Interview. Tommy Lee Jones.

Cormac McCarthy is "our best living prose stylist," Tommy Lee Jones tells Sean Axmaker. And he'd know. After all, the Oscar-winning actor graduated from Harvard with a degree in literature. What's more, he's sure McCarthy's Blood Meridian "would make a terrific movie."

For now, though, following his widely praised performance in In the Valley of Elah, Jones is starring in an adaptation of another McCarthy novel, the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men. And planning to direct an adaptation of another great writer, too.

There are, of course, already plenty of reviews of No Country out there. First there was the round from Cannes; then, Toronto and New York. The latest:

Updated through 11/9.

"The travesty of recent years (how much would you pay not to watch Intolerable Cruelty or The Ladykillers again?) is all but wiped out by the new film, although, as with those two fumbles at comedy, there remains a nagging sense that the Coens are not so much investing their emotions in a cinematic genre—in this case, the Western revenge drama—as picking it up, inspecting it, and then setting themselves the task of constructing a perfect copy," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

"It's a near masterpiece," writes David Edelstein in New York.

"I've seen over 80 new releases in the five months since I saw No Country For Old Men at this year's Cannes Film Festival, including fine works by directors like Steven Soderbergh, Michael Winterbottom and Abel Ferrara," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "But none has stayed as fresh in my memory - or, hell, just straight-up kicked as much ass - as the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men."

A ricochet at Reverse Shot. At the NYFF, Michael Joshua Rowin was glad to see the Coen Brothers "back," but Andrew Tracy is less enthusiastic: "Making a superior thriller is no mean feat, but to burden it with assertively existential meaning takes more than merely a dab hand. The Coens, whose technical aptitude has never been in doubt but whose artistic depth frequently has, have accordingly been led into something of a self-defeating enterprise. In a genre which depends upon expected moments of unexpectedness, they've foregrounded the mechanism but are patently unable to endow it with McCarthy's mystical fatalism."

Updates, 11/6: "The mechanics of No Country for Old Men recall those of a vintage film noir—as gripping and mordantly funny a treatise on the corrosive power of greed as The Killing and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre were before it," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "In terms of filmmaking and storytelling craft, it is a work destined to be studied in film schools for generations to come, from the threatening beauty of cinematographer Roger Deakins's O'Keeffe-like images to what is surely the most pulse-raising scene of motel-room suspense since Marion Crane took her fateful shower."

"The term 'return to form' may be overused, but it certainly applies to... No Country for Old Men - in its visual economy, maddeningly beautiful symmetry, and eccentric mundanity the film is a reminder of why the Coens were initially tagged as wunderkinds," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "It's easy to derive pleasure from the Hitchcockian virtuosity of No Country's mouse-trap set-ups, but the sweet surprise here is that Joel and Ethan Coen, genre vagabonds and occasional wise-asses who had been stuck in a rut as of late, have shot their latest film through with palpable, evocative melancholy and purpose."

Updates, 11/7: "Tommy Lee Jones will co-host the Nobel Peace Prize concert for former Vice President Al Gore - his roommate at Harvard University - and representatives from the United Nations' climate change panel," reports the AP.

"No Country for Old Men is the kind of film that will only cement the opinion you already have about its uniquely eccentric makers," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "Approach the ticket booth accordingly."

"Stripped of fancy editing and visual high jinks, devoid of a musical score, consisting of long shots of desolate Texas badlands and close-ups of equally weather-battered faces, No Country for Old Men is the brothers at their most polished, austere, and humorless," writes Peter Keough. Also in the Boston Phoenix, Keough's interview with Josh Brolin.

Updates, 11/8: "When it came time to cast a small but pivotal role... - a down-home West Texas trailer park housewife who serves as one of the cerebral thriller's moral compass points - the Coen brothers did what any self-respecting oddball auteurs of their stature would do," writes Chris Lee in the LAT. "The Oscar-winning writer-directors chose an actress whose native accent is as diametrically opposite the written character's laconic Texan drawl as just about any in the English-speaking world: Glasgow, Scotland-native Kelly Macdonald."

