As the Coen brothers' Oscar-winning 'No Country for Old Men' arrives on DVD, we celebrate two of America's most original filmmaking voices

By Richard T. Jameson
Special to MSN Movies

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There are hundreds of things thrillingly right with "No Country for Old Men," the Oscar-winning film from Joel and Ethan Coen, and the temptation to describe a few dozen of them must be resisted at this time. But let's allow ourselves just one, from early in the movie.

A Texan named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) has left his trailer-park home in the middle of the night, climbed into his pickup, and driven to a remote area where, the previous day, he happened upon a grisly scene. Moss pulls his truck right up onto the rim overlooking the place, gets out, and starts walking down into the gully where the bad thing happened.

Never mind what he's up to, especially since he may not be entirely sure himself. He's come to a lonely and dangerous location where a shocking number of people got themselves killed, and as he descends, somehow it matters that the filmmakers keep his truck in view behind him, crisply silhouetted on the rim. It's a small thing, but so satisfying. It means that whatever happens down below, Moss still has a way out, a way back to the rest of the world.

But it also means more, is more. Just the sight of the truck is peculiarly thrilling. The truck is unquestionably real, not a special effect, yet there's a preternatural vividness about its stark black outline against the charcoal night sky. Cinematically, it's too good to be just a truck -- it's the corner of a pattern yet to be disclosed. And a minute later, after Moss has discovered a gruesome new dimension to the scene in the gully, he looks back up at the rim and sees that alongside the truck's silhouette is that of another vehicle. And the silhouettes of men who now almost certainly will come to kill him.

The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, have made 12 feature films in twice that many years. Some of them are movies to which people return again and again, and carry pieces of in their memory and nerve ends. Several of them no sane person would revisit except under duress. But all are uniquely and unmistakably theirs. These films transcend genres, categories, even separation into comedies and dramas. They're Coen pictures, transpiring in a world all their own.

And yet the Coens and their films address, sometimes exhilaratingly, the world we all share. More to the point, they create occasions where mundane world and movie world intersect to our shivery satisfaction.

Consider their debut, that first, still-bounteous toy box of tension and delight, "Blood Simple" (1984). It has a good story to tell -- and tells it impeccably deadpan -- about a wife in a Texas town that seems to be all edge-of-town, and the tavern-owner husband she doesn't love anymore, and the man she wants to be with instead, and a grinning, resourceful lump of lard who's a private detective with a private agenda. The situation plays out in two-hander scenes with twists that take your breath away, before you can decide whether you were going to use that breath to gasp or guffaw. But "Blood Simple" is also the movie that vouchsafes these special pleasures:

• A point-of-view shot through the windshield of a car driving down a country road; a flock of birds, in a field off to the right, suddenly taking flight, rising, and crossing the road; the car reaching and passing through that spot at just the moment the shadows of their vanished wings flicker across our vision ...
• Two deliciously paranoid details to harass a man on an isolated road at night with a body to bury: the scraping, demented music of a shovel being dragged along the blacktop; and the headlights of a vehicle, beyond the horizon yet unavoidably approaching, sending their rays high into the night ...
• Camera tracking smoothly down the length of a saloon bar, a familiar bit of movie choreography that's about to be scuttled by the tipped-forward upper body of a drunk -- until the camera simply lifts, passes over the obstacle, and settles back down to bar-top level to continue its fluid itinerary ...

That last one is a self-conscious moviemaking joke (at which audiences invariably chuckle conspiratorially). The others almost could be found art, shards of experience and texture glimpsed where they lay. What all share is the joy of, "We get to do this" -- to put into a film the kind of accidental, trivial, evanescent, but piercingly evocative detail we've all noticed, while walking along a lane or registering the tricks of perspective when looking out of a moving vehicle, and thought, "Somebody ought to put that in a movie sometime."

The Coens put stuff like that in movies all the time. That's one of the best reasons for valuing them, and for not being stampeded by those critics -- professional and amateur -- who decry them as heartless ironists and mere connoisseurs of the grotesque.

Then again, "the critics" have sometimes been startlingly obtuse about what a couple of serious stylists might be up to. A lot of them looked at "Miller's Crossing" (1990), the brothers' third movie, and saw only a shell game, an imitation old-fashioned gangster movie by a couple of smart postmoderns. A few others (and legions of subsequent viewers on video and DVD) saw a film of uncommon beauty and power -- the best picture of 1990.

Among other things, "Miller's Crossing" is a reverent, rigorous reimagining of the world of Dashiell Hammett (especially "The Glass Key" and "Red Harvest"). Hammett's hard land is no country for sentimentalists, and a great deal of the movie's lighting, staging, and narrative reticence is dedicated to defining the character and existential principles of its protagonist, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), as a man who must conceal his deepest feelings at all cost. The cunning right hand of Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney), the political and underworld power broker of their mythical "Eastern city in the United States, toward the end of the 1920s," Tom has to look out for Leo's interests when the boss' brashness may be his own worst enemy -- though the field is crowded in that town. He also has to conceal he's the lover of the very woman Leo, an aging boy, has fallen in love with. Tom's being torn apart inside, and he can never, ever let it show for one second, up to the very last shot of the film.

That doesn't sound like a frivolous agenda, for a proto-gangster or a couple of filmmakers. As it happens, the two (three) have something in common. For the Coens, "Miller's Crossing" first stirred to life with the image of a black hat landing in a forest clearing, then sailing away down an avenue of trees. That image supplies the movie's title shot, and later Tom describes something like it as part of a dream he's had. Well might he dream of a hat: His own is a constant, signatory presence, even when he's not wearing it, and he lives in the shadow of its brim. For their part, the filmmakers began with the enigma of the hat and then dreamed a world and a story to contain it. Contain it, not explain it.

For the world of their next picture, the Coens moved deeper into their collective imagination -- indeed, made the writerly imagination their overt subject. "Barton Fink" (1991) tells of a smug playwright of the social-realist strain (very like Clifford Odets, and brilliantly played by John Turturro) brought to Hollywood around 1940 to hammer out a script for a schlocky studio boss (Harry Cohn aspiring to be Louis B. Mayer and played by Oscar-nominated Michael Lerner). He gets writer's block instead and goes certifiably nuts, with the assistance of the serial murderer next door and a demonic mosquito.

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