Joel and Ethan Coen: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

[mouton]

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Written and Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

Llewelyn Moss: Can’t help but compare yourself to the ol’ timers. Can’t help but wonder how’d they do in these times.

The Coen brothers have been making movies for over 20 years now. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is their twelfth feature together. While they were once considered princely collaborators held at the highest esteem by film enthusiasts the world over, they have recently been the victims of their own identity crisis. Caught between their signature exploration of all things quirky and abnormal found in the parts of America thought to be forgotten and the demanding pressures of delivering bankable Hollywood fare, the Coen’s finished by delivering sub-par work that tarnished their lustrous reputation. The film enthusiasts thought they might have lost great talents to Hollywood while Hollywood wasn’t even sure they wanted them. What were these “aging” filmmakers to do? They could have polished off another Tom Hanks picture and crossed their fingers. They could have appealed to their fans and told another tale of the idiosyncrasies of those living in the middle of nowhere. They could have tried appeasing both parties by attempting THE BIG LEBOWSKI 2. Instead, they did none of these things. No, instead, the Coen brothers crafted a film that is unlike any film they have ever made and is also perhaps the best film they’ve ever made.

Translating Cormac McCarthy’s novel about the relationship between the hunter and the hunted to the screen may be smoothest decision these boys have made for years. Not only does it allow for the brothers to explore the grim sides of characters consumed by money and an unnerving peace derived from killing, but NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN also leaves the door open for an interpretive commentary on the Coen’s career itself. Allow me to explain by painting a picture from the film. Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) aims his rifle at an unsuspecting animal grazing alongside the herd. He is right now in charge, in control, the hunter. He fires and misses, thus beginning his steady descent into ruin. He moves toward the spot where his prey once stood only to find the site of a drug deal massacre. Here, he innocently stumbles upon an enormous amount of money. He picks it up and goes without realizing the hell that is about to be brought upon him. He inadvertently becomes the hunted. He spends the remainder of the film calculating and executing different attempts to regain the superior position he once held. The comparisons are subtle and come about naturally rather than existing as the initial basis for the film to grow out of, reinforcing their genuine nature. I could explain my logic behind this analogy but that would be very un-Coen like.

Another consistency throughout the Coen Brothers’ careers is the elevated caliber of talent they attract to their diverse projects. With their writing at top of its game, performances by Brolin, Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones are pushed to the heights of their potential. Moss is a quiet man, focused and constantly thinking about what his next play will be. He has no time for ego, only function, and though most of his motivation is to avoid drawing attention to himself, Brolin’s interpretation cannot help but capture our notice. For the second time this year (in conjunction with his slimy crooked cop turn in AMERICAN GANGSTER), Brolin reinvigorates his skills by inhabiting Moss fully as an instinctual and reactionary being. While Jones is also impressive as a police officer resigned to following the action without any possibility of curbing the outcome, it is Bardem’s performance as Anton Chigurh that will leave audiences with a haunting chill after experiencing it. His portrayal of a psychopathic hunter is both disturbing and riveting. This is a man who enjoys torturing his victims mentally by asking them questions meant to expose the inconsistencies in the way they live their lives before ushering them out of this world. He abides by some form of ethical code that only makes sense in his own mind and fully justifies his killings. His adherence to this code is what sends him to an internal state of ecstasy as he chokes a man and stares intently at the ceiling. The hunter is always frightening but Bardem is worse; he’s unsettling.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is entirely disconcerting but is somehow still a tranquil experience. There is a normality amidst the unrest that thrives in the plain, natural manner in which the story unfolds. The chase is constantly surprising without ever seeming forced. Each move made makes perfect sense but is not seen coming. On this level, even their formal execution of this film speaks to the trajectory of their career. Who knew that leaving quirk behind for harrowing humour and a story that serves itself instead of as a platform for character would invigorate the Coen’s method and assert their place as two of the greatest American filmmakers operating in a country thought not to have any place for the them? I like to think they did. In doing so, they have also made a movie for a sharp adult audience in a country bent on catering to all things youthful and disposable.

www.blacksheepreviews.com

[tabuno]

I can sort of understand the hype this movie is getting but part of me feels its more a reaction to the novelty of anti-social personality on the screen than the actual quality of the movie itself. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a good movie. Yet I experienced enough cinematic flaws that dragged the movie from its greater potential for an great cinematic experience.