"This is the Coens' first crime movie since they began to master the medium, and the way No Country morphs from noir into contemporary-western moral struggle makes it deeper, funnier and even stranger than Fargo, their 1996 hit," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "You know what national cataclysm happened since then, so it should be no surprise that the Coens have made a crime movie that seems quietly aghast at the likelihood of death and menace occurring on American soil. Unlike American Gangster's sensationalized crap, this is a crime movie/western exercise that contemporizes the miasma of a world at war."

"It's also, since Fargo, the movie that wrestles most directly with the existence of evil," adds Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "The Coens' critics like to paint them as vapid stylists, but few American filmmakers have demonstrated their moral seriousness. No Country for Old Men is gripping and fantastically entertaining, but it's also almost unspeakably dark."

"The summative superlatives being aimed at No Country for Old Men belie the film's individual significance," writes Eric Kohn at the Reeler. "[T]he movie only shares superficial qualities with the previous work of filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. As a result, the stream of hyperbole declaring No Country to be the Coen brothers' finest accomplishment... don't do justice either to the film or its creators' oeuvre."

Updates, 11/9: "The picture of human nature in No Country for Old Men is... so bleak I wonder if it must provide for some a reassuring explanation for our defeatism and apathy in the face of atrocity," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader. "I admire the creativity and storytelling craft of the Coen brothers, but I can't for the life of me figure out what use they think they're putting that creativity and craft to. As I left the screening in Toronto, all I could think was, 'America sure loves its mass murderers.'"

"No Country for Old Men is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "For formalists - those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design - it's pure heaven.... The surprise of No Country for Old Men, the first literary adaptation these filmmakers have attempted, is how well matched their methods turn out to be with the novelist's."

"This is the rare movie so moment-to-moment riveting that you're sometimes in danger of forgetting to breathe," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve. That said, "The film's abrupt, deliberately unresolved ending, which is quite faithful to the book, comes across less here as an elegy for civilization than as a mere failure of imagination."

"The movie opens with the flat, confiding voice of Tommy Lee Jones," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "When I get the DVD of this film, I will listen to that stretch of narration several times; Jones delivers it with a vocal precision and contained emotion that is extraordinary, and it sets up the entire film, which regards a completely evil man with wonderment, as if astonished that that such a merciless creature could exist."

"Jones was born to play this kind of character, but Brolin, who has done a lot of competent, unmemorable work, makes a great leap forward, both in terms of chops and of being able to hold center screen," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "This is all the more impressive when you consider how absolutely great Bardem is."

The Coens' "adaptation is impeccable, a perfect mirror of McCarthy's prose – sparse, suspenseful, probing and profoundly disturbing," writes Rick Groen in the Globe and Mail. "In an earlier novel, ironically titled Child of God, McCarthy's portrayal of a dispossessed serial killer had a measure of empathy. But there's no empathy here, or irony either, just a paralyzing fear in the face of Chigurh's deadly menace."

"An intense, nihilistic thriller as well as a model of implacable storytelling, this is a film you can't stop watching even though you very much wish you could," writes Kenneth Turan in the LAT. "That's because No Country escorts you through a world so pitilessly bleak, "you put your soul at hazard," as one character says, to be part of it."

"The ultimate vision here is of a hard world in which civilization is the aberration, and the things we fear are always waiting for an excuse to make life normal again," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"What we have here is a classic Coen Brothers situation: like Fargo, Miller's Crossing or Blood Simple this movie is about the intrusion of hyperkinetic violence in a normally peaceful setting, a place where the inhabitants truly treasure the phlegmatic life and are profoundly puzzled by people who would disturb their peace," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "Does this make No Country for Old Men a black comedy of sorts? I suppose it does. But that's not a thought that occurs to you until the movie is over and you find yourself shaking your head and chuckling over the curiously exaggerated behavior you've just witnessed. Caught in the movie's grip, you are simply hypnotized by the damned thing."

"At first, No Country for Old Men seems like another crime story, smarter than most, filmed and acted with extra care and attention, but a crime story all the same," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "And then a shift comes - not an abrupt shift of plot or mood, but something that has been gradually built, shot by shot, scene by scene - and it begins to dawn that this is something remarkable."

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2007 9:35 AM