No Country for Old MenWhy the new Coen brothers' masterpiece disappoints.
Posted Thursday, Nov. 8, 2007, at 5:20 PM ETTo listen to Slate's Spoiler Special about No Country for Old Men, click the arrow button on the player:
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Walking out of No Country for Old Men (Paramount Vantage), Joel and Ethan Coen's new adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel, I finally understood something about why the Coens' work has always left me cold. The brothers make movies that can be good, even very good, without seeming essential. They can pull off bravura camerawork (Raising Arizona), dark wit (Fargo), or chair-gripping suspense (Miller's Crossing and, now, No Country for Old Men.) What they can't seem to do, at least for me, is make movies that matter. The Coens' movies are effective—diabolically so—without being affecting.
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StumbleUponMaybe part of the problem is that black comedy is a tough genre in which to create a masterpiece. With rare exceptions—like Alfred Hitchcock at his best —few filmmakers can move from cynical chuckling to solemn contemplation of the human condition. The Coens seem to have set themselves that very task in No Country for Old Men, and the result, while it may be their most ambitious and successful film in years, remains just a Coen brothers movie, a curio to collect rather than an experience to remember.
That's not to say that there aren't certain images from No Country for Old Men that will haunt you, especially those involving Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a bob-haired golem of a bad guy who lumbers through southwestern Texas amassing what may be the highest per-villain body count in any movie this year. Chigurh wants back his $2 million, a briefcase full of drug money that winds up in the hands of a feckless hunter named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). But Chigurh is also a born killer of an unfamiliar breed, neither a suave sadist nor a feral beast. He simply seems to regard killing as the natural way to end a conversation. He's lumpen, expressionless, and as unstoppable as an Old Testament curse.
No Country for Old Men is, in essence, an extended three-way chase, in which Chigurh pursues Moss across the sunbaked borderlands while Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) tries to find both, or either, to forestall the carnage that will be inevitable should the two men meet. If you've read any Cormac McCarthy, you're already laughing at that last sentence: Good luck with that forestalling-the-carnage thing! The novelist's world is one of omens and portents, where the worst thing you can imagine has already come to pass and something far worse is on the way. It's easy to see why this fatalistic vision would appeal to the Coens' grim sensibility, but less clear is what their adaptation brings to McCarthy's moral universe.
In the book, the three principals constitute a moral cosmos unto themselves: Jones' Sheriff Bell, a third-generation lawmaker on the verge of retirement, is a holdout from the days when men did the right thing simply because it was the right thing to do. The soulless Chigurh is like an envoy from some evil but inevitable future. And Llewelyn, like us, dwells somewhere in between: He's a thief, but no murderer, and he's tenderly protective of his wife Carla Jean (played here by Scottish actress Kelly McDonald).
On the level of a Western cops-and-robbers thriller, No Country for Old Men leaves very little to be desired. But when the movie shifts into manly-philosophical mode (which is fairly often; there's no shortage of wordy ruminations from Jones' Sheriff Bell on the decay of the social fabric), the sense of urgency dissipates. Even in their best films, the Coens have trouble with endings (witness the mood-destroying Sam Elliot speech that weighs down the final minutes of the otherwise delightful The Big Lebowski). The last scene of No Country for Old Men, in which Bell recounts his dreams to his wife Loretta (Tess Harper) is a tacked-on chunk of Meaning that seems to bear no relation to the tragically futile bloodbath we've just witnessed.
The Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy share something else besides a bleak worldview: Both the directors and the writer have attracted passionate cult followings in addition to their considerable mainstream success. I can't speak for the McCarthy cultists, but I predict the Coen-heads will be thrilled by No Country for Old Men. Like most of the brothers' films, it looks and sounds terrific, with a spare Carter Burwell score and impeccable cinematography from Roger Deakins, who also shot the season's other big Western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Brolin, Bardem, and Jones give monster performances. The Coen brothers have taken McCarthy's mythical, fallen West and made it their own—and maybe that's the problem. At some level, the Coens still seem like two movie-mad brothers lying in their bunk beds, daring each other to imagine ever-more-shocking scenarios: "Dude, what if Javier Bardem went around killing people with a cattle stun gun?" That would be awesome, bro. But not necessarily art.
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Remarks from the Fray:
I haven't seen the movie, but the dissonance between the cops and robbers storyline and the Meaning of Life ruminations interspersed here and there is exactly what turned me off of the book. I had hoped that the filmmakers would forgo the philosophical monologues and perhaps create one of those rare films that outstrips the quality of the book on which it's based. My point is, if the movie doesn't quite reach expectations, it may be because the Coen brothers were too loyal to the book to write its flaws out of the screenplay.
--melisma
(To reply, click here.)
