Autopsy of a scene: The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes
View image Two doors, mirror images. Two sides of a coin that's about to be tossed, and called, by Ed Tom Bell when returns to, and enters, room 114. The crime scene tape stretches across both, visually tying them together.
Because I brought this up in a larger context in "The Uncertainty Principle (or, The Easy Read), I figured I may as well follow through with it. (If you don't want to read another post about that movie, here, just keep a movin' right on through. You can't stop what's coming.)
So, let's take a look at what's here, and what's not here. And by that I mean what's in the movie, not what we might have seen if we'd been somehow been able to enter the picture as invisible ectoplasmic entities, free to wander back and forth at will between the membranes of those motel walls. We may draw different conclusions about what we see (and about how important it is), but let's not invent extraneous fictions beyond what the movie shows us (like Chigurh hiding under the bed or slithering down the drain)....
In an early post about "No Country for Old Men," I wrote that Chigurh could be seen as the embodiment of capitalism (or materialism) run amok: "Perhaps if Chigurh needs to be reduced to an 'emblem' of something, it's ruthless, indifferent force in the single-minded pursuit of any goal (religious, financial, political, genocidal)." The satchel of money is the MacGuffin (and the film doesn't pay much attention to what happens to it in the end)... but it's also a satchel full of money.
Sami Pöyry in Tampere, Finland, writes:
It's not the first time the Coens have made a movie about blind greed but "No Country for Old Men" certainly is their strongest take on this theme yet. Thus it feels very odd to me how this whole sense of impervious capitalism has been neglected in the discussion around the movie.
"No Country for Old Men" is all about money and money taking the place of moral principles. Chigurh sees himself as someone whose job is to make people see their blind greed. The coin toss is there to point out how money in general decides people's fates. He ends up there just like the coin does, as he states to Carla Jean in the end. Chigurh has principles and is not bound by money -- until this point.
Here's an angle I hadn't thought of. This e-mail actually came to Scanners, but with the writer's permission I also published it at RogerEbert.com. First the letter, then my response:
From Brad Smissen, Murrieta, CA:
Re: "No Country for Old Men": I'm a bit surprised that nobody has really touched on Chigurh's theology or lack thereof. In the book McCarthy makes clear that Chigurh is a non-believer. This is huge. I believe it's McCarthy's intention to say that Chigurh's atheism carved him into a Darwinian creature with a powerful survivalist function. That's the thing, Chigurh isn't meant as some reaper figure at all. He's an atheist/survivalist, plain and simple. It's not an accident that Chigurh is able to give himself first rate medical care after his leg gets shot up. Nor is McCarthy alluding to some military/medical background. Chigurh has equipped himself to live, he means to live above everything else.
UPDATED 03/03/08: The author of the original letter expands his thoughts:
We received this very fine letter to the editor yesterday at RogerEbert.com. It's from Nicholas Rizzo and it offers a deeply felt understanding of "No Country for Old Men" (and one I happen to share). The "Country" of the movie's title is America, and the West, but it's also age, and death:
I've just seen “No Country for Old Men”. And I'm wondering about something. I'm at a crossroads in my life. And for the first time I’m feeling left out. I'm 39, about to turn 40. I work as a physician, and my practice is in a transition due to forces beyond my control. After hours I coach a high school wrestling team and that has to go by the wayside as our head coach is finally stepping down and I've injured my neck. So my coaching days may be over. I'm divorced, have some gray hairs, and am essentially in between the young daters and the "available divorcees" in age -- kind of in a relationship limbo. Admittedly, I'm facing my own mortality on several fronts. And this movie hit home for me because of this. But after that hit, there was something more that I found, and I’ll cover that at the end of this writing.
Regarding your review, I agree with it entirely. It's an incredible film, and in all the aspects you mention. Except, you didn't mention the point of the film, at least as I see it. The first clue to it lies in its title, which is a double entendre. That is, "country" as in place to seek a safe place to be, and also "country" referring to the U.S.A. and our way of life. The latter relates obviously to our society's neglect of older generations, as the younger ones just pass us by. But that's another conversation.
This film is expertly crafted in three layers. The first layer is the literal one, where there is a cop chasing a killer chasing a victim. The real treasures of this film lie in its abundant symbolism and meanings – all on a secondary level. The third level may only be my invention, but I like it.
1. I have a competition in me.
I want no one else to succeed.
2. I hate most people....
I see the worst in people.
I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need.
3. I want to rule and never, ever explain myself.
I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little.
Match the above comments to the character who speaks or writes them:
a) Anton Chigurh, "No Country for Old Men"
b) The Zodiac, "Zodiac"
c) Daniel Plainview, "There Will Be Blood"
(Answers at end of post.)
* * * *
NOTE: Spoilers lurk sinisterly below.
View image Daniel Plainview, "There Will Be Blood."
Three of the most admired and fervently debated American films of the year move inexorably toward a climactic confrontation with a killer -- or someone's conception of a killer. Only Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" actually culminates in a eruption of savagery, while David Fincher's "Zodiac" and Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men" gradually steer their attention away from the assaults and into the psyches of the characters who are haunted by the brutality penetrating their lives.
