as a fox: Moss, clever and skilled at hiding. An example is the scene where he talks to the motel owner: "Do you have a tent?" "What kind do you want?" "I don’t know; listen, give me the one with the most stakes" (the tent stakes would later be used to hide the loot). The law also steps in, embodied by the shrewd and alert Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones); a law that can do nothing to stop the cruel coldness of a man who does everything to prove his madness. He decides the fate of a common mortal’s life with a coin toss, invents theories that have no legs and kills people with a compressor used for slaughtering cattle. Madness? It might be madness, but this will lead him to outwit the law. The victory of evil over good. To enrich it all, the Coens inject blasts of bitter humor and cynical sarcasm ("I'm about to do something stupid but I'm going to do it anyway. If I don't come back, tell mom I love her." "But mom is dead." "Then I'll tell her myself." or "Llewelyn, I've got a bad feeling." "And I’ve got a good one so they balance each other out.")

A man chooses for better or worse and has every right to do so; but it is the craving and desire that decide. In this case, the suitcase will cost Moss and his wife their lives. The key interpretation doesn't end here, because the inhibition of the law's role is justified by the words of the two sheriffs:

Sheriff: "Always for the damn money. For money and for drugs. It goes beyond any imagination, damn it. What sense does it make? Where will we end up? If twenty years ago you had told me that one day in our Texas towns there would be kids with green hair and a bone stuck in their nose, I wouldn’t have believed you."

Bell: "Things from another world, I think that when 'thank you' and 'please' are no longer said, the end is near."

It is no longer a country for old men.