No Country for Old Men
I haven’t felt much urgency about the Coen brothers for a few years: I thought The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Ladykillers were both duds (though I loved the gospel music in the latter), and I never even got around to seeing Intolerable Differences. But I was still excited about No Country for Old Men; I haven’t read the Cormac McCarthy novel, but from what I knew of it, it seemed like just the kind of thing the Coens could work well with.
Well, now I’ve seen the movie, and (a) I loved it, (b) I already want to see it again, and (c) I still suspect that it was a failure. Only the Coens can make me feel this way. The first time I saw The Big Lebowski I thought it was a mess; only on subsequent viewings did I come to see it as a masterwork. And I still flip-flop on Barton Fink; sometimes I think it’s tedious, sometimes I think it’s top-shelf Coens.
(MAJOR SPOILERS RE NO COUNTRY AHEAD)
No Country for Old Men takes place in 1980. Llewelyn (Josh Brolin), an underemployed welder, is out hunting in the Texas desert and comes across a fresh massacre – dead drug dealers, a truck full of their merchandise, and a satchel stuffed with $2-million. Being an inscrutable, morally ambiguous, old-school tough guy, he of course takes the money and runs, and soon enough Mexican drug dealers, an American fixer, and the local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) are all after him. So is a patient, slow-moving, dead-eyed psycho named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who, it’s established early on, would just as soon kill you as look at you. Ostensibly working for a druglord, Chigurh soon goes renegade and pursues the money for himself, though it’s hard to imagine what use he has for it, since he’s presented from start to finish as essentially an inhuman bogeyman.
Whatever problems anyone might have with the movie, I don’t think you can dispute that this is bravura filmmaking. The wide shots of Texas scrubland are beautiful and nerve-wracking. The pacing is genius, with contemplative stretches taut with tension and then suddenly lit by flares of violence. And during some of the suspense scenes – the best are the ones in which Chigurh stalks Llewelyn in various motels – the editing/storyboarding plays us expertly without pandering.
The movie also benefits from a certain hammy sensibility that McCarthy and the Coens apparently share. This is evident in dialogue that’s often pure cornpone: “Where’d you get that?” asks Llewelyn’s wife when she sees the money satchel. “At the getting place,” he replies. And when the sheriff’s deputy describes a crime scene as a mess, the sheriff says, “If it ain’t, it’ll do until the real mess gets here.” Also shamelessly theatrical is Chigurh’s weapon of choice: a compressed-air-powered cattle-killing machine that’s good for blowing off door locks and punching holes in human skulls. These little corny touches are cool with me; they all somehow work within the universe the movie creates for itself.
And there’s nothing hammy about the photography or direction: as the chase continues and the bodies pile up, the camera registers it all with a careful, dispassionate gaze, observing and missing nothing. (Except for a snatch of mariachi music in a scene in Mexico, there’s not one note of music on the soundtrack until the closing credits.)
For me, the trouble starts in the last quarter of the movie, when the storytelling suddenly gets diffuse. Until now, the movie has shown you what’s happening with great patience and care, even if the meaning behind what’s happening isn’t always clear. But suddenly, major events are treated as afterthoughts, the pivotal character (Llewelyn) is unceremoniously dispensed with offscreen in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, and it’s not always clear what’s even happening. I don’t mind elliptical, and I like movies that leave room for ambiguity, but it does seem like a jarring turn in a movie that’s been so methodical for its first 90 minutes.
Also in the last half-hour, the Tommy Lee Jones character is meant to emerge as the moral centre of a film that previously didn’t have one. But for me, at least, that doesn’t take – they haven’t done enough with him for his character to carry that weight. If anything, in his early scenes the sheriff seems complacent, albeit kindly and trustworthy. And even the meaty scenes Jones gets late in the film somehow don’t connect, or at least they didn’t for me.
Indeed, if they did, I suspect you wouldn’t have some critics complaining about the apparent nihilism in No Country for Old Men. I don’t buy that myself: the sheriff’s closing musings are clearly supposed to represent a howl at the meaninglessness and cruelty of the world. Switch tragedy for comedy, and it’s the flipside of the Cowboy’s speech at the end of The Big Lebowski about “the way the whole durned human comedy keeps on perpetuating itself.”
But if, as the movie moves toward its close, we’re supposed to start caring instead of just observing, why does the movie itself seem to care about its characters less?
On the other hand, it may be that that’s the real genius of No Country for Old Men: as we (theoretically) start to care, to move beyond being titillated and awaken our own sense of morality and wonder how it can possibly fit into this blood-soaked world the Coens are showing us, the camera itself suddenly gets queasy, turning away, unwilling to look on so coldly as Llewelyn meets his fate (and his wife meets hers).
Even if that was the aim, though, I’m still not convinced they pulled it off, again because of the failure of the sheriff character to resonate. But who knows – I still look forward to seeing it all again in the not-too-distant future.
