No Country for Old Men

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Movie
German title No Country for Old Men
Original title No Country for Old Men
No Country For Old Men Logo.png
Country of production United States
original language English , Spanish
Publishing year 2007
length 122 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 16
Rod
Director Ethan and Joel Coen
script Ethan and Joel Coen
production Ethan and Joel Coen
Scott Rudin
music Carter Burwell
camera Roger Deakins
cut Roderick Jaynes
occupation
synchronization

No Country for Old Men is an American feature film of Coen brothers from the year 2007 with Tommy Lee Jones , Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin in the lead roles. The script for the first explicit literary adaptation by the two brothers is based on Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men , which basically means “No country to grow old”, and tells of a cat and mouse game between three men after a failed drug delivery in Texas , with lots of casual murders and a bitter, resigned mood. The thriller has received numerous awards, including four Academy Awards , including Best Picture , and two Golden Globe Awards .

action

In 1980, Ed Tom Bell is the third generation sheriff in Terrell County . At a traffic stop is assassin Anton Chigurh brought to a police station. There he strangled the deputy to get out of custody. He uses a stolen patrol car to stop an uninvolved motorist and murder him in order to gain possession of his vehicle.

While hunting for pronghorns , the Vietnam War veteran Llewelyn Moss comes across the scene of a failed drug trade in which bandits shot each other in the desert . He is the only survivor to discover a wounded Mexican who is in danger of dying of thirst, a large truckload of heroin and, some distance away, another dead person next to a suitcase with two million dollars. Moss brings the suitcase home to his wife Carla Jean, not realizing that there is a tracking device in it. When Moss returns to the desert at night to bring the wounded man water because of his guilty conscience, more Mexicans appear and shoot him. Moss escapes, but has to leave his car behind. He is sure that his mark will lead the persecutors to him.

The American mafia hires the psychopathic hit man Chigurh, who prefers a nail gun and a silenced self-loading shotgun ( Remington Arms 11-87) as weapons. However, Chigurh kills his clients at the site of the failed drug deal after receiving the receiver of the tracking device. Moss sends his wife to her mother in Odessa and goes into hiding . He quartered himself in a motel, but took a second room when he saw an unknown vehicle on site. The Mexicans who located Moss and hid in his room are shot by Chigurh.

A direct meeting between Moss and Chigurh takes place that night in a hotel. This is where Chigurh locates Moss after he has been to his house. At the hotel, Chigurh opens the door to Moss' room with the bolt gun and meets Moss on the shoulder, who is waiting behind the door with his shotgun at the ready after he has discovered the tracking device. Moss then shoots at the door and is given time to escape through the window. Injured by the fall, he pulls himself up and tries to escape through the back door of the motel when Chigurh shoots him from a window and hits him in the hip. Moss stops a car in the street, the driver of which, as soon as Moss got in, is shot dead by Chigurh from a distance. Moss then steers the car from the passenger seat and drives under fire around a corner, where he drives it into parked vehicles. Chigurh approaches. Moss jumps out from behind a car he's hiding behind, hits Chigurh with a shot in the thigh, but loses sight of him.

As a diversionary maneuver, Chigurh detonates a car in front of a pharmacy in order to obtain necessary medication and to treat his gunshot wound himself. Moss throws the suitcase on the Mexican-Texan border over a fence in no man's land into a bush and is treated in a Mexican hospital for his wounds.

The mafia now instructs Carson Wells, a Vietnam veteran, contract killer and acquaintance of Chigurh, to kill him and get the money back. Wells tracks down Moss within a very short time, visits him in the hospital and offers him help against Chigurh in exchange for the suitcase of money. However, Chigurh surprises Wells at his hotel at gunpoint. Their brief conversation is interrupted by the ringing of the phone, causing Chigurh to shoot Wells. Moss answers the phone, which Chigurh picks up, probably to accept Wells' assistance. Chigurh threatens to kill Carla Jean if he does not receive the money immediately. He adds that he will kill Moss anyway; he could only save his wife. Moss does not respond and arranges to meet his wife over the phone at a motel in El Paso . When Carla Jean is accompanied by her talkative mother on the trip to El Paso, the latter unsuspectingly reveals the destination of the trip to one of the Mexican gangsters. They then seek out Moss and shoot him shortly before his wife arrives. Sheriff Bell, whom Carla has given the meeting point, sees the gangsters flee and is the first to arrive at the scene. It remains to be seen whether the Mexicans found the suitcase with the money at Moss. Bell later returns to the abandoned crime scene marked with barrier tape and ponders the lock that was cracked with a nail gun. Little does he know that Chigurh is lurking inside the door when he enters the motel room. After looking around the bathroom, his gaze falls on a coin lying in front of the open ventilation shaft. Chigurh cannot be seen and has disappeared.