Several problems with this movie:

Javier Bardem's character is oftentimes is prematurely cut away when the actual tension and emotional climax is about to occur. While some critics may feel this is some sort of great director's script device, I feel it's too lazy. One of the most interesting characteristics of this character is his approach to deciding the fate of his victims and yet the audience usually doesn't get to experience fully his approach - many times the audience does not know whether a character lives or dies...leaving a dead space, making for unfinished business - Javier Bardem character knows what happens and probably a number of the other main characters but the audience doesn't get to know. Life is unfair? Well, this is a movie and the directors have the power to make this movie fair to watch.

Javier and

[tabuno]

[Sorry pressed the wrong button].

Javier and Jones characters never really get to interact much and in fact Jones character is the weakest of the main characters. Particularly at the end, Jone's dialogue while apparently important, requires more contemplation than the audience has time for one time through. Jones character also doesn't seem that much different from other characters he has portrayed before, just less emotional, worn down, and unfortunately less interesting.

Brolin's character also is not helped by the director's choice to have him talking to himself in attempting to track down the remaining individual with the money, his explanation of his tracking skills appeared too convenient a device, his talking was artificially inserted into the movie so the audience would understand why he was going where he was going. Brolin's background comes out in bits and pieces and its difficult to know what abilities Brolin has. The cat and mouse game is off-balance. Neither Brolin nor Javier seem to have that really great skill. The movie seems to move more on the basis of luck and fortune (like the flip of the coin in the movie) than anything else.

Even Woody Harrelson's eventual outcome is so ludicrous in that I found it unbelieveable and almost a fatal flaw in the movie. Woody is supposed to be able to protect people from Javier? Why not just hire a retired CIA or FBI or ATF or Tommy Lee Jones for that matter. Ever find a case full of money by just looking at the right place? Perhaps, but just not in this movie.

Finally exploding a car was more for show than quality movie-making. This was not consistent with Javier's character, there were much more subtle cinematic ways of accomplishing the same thing.

[Chris Knipp]

mouton, I agree with your review wholeheartedly. I find it hard to find flaws in this film, and I am enthusiastic that the Coens, whose promise has indeed gone awry of late, have done something so stunning. If it is not their best, which it may be, it's at least true to the qualities of their best. I share your enthusiasm for what in so many ways seems a perfect creation, and the unfolding of the story is magical in the ways you suggest in your review.

Maybe both roles do rehabilitate Josh Brolin's career as you say, but the stereotypical nature of his American Gangster character is an indication of the relative conventionality of that film compared to the brilliance both of the Coens' movie and, of course, Cormac McCarthy's text.

I can hardly credit tabuno's statement that he finds No Country for Old Men somehow overrated. The film is very close to the book. Everybody says that, and that is my iimpression. I don't therefore think one can necessarily say anything was done for a cinematic effoct and wasn't true to Chigurh's character, because it's pretty much the way Cormac McCarthy conceived the events. The novel pops in and out of scenes with Chigurh

An aside: I just read McCarthy's The Road. I had misgivings about reading it when somebody compared it to Stephen King. I am a huge admirer of McCarthy, and if this was just something King might have done, it would be a disappointment. That wasn't the case. The Road is enormously powerful. It's actually a much greater novel than No Country for Old Men. It may be much harder to make a great movie out of it. But still it seems to have that potential.

A report of my Festival Coverage section review from the NYFF follows.

[Chris Knipp]

Ethan, Joel Coen: No Country for Old Men (2007)

Grim reaper in a Dutchboy bob

Review by Chris Knipp

Cormac McCarthy's characteristically dry, laconic, and sometimes hilarious dialogue brightens the scenes of this superb and chilling thriller the Coen brothers have ably transferred to the screen with excellent help from Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Tones, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald, and others, including a salty second layer of minor characters who look like they sprang straight out of the sandy soil of West Texas.

