Lucky for Lee Marvin fans and thanks to films such as No Country for Old Men, along with movies such as The Proposition, and television shows such as Deadwood, the Western is currently undergoing something of a mini-renaissance.
Like any genre, the Western remains malleable and ubiquitous enough to reflect contemporary themes and concerns, while the elements remain the same; unshaven men baking in the desert sun, looking to kill one another for various motivations of revenge and/or justice.
In an interview with the Guardian, Ethan Coen describes the film’s relationship to the iconic Westerns of Sam Peckinpah, as “Hard men in the south-west shooting each other — that’s definitely Sam Peckinpah’s thing. We were aware of those similarities, certainly.”
But where previous Westerns revolved around a clear confrontation between good and evil, the Coen brothers’ take on this genre relates a story where the protagonist and antagonist never truly meet one another. Even tension-filled shoot-outs occur in darkened streets where Josh Brolin’s Moss and Javier Bardem’s Chigurh, wildly flail from behind parked cars and around corners, hardly glancing at the whites of anybody’s eyes.
Rather than communicating the harshness that “good” men must overcome, the bleached bone landscapes of the Southwest here convey the pitiless, ineradicable fate that shapes and pervades the drama of both hero and villain. The “sheriff,” traditionally, the vehicle for justice’s swift hand, in the personage of Tommy Lee Jones’ Ed Tom Bell, spends the opening and closing monologues lamenting his relative impotence in the face of an increasingly implacable brand of modern violence.
In essence, the Coen brothers have managed to wholly invert the Western, crafting a drama of powerlessness, where the hero’s fate rests not in his own calloused hands but on the whims of a mad man and in capricious circumstance.
Even, Lee Marvin would be screwed against Anton Chigurh.
No Country for Old Men shows tonight and Thursday at the Virginia Theatre (Randolph Street and Park Avenue). The shows start at 7 p.m. Tickets are $2 tonight and $3 on Thursday.