View image Anton Chigurh, "No Country for Old Men."
View image The Zodiac, "Zodiac" -- or as close as we ever get to seeing him.
Much has been written about the violence in these movies, the darkness they find in the American landscape, and what some see as their bleak, fatalistic and/or nihilistic attitude. Does this somehow reflect the country's moral ambivalence about being mired in two bloody, confusing guerrilla wars on the other side of the world? A sense of No Exit hopelessness that the Vietnam nightmare is recurring? Mainstream (or art house) torture porn that allows us to vicariously groove on -- as we are simultaneously appalled by -- the crimes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Dissatisfaction with the materialistic emphasis on the American Dream? A cynical exploitation of artfully staged killings for our (cathartic?) entertainment?
The popular press likes to talk about violence in movies with a superficiality that assumes all violence and all movies are the same, that blood is blood (and that gore and gunplay are automatically more sensational than depictions of beatings or other forms of physical and psychological abuse). But that Sunday feature-section approach ignores what it's like to watch the movies themselves, and the diverse contexts in which they present acts of cruelty and lethality. To say that "Zodiac," "NCFOM" and "TWBB" are all "violent films" tells you as much about them as saying they all use the color red.¹ I'd like to consider how the violence in these films conveys its own meaning, apart from any op-ed political parallels that can be drawn, however legitimately.
... Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland -- and un-nominated co-conspirator, Carter Burwell -- for sound in "No Country for Old Men"! (See below.)
Meanwhile, I'm happy to see several mildly surprising nominations: Viggo Mortensen for "Eastern Promises"; Saoirse Ronan for "Atonement"; Hal Holbrook for "Into the Wild"; "Persepolis" for animated feature. No surprise, and absolutely proper: Roger Deakins for shooting both "No Country for Old Men" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (though I hope they don't cancel each other out). But nothing for "Zodiac"? At the very least it should have received a nomination for its amazing visual effects. But unless you've seen the Director's Cut DVD (or some Digital Domain clips on YouTube) you probably wouldn't have known they were effects. That's how good they are.
Looking at the odds, "Atonement" is an unlikely best picture because its director (Joe Wright) wasn't nominated. "Michael Clayton" and "Juno" lack an editing nomination, which (statistically speaking) is are crucial to winning the top prize. On the other hand, "Michael Clayton" is honored in three acting categories, for George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton -- and guess which branch of the Academy is the biggest? "No Country for Old Men" didn't claim a lead acting slot, perhaps because it's an ensemble piece. If you go strictly by statistically significant nominations, only "There Will Be Blood" has 'em all -- an old-fashioned Hollywood epic built around a big performance (by a previous Oscar winner). But will its unremittingly bleak nihilism (and the bizarre ending that alienated even some admirers) prove too bitter for Academy voters? I dunno.
I just want to take a moment here to acknowledge my favorite nomination. (This is where I congratulate myself on my foresight -- hey, I predicted Tom Wilkinson, too -- even though I'm a lousy Oscar guesser.) Back in September when I first saw "No Country for Old Men" in September, I wrote:
It wasn't even close. In the MSN Movies 2007 Top 10 Poll, Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men" scored 106 points out of a possible 120 -- the only film to rank on all ten of the contributing critics' best-of-the-year lists. It was #1 or #2 on nine of the ten, and #4 on the other one.
Some of you may have gotten the impression that I think rather highly of "No Country for Old Men," so I was pleased to be asked by editor Dave McCoy to write a little blurb about it summarizing my appreciation. It goes like this:
Shot by shot, cut by cut, sequence by sequence, no movie this year (or any other year) was more grippingly, cinematically exhilarating than "No Country for Old Men." Joel and Ethan Coen's first literary adaptation (from Cormac McCarthy's novel), crackles with an intensity that sharpens and stimulates your senses and reminds you of how little most other films do with the essential expressive properties of the medium: light, color, sound, movement, language. Movies are as much about the orchestration as the composition, and the Coens have orchestrated and composed a masterpiece -- one that embodies what most movies only describe.
A Western, a crime picture, a chase thriller, a ghost story (though not in the supernatural sense), "No Country" is the story of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a man chasing a dream ($2 million in drug money he's found in a satchel); Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a messenger of death who's tracking down Moss for the money; and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who's trailing both of them. Tension builds as the film progresses, even as the violence recedes. This isn't a movie about murder; it's about the awareness of inevitable death that stalks us all.
Check out our individual lists here. My Scanners list (with blurbs on all my favorites) will be somewhat different...
For Your Consideration: Anton Chigurh, Supporting Actor
View image Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem): You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't.
(A comment by Phillip Kelly in reply to an earlier post made me chuckle and got me thinking. He wrote: "I guess my theorizing [of] Anton Chigurh as main character doesn't stand now that Miramax is touting him for Best Supporting Actor. Too bad." That's the jumping-off place for this entry.)