McCarthy, unmistakably one of America's greatest living writers of fiction, lives vividly in this, the Coens' first literary adaptation. Some of his best novels, notably Blood Meridian (called by Yale critic Harold Bloom one of the 20th century's greatest novels), are so apocalyptic, so embedded in their glorious poetic prose, as to be virtually unfilmable. All the Pretty Horses, from his Border Trilogy, has been filmed with some success (Matt Damon works in his role; Penelope Cruz doesn't). No Country for Old Men is late McCarthy. Post-apocalyptic, maybe. Jones's disenchanted, aging sheriff says, "When you don't hear sir and ma'am any more pretty much everything else goes." Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), a fairly innocent but opportunistic man, is deer hunting (he's not a good shot; he can't catch one out of a whole herd of them) when he finds a sprawl of wrecked vehicles and corpses, including Mexicans and a dog. There's a truckload of heroin in plastic packages and a briefcase containing two million plus in $100 bills. Moss takes the money and hightails it in his truck.

Naturally there are people who want the money back. Not nice people.

The man they hire to go after it is called Anton Chigurh. Expertly played by Javier Bardem, he's a villain--but with a clear-cut morality all his own--who's invincible and probably unforgettable. Chigurh is like the Grim Reaper: he can decide your fate with the flip of a coin; he reflects the biblical side of Cormac McCarthy, but in a terrible modern corruption. The crooks also hire another hit man, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson)--a mistake, because Chigurh resents the duplication. He is the last word, the anti-Christ. No man may come after him.

Out in these open spaces of West Texas--El Paso, the Mexican border--where Cormac McCarthy's innocent, pure-hearted cowboys used to roam in earlier decades, things have changed beyond recognition. This is 1977. It's a few years since the end of the Vietnam war. Lots of drugs and lots of money floating around; you don't hear sir and ma'am any more.

The story turns into a chase, Chgurh after Llewelyn Moss, the sheriff coming after them. And then Carson Wells, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and doomed, pops in to follow.

People have been talking about Bardem's pageboy haircut. Yes, it's creepy. Bardem makes Chigurh both threatening and inscrutable. It seems he'd as soon kill you as look at you. He has a long rifle with a silencer and a high-pressure cattle-killer device with a tank that looks like something a person with emphysema would carry around. It kills instantly with a pop in the head. He also uses it to shoot out door locks.

The film is more tense and suspenseful in the first half or so than in the grimly determined finale (all true to the book, if with a few details cut). By that time a lot of people have been killed and some wounded. This has some elements of the Coen's Fargo and Blood Simple (the latter introduced in an earlier NYFF) and thus with their most powerful work. But No Country is an economical and faithful literary adaptation. Some Coen movies have been thin and frivolous lately. This is emphatically not, sure and riveting from the first few shots. Richard Deakins' photography, making much appropriate use of wide-angle lenses, is superb. Their distinguished source seems to have kept the Coens honest and serious (except for the dry humor built into McCarthy's talk). Unquestionably this will wind up being one of the best American films of the year. It's tight and vivid and suspenseful. It's great stuff. The images sing and stun. There's no distracting music, only the beauty and terror of real sounds.

Present for the Nyff press screening Q&A (moderator Lisa Schwartzbaum): Brolin, Jones, Macdonald, Bardem, and the brothers Coen, Ethan and Joel.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp:

I can hardly credit tabuno's statement that he finds No Country for Old Men somehow overrated. The film is very close to the book. Everybody says that, and that is my iimpression. I don't therefore think one can necessarily say anything was done for a cinematic effoct and wasn't true to Chigurh's character, because it's pretty much the way Cormac McCarthy conceived the events. The novel pops in and out of scenes with Chigurh

It's interesting that people often complain that a movie adaptation isn't as good as the written source material. The only one of the few movies that I've seen that successfully captures both the brilliance of the book as well and visual/audio experience on the screen (and I don't often read the source material - I'm a product of the television age) is PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975). However, to justify the quality of a movie based on its source material isn't a slam dunk justifiable argument. It can just as easily be said that the director took the easy way out by just copying over the book to the screen without consideration for the audience or for improving on the source material. Again, I feel my comments remain valid from an audience standpoint. Why stick with a literal translation when a cinemagraphic improvement could have enhanced the original novel's presentation?