Chigurh later awaits Carla Jean, who has returned from her mother's funeral, at her home and says that he promised her husband that he would kill her. She replies that he doesn't have to do it, whereupon he offers her to toss a coin. In the same way, he had already offered this to an uninvolved gas station attendant, and he won the bet. But Jean insists that he should make the decision himself. Their fate remains uncertain for the viewer; on leaving the house, however, Chigurh checks the soles of his feet, as he has done after other murders so as not to leave any traces of blood. A few moments later, Chigurh is involved in a car accident. He sustained an open arm fracture, but was able to leave the scene of the accident before the police even arrived.

At the end of the film, Sheriff Bell, who has since retired, has a conversation with his wife. He tells her about his dreams of the last night: His late father, who was also a sheriff, gave him money in a dream on the street and rode a horse up a snow-covered mountain path. In silence he carried a horn that was filled with embers “as bright as the moon” to the mountain top. The story follows the beginning of the film: the sheriff tells from the off about the good old and the bad new times of his work: “No country for old men”.

production

Filming took place in New Mexico and Texas . The Spaniard Javier Bardem tried very hard to speak as accent-free as possible so as not to sound exotic or to be confused with the Mexicans. Production costs were estimated at 25 million US dollars .

The background music usually used in thrillers and other cinema productions was almost completely dispensed with. Only in a few short scenes were soft continuous tones played. The title track for the film, Blood Trails , was recorded by The London Film Score Orchestra and can be heard in the credits. The absence of background music increases the effect of the sound design .

The film celebrated its world premiere in May 2007 as a competition entry at the Cannes International Film Festival. It was presented at a film festival in Naples on June 13, 2007 , and in October it was shown at the Viennale . The film was released in Germany on February 28, 2008. The film was first shown on German free-to-air television on March 28, 2011 on ZDF from 10:15 pm.

Anton Chigurh's use of the Remington 11-87 weapon is an anachronism , as the film is set in 1980 and the weapon was not released until 1987.

synchronization

The film was dubbed based on a dialogue book by Klaus Bickert and directed by Frank Schaff .

role Actress German dubbing voice
Llewelyn Moss Josh Brolin Klaus-Dieter Klebsch
Anton Chigurh Javier Bardem Thomas Petruo
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell Tommy Lee Jones Ronald Nitschke
Carson Wells Woody Harrelson Thomas Nero Wolff
Carla Jean Moss Kelly Macdonald Maria Koschny
Deputy Wendell Garret Dillahunt Olaf Reichmann
Loretta Bell Tess Harper Astrid Bless
Ellis Barry Corbin Horst lamp
Wells client Stephen Root Engelbert von Nordhausen

reception

The film grossed $ 171.6 million in cinemas worldwide.

English language review

Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times of November 8, 2007 that this film by the Coen brothers was as good as their earlier work Fargo and combined elements of a thriller with a character study, with Chigurh being completely inexplicable. The film is a "masterful evocation of time, place, character", ethical decisions, human nature and fate . Ebert praised the camera work, the editing and the film music. It is a “miracle” to make such a film.

Todd McCarthy wrote in Variety magazine on May 18, 2007 that the film was an example of the coincidence of a good original with the talent of filmmakers (“ 'No Country for Old Men' reps a superior match of source material and filmmaking talent ”) . The Coen brothers treated the novel with respect, but not slavishly. The result is one of the best films that contains a lot of melancholy and “very, very black humor”.

Richard Corliss from Time magazine (May 18, 2007 issue) saw suspense scenes as taut as they are acutely observed in the film .

