Miramax

So what did we all learn with the Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest opus, an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel No Country For Old Men? Well, suffice to say, along with the creative resurgence of the brothers, we get a film that’s part modern-day Western, part action, part comedy and even perhaps part-horror, but in the adoration and adulation, to want to pin the film down as something is to forget that above all else, the film is a tale about changing times, told by someone who’s seen better days and is nostalgic for them. It’s that story that seems to be ignored to a certain degree by people, which oddly enough is ironic considering the title of the film.

The story that’s pushed along by the film surrounds a drug deal where all the concerned parties were killed in cold blood. The bodies were found by Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin, Planet Terror), who also managed to find several million dollars in the vicinity. But as is the case in both movies and real life, that kind of money is not going to not be missed for long. So enter Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, Before Night Falls), a man with a mysterious past. But there are a few certainties we know about him: first, he’s hired by someone to recover the money. By whom is immaterial, though through other recollections, he’s made out to be an killer with ice-cold veins, and we find this out within the film’s first several minutes, when he kills a police deputy in a gruesome fashion at a police station. So Chigurh is after the money and, inevitably, after Moss. The crimes occur in a sleepy west Texas town whose sheriff is Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, The Fugitive), and all three men find themselves near the border in 1980, on the cusp of a serious influx of drugs to the U.S..

As you might imagine, I am often asked for my opinion on the films I see. Inevitably I’m called upon to compare the film with some other work, which is at best quite unfair and at worst simply impossible to do. But I’ve gotten good at the game. So let us play it now. We’ll call Neverwas One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest meets Alice In Wonderland. Unfair, some might say, for they are actually the very same story. When you look at it carefully enough, they really are, although important differences do exist. My point i... all of this nonsense is this: There really is a razor fine line between insanity and fantasy. Neverwas blurs this distinction to an almost indefinable difference.

When Dr. Zack Riley (Eckhart) arrived at Millford Mental Health Institute, which once housed his father, he had no idea that his journey would take him full circle to a childhood he had been running from. Zack’s father (Nolte) was the author of a famous children’s story titled Neverwas. Zack has been running from Neverwas ever since. He changed his name and refused his inheritance of the book’s royalties. Here at Millford, Zack discovers a rather remarkable patient. Gabriel (McKellen) is not only intimately familiar with Neverwas and Zack himself, but claims to be her King. Zack finds himself confronted by a place he always believed came from his father’s imagination. It’s a wonderful story with an almost magical potential. Unfortunately this film takes too long to develop and never quite hits its stride. The film travels a trail of breadcrumbs laid out in such painstakingly slow motion that it is our patience and not our imagination that is finally put to the test. Writer/directors often commit the fatal sin of overcomplicating what often plays best in simpler terms. Joshua Michael Stern is guilty of it here. The film becomes too muddled, trying to show too much history and never trusting its audience enough to find their own way. You should know this IS NOT a children’s film.