Issue Date: March 30, 2008
No Country for Old Men
A Harvard-trained hematologist on the relentlessly violent Oscar-winning best picture by the Coen brothers
Javier Bardem won the best supporting actor Oscar for his role in "No Country for Old Men." The DVD, out now, is available on Blu-ray Disc.
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The Plot
The Academy Award-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel about a good old boy, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who comes across more than $2 million at the site of a heroin deal gone bad and tries to outrun a blood-thirsty sociopath, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). A third-generation sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) attempts to interfere.
Our Insider
Cynthia Dunbar is editor in chief of "Blood," a journal by the American Society of Hematology. She is the first woman to hold the position since "Blood" was published in 1946. Harvard-trained Dunbar is a hematologist at the National Institutes of Health, where she works with blood under a microscope after it is drawn from patients -- as opposed to gushing out of people, as it does in this movie.
OVERVIEW "The violence didn't bother me, but the overall darkness was a bit much. The scenes where Moss was dressing his wounds and the blood in the bathtub were visually arresting but lasted too long. And the last quarter of the movie was confusing."
WALKING WOUNDED "I liked the scene where Chigurh blew up the car and went to the pharmacy. You're worried he's going to hurt the pharmacists, but he just wanted to distract everyone with an explosion so he could get the medical supplies he needed. It seemed realistic for him to still be walking around [after getting shot in an earlier scene] -- a guy who was completely crazed probably had the world's highest pain threshold."
THE GRISLY OSCAR SEASON (i.e., "There Will Be Blood," "Sweeney Todd") "I don't think there was a plot to include lots of blood in movies this season. We haven't been doing product placement. But we'd be happy if anyone ever had a hematologist in a movie. People don't really understand the field. We see patients with blood diseases, write scientific papers on blood and experiment in the lab trying to understand how the bone marrow makes blood. Even though blood may not seem aesthetically pleasing shooting out of people, under the microscope, it's very visual, especially if you stain the cells with different dyes."
-- Melanie D.G. Kaplan
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