Geoff Andrew described the film in Time Out London on January 14, 2008 as "frighteningly intelligent and resourceful". The film contains some of the Coen brothers' "constant motifs" such as violence, masculinity and "bizarre characters". The film is the brothers' “bloodiest” film so far.

German language criticism

A classic from the start and the best film by the Coen brothers since Fargo is No Country For Old Men, praised Jan Schulz-Ojala from Tagesspiegel . His colleague from the Frankfurter Rundschau , Daniel Kothenschulte , described the work as a “splendid specimen”, the best and most accessible of all Coen films. According to world critic Matthias Heine, the Coens had found their way back to their old quality and enriched the literary model with black humor. "If there is a literary film adaptation at all that improves its original by condensing it, it is probably this one," said Tobias Kniebe from the Süddeutsche Zeitung . With everything it is uncertain whether the Coens have anything to say at all. The taz reviewer Andreas Busche gave a similar judgment. From a “rather inferior novel”, the Coens have made “their densest film to date because it is formally unfussy”, which will go down in film history as “a shining example of a neo-noir western that, despite all its value, does not offer any moral certainties.” Holger Römers wrote in the film service that this was "the most mature film by the Coen brothers and perhaps their first that, after enjoying the formal brilliance, leaves no impression of emptiness."

Despite a few grotesque punchlines, No Country For Old Men is not a funny film, but rather a "terrific dark epic". The dense atmosphere and the brilliant staging were praised; every detail gets the time it takes. Schulz-Ojala gave the narrative style precise and concentrated; the Coens don't seem to be driving the plot forward and still keep the audience under their spell for the entire length of the film. "In its quietest moments [the film] begins to boom as eerily as only the silence can boom." The enormous tension was mentioned several times. The Coens, according to Kothenschulte, “play Hitchcock on their keyboard like Rubinstein played Chopin . It's in their blood. ”According to Kniebe, the dialogues were among the best that film art had to offer for a long time. The achievements in camera and editing were also mentioned.

The familiarity that the Texan landscape usually evokes in cinema gives way to a fundamental discomfort. The end, a “wonderfully vile volte”, let the audience's expectations run wild. No Country For Old Men becomes a special film because of the uncompromising, unwavering path to destruction. The work is "like looking into an abyss - and it throws us right into it."

Busche found Tommy Lee Jones "terribly weathered". The actor embodies once again the form “of a positive conservatism meanwhile in a similarly authoritarian way as the late Eastwood.” But by far the most critical interest aroused the character of Anton Chigurh played by Javier Bardem. This is a memorable figure, a “fighting dog in human form” who exerts a “sinister fascination”. Is he an “emissary of the devil”, a “devil” and “ultra psychopath”, “half human, half divine, utterly fatal”, an “incarnation of groundless and limitless violence”, “evil personified” or the "Lacony Personified"? Kniebe referred to him as the “other”, which one cannot necessarily call evil because it moves outside of moral conceptions. “The other thing in this film is a power that you can't win against, with which you can't even negotiate - and that's the most terrifying thing in a world where everything else is only a question of price.” For Patrick Seyboth from epd Film moves Bardem's character "on a fine line between abyssalness and bizarre", but the actor succeeds in lending depth to the basically artificial figure, so that the bizarre does not relieve us of the horror through comedy, but reinforces it. Bardem's unusual appearance emphasizes his threat, and his ridiculous appearance is a brilliant solution for the embodiment of the "other". The critics referred above all to his “ Prinz Eisenherz ” or “ Günter Netzer hairstyle”. He plays oppressively minimalist and, along with other good actors, is the greatest attraction of the film.

Awards

Javier Bardem and the Coen brothers at the screening of the film in Cannes

The film was shown at the 2007 Cannes International Film Festival in the competition for the Palme d'Or . At the Satellite Awards 2007 , the film won the award in the categories of Best Picture (Drama) and Best Director; He was also nominated for a Satellite Award for script, editing and portrayal by Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem. The National Board of Review awarded No Country for Old Men 2007 awards for Best Picture , Best Acting Company, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The film won the 2007 New York Film Critics Circle Award in four categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem). He won the 2007 Chicago Film Critics Association Award in the same four categories . Roger Deakins received another nomination for camera work. The film, directors, and Javier Bardem won the 2007 Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Award. The film, the director, Javier Bardem and Roger Deakins won the 2007 Florida Film Critics Circle Award.