[Chris Knipp]

There's no such thing as a 'literal translation' of a book to a movie. Only great filmmakers can do it. There is no such thing as 'just copying over the book to the screen.' The statement is meaningless. It requires genius and craft and great good luck to transfer a fine book to the screen with success, whether freely or faithfully. I am not seeking to 'justify' the quality of the Coens' film by saying its faithful to Cormac McCarthy's book. Needless to say, accuracy in itself doesn't guarantee quality. It's a good book. It's not McCarthy's best, but everything he does is fine. The point is, they made a great movie, and they did so while staying close to the basic plot and character and tone of the novel. That's all.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp:

The point is, they made a great movie, and they did so while staying close to the basic plot and character and tone of the novel. That's all.

A great movie in my mind is a movie that doesn't contain important omissions to the essence of the storyline nor adds dialogue that is not essential to the movie nor detracts from its presentation. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN contains just such omissions and additional baggage that while this movie is good but isn't truly great.

To repeat: Why add unnecessarily Brolin talking to himself in search of another man just for, and obviously to me, the audience sake to explain how he's searching for this man in the beginning of the movie. It is an unnecessarily fake scene that detracts from the movie that a great movie wouldn't have included.

Javier's scenes let me repeat are cut short without allowing the audience to truly experience the full emotional impact of the outcome of the seen and to experience further Javier's behavior to some sort of resolution. A great movie, in my mind, doesn't quickly and prematurely cut away from some of the most important and fascinating characteristics of Javier, the character probably most audience members and critics really appreciate about this movie.

Additionally, if one really examines the initial death scene in the desert, the positions of the variation bodies and the blood stains of each body appear to me somehow unrealistic. There didn't seem able body that was truly sprawled from being hit backwards from the full blast of their injuries, most of the injuries were in the same locations of their bodies.

[Spoiler warning]. Again, Woody Harrelson demise is seemingly unbelievable, unrealistic as if he was caught so easily - he shouldn't have even been selected for the job in the first place. He discovery of the black case was also too conveniently, implausible. If this was in the book, then the director really needed to change it for the audience.

There's more, but I don't want to keep on going and going...a great movie in my opinion wouldn't be open to so many inconsistencies and problems.

[Chris Knipp]

I don't think others have been bothered by these 'inconsistencies' as you are. I personally don't think one judges a film in the final analysis by it's 'realism' or 'credibility,' and I'm not sure this time if you are comparing the film to the book, or are considering the book at all, which was part of our discussion earlier--perhaps, to you, an irrelevant part!

I still think it's a great film. And so it appears do a majority of US film critics. Very high Metacritic rating, 91, I see. Of course I fully admit i don't always agree with that rating or with the mainstream critics, but this time apparently I do agree with them and with mouton and not with you.

[mouton]

Hey Chris ... Thanks for the kudos. I had such a hard time writing that review. I knew that the movie made a profound impact on me. I was so taken with it, enamoured even. But when it came time to express why it was so impressive, I ran into wall after wall. I had not read the book so it was an entirely fresh experience for me and one that I thought was executed perfectly. Sure there were elements that were more functional than natural but I found them to be appropriate still. This one will definitely be making my 2007 shortlist!

Wasn't the lack of music haunting?

[Chris Knipp]

i just talked to a good friend who reads a lot and she commented as others do that it is very close to the book. I think so. Maybe, mouton, this will lead you to read McCarthy--you won't be sorry. My three great reads of the last 11 years are (1) David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (a work of genius, but not a book for everyone)--too quirky and long and complicated, I guess), (2) Proust's In Search of Lost Time [A la recherche du temps perdu], which was the favorite book of my mother, a great reader, and (3) The novels--all of them--of Cormac McCarthy. The man can write. I hope some filmmakers as inspired as the Coens were this time will tackle The Road,, his latest, a great novel that haunts me still. I know it's a far greater book than No Country for Old Men and yet it is cinematic, but it will not be as easy to do for many reasons, starting with the fact that there is a danger it will seem to slip into the horror and sci fi genres.