Well, now I’ve seen the movie, and (a) I loved it, (b) I already want to see it again, and (c) I still suspect that it was a failure. Only the Coens can make me feel this way. The first time I saw The Big Lebowski I thought it was a mess; only on subsequent viewings did I come to see it as a masterwork. And I still flip-flop on Barton Fink; sometimes I think it’s tedious, sometimes I think it’s top-shelf Coens.
(MAJOR SPOILERS RE NO COUNTRY AHEAD)
No Country for Old Men takes place in 1980. Llewelyn (Josh Brolin), an underemployed welder, is out hunting in the Texas desert and comes across a fresh massacre – dead drug dealers, a truck full of their merchandise, and a satchel stuffed with $2-million. Being an inscrutable, morally ambiguous, old-school tough guy, he of course takes the money and runs, and soon enough Mexican drug dealers, an American fixer, and the local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) are all after him. So is a patient, slow-moving, dead-eyed psycho named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who, it’s established early on, would just as soon kill you as look at you. Ostensibly working for a druglord, Chigurh soon goes renegade and pursues the money for himself, though it’s hard to imagine what use he has for it, since he’s presented from start to finish as essentially an inhuman bogeyman.
Whatever problems anyone might have with the movie, I don’t think you can dispute that this is bravura filmmaking. The wide shots of Texas scrubland are beautiful and nerve-wracking. The pacing is genius, with contemplative stretches taut with tension and then suddenly lit by flares of violence. And during some of the suspense scenes – the best are the ones in which Chigurh stalks Llewelyn in various motels – the editing/storyboarding plays us expertly without pandering.
The movie also benefits from a certain hammy sensibility that McCarthy and the Coens apparently share. This is evident in dialogue that’s often pure cornpone: “Where’d you get that?” asks Llewelyn’s wife when she sees the money satchel. “At the getting place,” he replies. And when the sheriff’s deputy describes a crime scene as a mess, the sheriff says, “If it ain’t, it’ll do until the real mess gets here.” Also shamelessly theatrical is Chigurh’s weapon of choice: a compressed-air-powered cattle-killing machine that’s good for blowing off door locks and punching holes in human skulls. These little corny touches are cool with me; they all somehow work within the universe the movie creates for itself.
And there’s nothing hammy about the photography or direction: as the chase continues and the bodies pile up, the camera registers it all with a careful, dispassionate gaze, observing and missing nothing. (Except for a snatch of mariachi music in a scene in Mexico, there’s not one note of music on the soundtrack until the closing credits.)
For me, the trouble starts in the last quarter of the movie, when the storytelling suddenly gets diffuse. Until now, the movie has shown you what’s happening with great patience and care, even if the meaning behind what’s happening isn’t always clear. But suddenly, major events are treated as afterthoughts, the pivotal character (Llewelyn) is unceremoniously dispensed with offscreen in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, and it’s not always clear what’s even happening. I don’t mind elliptical, and I like movies that leave room for ambiguity, but it does seem like a jarring turn in a movie that’s been so methodical for its first 90 minutes.
Also in the last half-hour, the Tommy Lee Jones character is meant to emerge as the moral centre of a film that previously didn’t have one. But for me, at least, that doesn’t take – they haven’t done enough with him for his character to carry that weight. If anything, in his early scenes the sheriff seems complacent, albeit kindly and trustworthy. And even the meaty scenes Jones gets late in the film somehow don’t connect, or at least they didn’t for me.
Indeed, if they did, I suspect you wouldn’t have some critics complaining about the apparent nihilism in No Country for Old Men. I don’t buy that myself: the sheriff’s closing musings are clearly supposed to represent a howl at the meaninglessness and cruelty of the world. Switch tragedy for comedy, and it’s the flipside of the Cowboy’s speech at the end of The Big Lebowski about “the way the whole durned human comedy keeps on perpetuating itself.”
But if, as the movie moves toward its close, we’re supposed to start caring instead of just observing, why does the movie itself seem to care about its characters less?
On the other hand, it may be that that’s the real genius of No Country for Old Men: as we (theoretically) start to care, to move beyond being titillated and awaken our own sense of morality and wonder how it can possibly fit into this blood-soaked world the Coens are showing us, the camera itself suddenly gets queasy, turning away, unwilling to look on so coldly as Llewelyn meets his fate (and his wife meets hers).
Even if that was the aim, though, I’m still not convinced they pulled it off, again because of the failure of the sheriff character to resonate. But who knows – I still look forward to seeing it all again in the not-too-distant future.
posted by DW | 11.11.07
4 Comments:
Llewelyn dies "offstage" in the book, too, and for me, that's part of McCarthy's entire point: in the morally vacuous world of the story, it doesn't matter that you've come to care about this character and his plight, that you authentically want him to find a way out of the dilemma he's created for himself: he's going to die, and he's going to die offstage. And there's nothing anyone can do to change that.
In the book, it's also a bit of a bait-and-switch, of the kind that Hitchcock pulled in Psycho. See, McCarthy seems to be saying, all this time I've convinced you that the story is about Moss, but it's not, it's about the sheriff. In the book, Llewelyn's death occurs about two thirds of the way through, so there's more that comes after it than there is in the film. However, I give the Coens credit for dramatizing (or not dramatizing) this moment in a way that's deliberately, almost defiantly anti-Hollywood.