The film was nominated in four categories at the 2008 Golden Globe Awards and won two awards: Javier Bardem for Best Supporting Actor and the Coen Brothers for Best Screenplay . The nine nominations for the BAFTA Awards in 2008 include those in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones and Kelly Macdonald). The screenwriters were nominated for the 2008 Writers Guild of America Award .

At the 14th Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony on January 27, 2008, the film received the award for the best actor ensemble in the film category. Both Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem were nominated for best supporting actor in the film category - the award went to the latter.

The 28th London Critics' Circle Film Award 2008 won the award for Best Film of 2007.

The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards in 2008, of which it won four: Best Picture , Best Director , Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem), and Best Adapted Screenplay . He was also nominated in the categories of Best Cinematography , Best Editing , Best Sound and Best Sound Editing .

The sound design of the film was nominated for two Golden Reel Awards .

In 2016, No Country for Old Men ranked tenth in a BBC poll of the 100 most important films of the 21st century .

The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating “particularly valuable”.

literature

source rating
Rotten tomatoes
critic
audience
Metacritic
critic
audience
IMDb

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for No Country for Old Men . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , January 2008 (PDF; test number: 112 948 K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for No Country for Old Men . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ a b c Matthias Heine: A killer film is the Oscar favorite . In: Die Welt , February 6, 2008, p. 28 Online
  4. ↑ a b c Heiko Rosner: No Country For Old Men . In: Cinema No. 3/2008, pp. 46-47. When accessed on March 29, 2011, the text matched the printed version.
  5. ↑ Jannis Schakarian: That means the end of "No Country for Old Men". In: netzfeuilleton.de. November 20, 2018, accessed on January 28, 2020 (German).
  6. ^ Filming locations for No Country for Old Men
  7. ↑ Javier Bardem in conversation with Focus , February 25, 2008, pp. 76–78: The violence in person
  8. ↑ german.IMDB.com: Box office / business for No Country for Old Men , accessed October 3, 2008
  9. ^ Opening dates for No Country for Old Men
  10. ↑ Kino.de and Film.tv .
  11. ↑ Retrieved June 27, 2014 / NRA Museum
  12. ↑ No Country for Old Men. In: synchronkartei.de. German dubbing file , accessed on March 2, 2017 .
  13. ↑ Box office results for No Country for Old Men , accessed October 3, 2008
  14. ^ Film review by Roger Ebert , accessed January 21, 2008
  15. ↑ Todd McCarthy film review , accessed May 21, 2007
  16. ^ Richard Corliss, Mary Corliss: Three Twisty Delights. In: Time . May 18, 2007, accessed April 30, 2008 .
  17. ^ Geoff Andrew's film review , accessed October 13, 2008
  18. ↑ a b c d Jan Schulz-Ojala: heads or tails . In: Der Tagesspiegel . February 26, 2008, p. 21 ( online [accessed March 7, 2016]).
  19. ↑ a b c d e Daniel Kothenschulte : The imagination is colder than death . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , February 27, 2008, p. 29
  20. ↑ a b c d e Tobias Kniebe : Evil and the bolt gun . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 27, 2008
  21. ↑ a b c d Andreas Busche: The only thing that remains for men . In: Die tageszeitung , February 27, 2008, p. 15
  22. ↑ a b Holger Römers: No Country For Old Men . In: film-dienst No. 5/2008, pp. 28–29
  23. ↑ a b c d e f g Alexandra Seitz: No mercy for poor dogs . In: Ray , No. 3/2008
  24. ↑ a b c d Lars-Olav Beier: What was left of the killing . In: Der Spiegel . No. 9 , 2008, p. 156 ( online [accessed March 7, 2016]).
  25. ↑ a b c d Patrick Seyboth: No Country For Old Men . In: epd Film No. 3/2008, p. 37
  26. ^ No Country for Old Men in German Film and Media Rating
  27. ↑ a b country fo at Rotten Tomatoes , accessed on October 31, 2014
  28. ↑ a b [1] at Metacritic , accessed on October 31, 2014
  29. ↑ No Country for Old Men in the Internet Movie Database (English)