No Movie for Loud Men

The latest Coen brothers' feature, No Country for Old Men, is getting a lot of awards buzz, and I think it's well deserved. I really liked it in the theater, and the more I thought about it afterwards, the more I retroactively enjoyed it. Today, I read this article that explains part of why the film is so effective: it's the way the Coens use sound, or rather, silence.

Here's its description of the most memorable scene:

"There is at least one sequence in “No Country for Old Men” that could be termed Hitchcockian in its virtuosic deployment of sound. Holed up in a hotel room, Mr. Brolin’s character awaits the arrival of his pursuer, Chigurh. He hears a distant noise (meant to be the scrape of a chair, Mr. Berkey said). He calls the lobby. The rings are audible through the handset and, faintly, from downstairs. No one answers. Footsteps pad down the hall. The beeps of Chigurh’s tracking device increase in frequency. Then there is a series of soft squeaks — only when the sliver of light under the door vanishes is it clear that a light bulb has been carefully unscrewed."

The reference to Hitchcock is apt. I knew exactly what was going to happen in this scene, and yet I was still completely on the edge of my seat. Another good comparison is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick builds the tension to an amazing degree scenes in which the astronauts are maneuvering outside their ship, by using utter silence or limiting the sound to the astronauts' breathing and a slight hissing of the air system. It seems to last forever, and it underscores the coldness and emptiness of space, which reminds the viewer (although subtly) of the danger they're witnessing. Similarly, he focuses for an uncomfortably long amount of time on the readout monitors on the hibernation pods, when HAL is slowly killing the astronauts inside, and all you hear is a persistent, manic beeping. It's one of the creepiest things I've ever seen in a movie. You can get a feel for it here, but it loses something on the small screen.