Kudos deserved. Though when one has a hard time writing about something it doesn't always in my experience bring forth one's best--this time you hit the mark for sure, though.

[oscar jubis]

I am less interested in reviewing NCFOM than researching and pondering why almost everybody thinks it's very good or great. It's clear to me this is a well-made movie; that the filmmakers are skilled; good craftsmen. But there are dozens of well-made films every year that don't inspire such praise. I personally had a hard time sustaining interest in a film with no character development and no ethical/moral dilemmas. Lots of plot, technically flawless filmmaking and good performances in the service of what exactly. Nihilism and bloody mayhem? Not impressed, not at all.

Even if you love this kind of thing... Did anyone notice that if Lewellyn doesn't do something unbelievably stupid by returning to the desert with a water jug there's no movie? Ask yourself, you come across the scene of a failed drug deal, there's a truck full of dope and a case full of money. You take the money and leave. Would you return hours later to honor a request for water made by a man who is certain to be dead by the time you arrive? What about the cop that gets murdered after the serial killer is aprehended...I guess country cops are stupid uh? How are these dupes significantly different that all those dumb southerners in previous Coen Bros. movies? The device of having characters who talk to themselves, mentioned by tabuno among other interesting points, is a lazy, bottom-drawer narrative device.

I have no idea why people find this film so interesting. But I hope it's more than a fascination with a psychopath with unique ways of killing and a knack for psychological forms of torture.

[tabuno]

Thanks Oscar Jubis for your comments. I thought I was alone in my thoughts about this movie. It's nice to know I'm not crazy.

[Chris Knipp]

I am less interested in reviewing NCFOM than researching and pondering why almost everybody thinks it's very good or great.

That is unfortunate, because what it implies is essentially that you have stopped thinking about the film and now are simply focusing on reactions to it. Your mind is made up. Now you're just staring at the audience, and ignoring the work.

There is no disputing matters of taste, and so on. Not everyone loves or everyone hates any movie. But, that said, the quality of No Country for Old Men is just something you feel, something you feel intensely from the very first opening frames. There is an absolutely stunning authority and sureness about it. It is not "this type of thing". Saying that simply shows that you don't see what's special about it. Because there is no other such thing. I'm sorry about that. But our tastes are all always very different in many respects, though they overlap at some key points too. I wonder if you would react the same way to the content of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, an acknowledged masterrpiece which is probably unfilmable. Blood Meridian, with its epic scale, is, like his more recent The Road, a much greater work than the relatively minor--but still fine-- No Country for Old Men. In the latter, McCarthy is working closer to Elmore Leonard. But seen in the context of his whole body of work, as it should be, No Country has an apocalyptic edge to it that one may not quite discern in the Coens' version without that context. The main point about No Country is that it is intensely cinematic, the novel is, and a perfect vehicle to make a movie out of. Sometimes what has to be used is not what is greatest but what is most suitable to the medium. The marriage here has been perfect--but similarities to conventional genre pieces are deceptive.

Just as critics have said that McCarthy's prose mastery in No Country for Old Men shows that him to be second only to Faulkner as a stylist, I would hope that the Coens' use of cinematic language in their film would immediately command the same level of respect, and one would not mistake this film for any other "well-made movie" made up of " Nihilism and bloody mayhem" or think that an appropriate reaction is "I guess country cops are stupid uh?" or not see that these "dupes" are not "significantly different that [sic] "all those dumb southerners in previous Coen Bros. movies". These remarks show little engagement with what is actually going on in the film. Sure enough, "these" "dupes" have something in common with what goes on in some of the Coens' other best films--Blood Simple, Fargo--but they are raised to quite another level by the literary source, which the Coens have, as has been repeatedly pointed out, never previously worked from.

