No Country for Old Men - an alternate viewpoint
I had read David's excellent review of this movie earlier. Please check out his
earlier review. I was unable to write at that time, so I am starting a new root article about it.
This movie has gotten excellent reviews and rewards from very liberal and intellectual sources in the US. It has a good shot at best film at the Academy. These people are generally not fans of the American National Rifle Association or vice versa. What are these reviewers seeing that David isn't? For certain, this
is a violent and disturbing movie. But I honestly don't think it is telling a lie, even though it is based on a novel. It is a film set in a place I am intimately familiar with: West Texas' Big Bend Country. This is a hard and forbidding
place, dry and rocky with jagged mountains. It is just the sort of place I love, but it is dangerous and needs respect if you are to survive there. THe movie
has to do with drug dealing and murder, and unspeakable cruelty. Unfortunately
, this association is true, and I have had some experience with it.
In the late 1980s I had read a shocking story in the newspapers about a man and
his young daughter found murdered near the Mexican border in a burnt out 4 wheel
drive vehicle. Apparently the foolish man had arranged a drug deal with smugglers and arranged to meet them in a very remote part of Big Bend National Park, bringing his daughter as cover so as not to fit the profile of a drug smuggler.
But the smugglers preferred to keep their drugs and take his money, and then they disposed of witnesses by burning them alive in their car. About three years later, I met a woman in a hotel just outside of the park where the murder occurred. Her name was April, the same as my daughter. It turns out she was the mother of the murdered girl and the girl's father was her ex-husband. She had come to see where her daughter was killed and to come to terms with her loss. I was with my three kids and she seemed to enjoy being with them. We spent three days
together and I took her to the fatal spot. Sharing the tragedy of this woman's
loss was very difficult, but I know she needed people to be with - she knew it was too much for one person.
So when I saw the movie that David did, I really didn't consider this entirely a
fictional tale or the cold-hearted assassin of the film to be unbelievable. The huge amounts of money associated with drug smuggling moving in dark places attracts very dark people and only fools will seek to achieve a profit by associating with them. The plot of the movie is about the futility of the young cowboy trying to make off with drug money and losing everything in the process. I've seen it happen in reality and in the very location the movie takes place, so I don
't see the movie as a plot by big corporations to plant unreasonable fears in people. We must fear those entities that put money ahead of human life. I left the movie seeing the unimaginably cruel killer as a metaphor for corporations that make money by killing people - weapons manufacturers, cigarette companies, coal companies... A big corporation is an inhuman machine that cares only about the bottom line - profits and it is relentless and uncaring in it's pursuit, just
like the assassin who brutally murders anyone who stands in his way to the lost
drug money. We have witnessed what happens when the government allows the corporations to run wild and take over a country - it is called America. How many thousands of innocents have died for the benefit of oil companies or mercenary corporations like Blackwater USA? The painful crisis that we are experiencing should serve as a lesson to China, and this scary and dark movie could be a lesson to we Americans. Maybe that is not what the filmakers were trying to say, but whatever the message, it is hard not to agree with reviewers that this is a powerful, disturbing work of film art.
I still enjoy going to West Texas and I don't have much fear when I go. That is
because I know what there is to fear and how to avoid it. I hope that China can avoid losing her soul by the soulless pursuit of pure wealth, as the hero of the movie did. If she recognizes the danger, it can be avoided.
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