For my money, No Country For Old Men is not just the best American film of the year, it's one of the great American films, period.
Hey Steven,
> In the book, it's also a bit of a bait-and-switch, of the kind that Hitchcock pulled in Psycho. See, McCarthy seems to be saying, all this time I've convinced you that the story is about Moss, but it's not, it's about the sheriff.
I'm totally down with that -- I just felt like (in the movie, anyway) the treatment of the sheriff character didn't step up and justify that switch.
> For my money, No Country For Old Men is not just the best American film of the year, it's one of the great American films, period.
I still wouldn't rule out thinking the same thing myself after seeing it a couple more times....
Did you eventually see this a second time, as you suggested you might? I was on an expedition to find some groceries last night and -- noticing that the theatre next door to my local Dominion was just about to begin a showing of the film -- I took a chance on it. Not a big chance, mind you; it was Two Toonie Tuesday. I'm confident that I got my money's worth, but the movie's not really about anything, is it? I mean, you're not *supposed* to understand it, right? Each of the important characters seriously misconstrues his situation, except for Ed Bell, who kinda gives up trying to understand. Moss believes that he's locked in a mano-a-mano conflict with Anton, and tragically ignores the threat posed by the legion of anonymous Mexican gangsters. Anton seems to be in control of things, but that's only because he has invented for himself a bunch of comforting but insane superstitions. The only character who really seems to know what's going on is Moss' widow, who calls bullshit on the mysticism surrounding Anton's coin toss schtick.
Is it just a picture of the inscrutibility of everything? Is there anything to really understand?
If I had to write an essay analyzing the movie, I might say that it's about how people try to understand the world by working with mental models that resemble traditional story structures (particularly old westerns, in this case). And how life doesn't conform to those structures. And how excessive reliance on those inadequate models can cause individuals and -- more broadly -- their governments to make really stupid mistakes. I don't really believe that, though. I just think that the movie doesn't want to be understood, and that I'd probably be falling into some kind of trap if I tried to explain it.
I'm usually very squeamish and have a hard time watching violent movies, but this one wasn't a problem for me. I'm not sure why. My guess is that the killing is so clinical that it doesn't feel sadistic. When a film expects its audience to take prurient delight in gore, I'm repulsed. Somehow, the cold dispassion of the killing in this movie makes it OK. I'm not sure this an admirable aspect of my character.
They showed a trailer for the ATONEMENT movie last night. How could this possibly be anything other than a terrible movie? I'd think that a novel that is more-or-less about writing would resist adaptation to film.
I loved the bait-and-switch as you called it. It was indeed very anti-hollywood for the film to simply forget about its apparent protagonist. I agree that that’s the point: this nihilistic world cares nothing for character, for the individual. However, considered conventionally in terms of the film’s construction, Jones’ voice-over across the opening montage signalled that he has a certain authority over the ultimate “meaning” of the film, he is its central consciousness or understander. We just forget that when Llewelyn’s story gets underway. Jones has the perspective provided by historical knowledge of the place.
But nihilism isn’t quite right. I haven’t read much McCarthy but what I took from Blood Meridian is that he is a kind of gnostic. Creation itself is the Fall; the Fall is the violent wrench of the human into physicality. Thus an incredible violence is central to McCarthy’s metaphysic, and No Country is a metaphysical drama of sorts. Sure it’s “realistic.” A cast of incidental Coen-esque ordinary/grotesque innocents (store clerk, hotel clerk, taxi driver) form the background for the metaphysical drama taking place between Llewelyn/Chigurh—one good, relatively tough, and “principled” (not ordinary/grotesque), the other just more committed to, identified with that fundamental violence, more “principled” than the ordinary folks as well as Llewelyn. Llewelyn, a kind of outlier, “an inscrutable, morally-ambiguous old-school tough guy” (perfect characterization, that) poses something of a challenge to Chigurh, but Chigurh is a force, a character in a fable. That’s one reason he’s perversely principled and well-nigh indestructible. He can’t be beat.
This links to another feature of the movie: its gratuitous and uninteresting attention to historical detail. 1980? Yawn. Sure, it’s the beginning of a lot of drug-related violence so it might be important to insist on the detail. The larger point though is to show (or at least tell us) that history doesn't explain what's going on. Various characters (law-men) express their dismay at this new kind of violence, at the impossibility of defending against it. But what Jones learns (or is told) is that it’s not new. This kind of violence has always been around, at least it has been around throughout American history. Llewe lyn gets dumped by the camera and thus as an object of the film’s attention because the film is not dedicated to the sentimental hollywood vision of the redemptive individual or “the power of one.” He was almost a classic hollywood hero, but he cannot be one in McCarthy’s world. Jones isn’t either, but he gets to be the central consciousness of the film because he is the one who grasps something of the terrifying character of this world.
I think it’s a great movie.
Post a Comment
<< Home