Ms. Stevens notes the craft in the Coen Bros. movies, but concludes "it's not necessarily art." Even assuming that the Coen Bros. merely make just well-crafted films, since when does a really well-made film not qualify as art? Or great storytelling? And this is a film critic saying this?!? I find this almost shocking.
Beyond whether or not the Coen films appeal to her taste, does she really believe that ONLY those films about putative "big issues" are art? Since most films are not about such things, I guess film itself is not art, except for a select few. The human condition needs to be examined and showed in even the "smallest" of parameters, because it's valid and "essential" in its own right, and does not have to be based on some perceived relevance to larger cultural issues.
Many posters have rightfully called out Dana for not defining what she means by "essential," I for one want to know what she means by "art". Since when is art defined by subject matter or having to be "important" in some way?
As for the Coen films themselves, Ms Stevens seems to suggest that they are fluff, well-crafted fluff, to be sure, but fluff nonetheless. That's an interesting take on films like Fargo, Barton Fink, and Miller's Crossing, which offer cross-sections of American life and mores. Oh Brother Where Art Thou, which represents a syncretic mix of Christianity, roots music, Homer, and Americana, just to name a few. Even Dana herself admits that Coen Bros. films do possess philosophic ruminations (whether such ruminations are necessary or tenable is another matter). My point is that the Coens clearly have a point-of-view that transcends just craft.
In the end, it's not that Ms. Stevens is not a big fan of the Coen Bros (hey, to each his own), it's the implications in her argument- i.e, what she feels art must be and the subversively anti-artistic view of film in general- that is so disturbing.
--birdman3501
(To reply, click here.)
After attending a screening of No Country last weekend, I guess my question for Ms. Stevens is: How could that movie not leave you cold? It's about a guy who uses a bolt gun to murder any living thing he comes across, as if that were the "natural way to end to a conversation" (as she aptly points out). Hard to take a message away from a movie that takes as its subject the annihilation of meaning.
But let's not dwell on the actual film; Ms. Stevens is more interested in talking about whether it matters. I wouldn't take issue with her saying that she wasn't personally "affected" by the film – a criticism often leveled at Coen movies – but I think it's important to make a distinction between being affected during a movie, and being affected after it. If she's implying that No Country for Old Men doesn't make much for water-cooler conversation, that it won't change your life or even the way you think about the issues it presents, I'd agree. After watching it, I found myself strangely incapable of coming up with anything to say about it. I was deeply affected during the movie, but not afterward – and that seems to be what Ms. Stevens took issue with.
But I would suggest that that's the charm of No Country – it's a visceral experience, a movie that's made to be, well, watched, not talked about – a film that "matters" more during its two hour playing time than afterward. And I can see how that could pose a problem for a reviewer who would rather use her 700 words to tell us how she feels about film in general ("The Coens' movies are effective…without being affecting"), instead of, well, reviewing the movie.
Then again, maybe Ms. Stevens is right. Maybe we need more "important" movies. Movies that expose politicians for what they are, that tell us what kind of world we live in, that give us something to talk about around the aforementioned water cooler. Movies like "In the Valley of Elah," or "Rendition," or "Lions for Lambs"
For my money, though, I'll settle for a film that entertains me as I'm watching it, in the best sense of the word – maybe even a movie that would send me back to the theatre for another $10 (or $12, or $14) ticket, so that I can try to figure out why I'm having so much trouble talking about it. Maybe the Coens make films that don't "matter" in the sense that Ms. Stevens might be using it, but that's never been their intention. They play around in their films – mashing genres together, writing absurdist, circular dialogue that often comments on the process of speech itself, using their extensive knowledge and appreciation of cinematic history as a bass line to riff on. (Their "cult" includes anyone who watches movies.)
All of their films have a strong satirical element, which could be part of what Ms. Stevens is responding to (satire, by definition, annihilates meaning). I still find a degree of warmth in their movies, a sly compassion on the filmmakers' part for even the slimiest of their characters. I agree with Ms. Stevens that the endings of their films tend to fizzle out or spin off, but in most cases I think that's intentional. Instead of settling for an exhilarating high note, they often leave us on a curious downbeat – Marge talking to her husband in bed in "Fargo," Hi thinking about a future in Utah in "Raising Arizona," Sam Elliot's character inexplicably rambling about The Dude in "The Big Lebowski." They wait for the last wave of action to crash, and then they wait a little bit longer. You're more likely to leave the theatre saying, "What was that about?" than praising the film.
Like any magician worth his salt, the Coens take care to reveal the artifice before the lights come up. They don't make masterpieces, but they would probably ask the same question that I (and others on this board) would ask of Ms. Stevens. "What does that word mean?"
--sfh
(To reply, click here.)
(11/12)