I certainly do not think "no ethical/moral dilemmas" is quite right. In fact, not right at all. Here you have apparently missed something essential, and this may be the key to your dislike. There in fact is a very real "ethical/moral dilemma" at the center of the story, or a sequence of them. Fundamentally, the "ethical/moral dilemma" is that moral values are in a pervasive state of decay. Specifically, each player represents a different level of moral decline. First of all, is it wrong to rob robbers? Llewellyn Moss has had something in him morally destroyed by Vietnam. And yet somehow he may be less a mere tool than the Mexican and other drug runners he comes upon. There is something of the freewheeling individual of the old West about him still. But it's Sheriff Ed Tom Bell of course who's the spokeman for the decline in values both the drug runners and Moss represent. Nothing makes any sense any more as Bell sees it. He is the moral compass of the story; his fundamental role, to delineate the moral decline of the world he still inhabits but no longer understands. No country for anyone, really, perhaps, is what he's saying.

The whole story is a picture of utter moral decline. Is that a dilemma? I should think so. Bad men are sloppy and crude, and in their world a clean, efficient killer like Anton Chigurh almost seems admirable--and yet, he is a monster, more amoral than any of the others, a force of evil itself--but paradoxically, a creature at least possessed of his own clean set of values to which he rigidly adheres. Still, Chigurgh is the outgrowth of the amoral animal drug world that has emerged in this new, debased age. He is at the center of this world gone mad.

This is the moral universe defined on many levels by McCarthy and the film. And setting the story in 1980 for whatever complex reasons, McCarthy throughout his work has shown a keen historical sense of the ever evolving varieties of moral decline that we have lived with successively since our nation's infancy. No "moral/ethical" elements? I don't think so! They are pervasive. That their decline is embodied in a stunningly effective violent suspense thriller is a neat trick that McCarthy used to symbolize the reductive nature of post-modern "progress." And the Coens have ably captured this idea. It's no criticism of the movie to say it's extremely close to the book, because the book, as various reviewers commented, is very cinematic.

Moss's return with the jug of water is, of course, a humanitarian gesture. It seems odd to speak of the lack of a moral compass in the story and then refer to this action as "something unbelievably stupid." There is plenty to ponder morally here. I don't know if it is neat enough to describe as a "dilemma." But stories don't all come tidily supplied with "dilemmas." Post-modern tales define a moral world too murky to compartmentalize into "dilemmas." Except that the whole moral universe defined in the movie is so compromised--that is a pretty terrible "dilemma."

But I would grant you the NYTimes critic of the novel was not entirely wrong in referring to it as "high hokum"--though expressing ultimate approval of the writer's brilliance in keeping the action in such compulsively effective movement from first to last. It was that neatness that presented itself to the Coens as something they could work brilliantly with. And that's the bottom line: they made a brilliant movie. You don't have to like it. You don't even have to recognize its moral complexity--though it's a real shame that you don't. You simply have to acknowledge, as you do, grudgingly, that this is "technically flawless filmmaking," only you wavor a bit on the merits, because that's a bit more than simply "well made," and in a sense craft can rise sometimes so high that it has to be acknowledged regardless of how well one likes the subject matter.

Surely if you look more closely (instead of simply turning away from the film itself and studying audience and reviewer reactions) you will find the subject matter more complex and rich than you realized, and see that the story is not "this kind of thing." It's a western and a crime story but it's nonetheless sui generis and must be recognized and respected as such--again, whether you like it or not--as not any other "kind of thing" but it's own distinctive "kind of thing" and quite worthy of study and admiration--in and for itself.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp:

But, that said, the quality of No Country for Old Men is just something you feel, something you feel intensely from the very first opening frames.

From the very first scenes I thought, "Oh boy...another cliche!" I mean how cliche is it when from the very first scene one gets to feel the predictable, I know what's going to happen next...and sure enough this person dies. The first scene wasn't much of an opening for me. It was been there, done that for me and then from then on...the movie kept getting deeper and deeper into trying to be cute and different, the effort put into it was what made me feel distance from the movie...it never pulled me into it until the Hitchcockian scenes of interior dark shots, creepiness of what's going to happen next. But these scenes didn't last.