The New York Film Critics Circle gave Javier Bardem its 2007 Best Supporting Actor award for his role as Anton Chigurh ("shi-GUR") in Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country For Old Men" (which was also named Best Picture). The funny thing is, so much of the discussion of the of the movie centers around Chigurh that you'd think he was was the lead. And critical reservations about "No Country" tend to focus on interpretations of Chigurh, and whether the critic accepts him as a character or a mythological presence or a haircut or some combination thereof.
"No Country" traces the path of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), from his opening narration to his closing monologue, from his nostalgia about the "old times" and his fear of the violence in this modern world to his account of two dreams about his father. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), sets things in motion by taking the satchel of drug money, and Chigurh spends most of the film relentlessly tracking him down, while Ed Tom follows a trail of blood to catch up with them both. None of these characters is a conventional "lead." We never even see Moss or Ed Tom come face-to-face with Chigurh. He exists in the physical world, but his presence is strongest when it's felt by these other two characters, even though they don't share screen space with him.
I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five. Hard to believe. Grandfather was a lawman. Father too. Me and him was sheriff at the same time, him in Plano and me here. I think he was pretty proud of that. I know I was.
Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lot of folks find that hard to believe.... You can't help but compare yourself against the old timers. Can't help but wonder how they would've operated these times....
-- Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones)
The land is black, swallowed in the shadows. The sky is beginning to glow orange and blue. This is Genesis, the primordial landscape of "No Country for Old Men." We may think we're looking at a sunset at first, but the next few shots show a progression: The sky lightens, the sun rises above the horizon to illuminate a vast Western expanse. No signs of humanity are evident. And then, a distant windmill -- a mythic "Once Upon a Time in the West" kind of windmill. So, mankind figures into the geography after all. A barbed-wire fence cuts through a field. The camera, previously stationary, stirs to life, and pans (ostensibly down the length of the fence) to find a police car pulled over on the shoulder of a highway. There's law out here, too.
View image The law. (Do these images look sterile or "technical" to you?)
Light, land, man, boundaries, law. Each image builds subtly on the one(s) before it, adding incrementally to our picture of the territory we're entering. The establishment of this location -- a passing-through stretch of time and space, between where you've been and where you're going, wherever that may be -- seeps into your awareness. Not a moment is wasted, but the compositions have room to breathe, along with the modulations of Tommy Lee Jones' voice, the noises in the air, and Carter Burwell's music-as-sound-design. The movie intensifies and heightens your senses. Light is tangible, whether it's sunlight or fluorescent. Blades of grass sing in the wind. Ceiling fans whir (not so literally or Symbolically as in "Apocalypse Now"). Milk bottles sweat in the heat. Ventilation ducts, air conditioners and deadbolt housings rumble, hiss and roar.
"To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated."
-- Jean-Luc Godard
"No Country for Old Men" has been called a "perfect" film by those who love it and those who were left cold by it. Joel and Ethan Coen have been praised and condemned for their expert "craftsmanship" and their "technical" skills -- as if those skills had nothing to do with filmmaking style, or artistry; as if they existed apart from the movie itself. Oh, but the film is an example of "impeccable technique" -- you know, for "formalists." And the cinematography is "beautiful." Heck, it's even "gorgeous." ...
This is about a hallucinogenic experience I had years ago... and how it relates to the way I look at movies. I can't say this psychedelic "revelation" altered my perception of cinema in any way; it just gave the perception a form, a metaphor. And I wasn't under the influence of an illegal synthetic drug, but an ancient (legal) herb: Salvia divinorum ("The Divine Sage"), which grows wild in Oaxaca, Mexico. Unlike LSD, which can induce an altered state of perception that lasts for hours, a hit of Salvia divinorum (smoked) provides a disorienting, headlong visual rush that may last for only a few seconds or minutes. Problem is, you could pass out for an instant before you hit the floor. (Salvia divinorum, although it's related to the common sage plant, has since been classified as a controlled substance in a few states -- and will become one in Illinois in January, 2008.)
But, talk about your theory of relativity: those seconds can last a long time. Here, as near as I can describe it, is what happened: I was "falling sideways," as some have described it, hurtling forward through what felt like a blurred tunnel of orange and yellow leaves (this was in the fall, of course). And near the end was the shape of an overstuffed chair, not unlike the one I was sitting in at the time. Only the texture of the chair, instead of being leather or some other kind of upholstery, was the leaves, and they were moving, too, fluttering in the breeze. It's not that the chair was made of leaves. It was that the idea of "leaves" and "chair" became inseparable, and they were intertwined fractal shapes, holding space and gently defining each other. You know how that is. The color and the texture of the leaves became one distinguishable thing, and that thing was a beautiful overstuffed chair. And then the chair was water. It wasn't wet, it wasn't made of H2O, it was still just a chair with the visual properties of water. It was transparent and currents or ripples slightly distorted the substance of it, as if you were peering into a soft, chair-shaped aquarium without any glass walls holding it together. (I guess you could say it was something like the "water tentacle" in "The Abyss," but it was more stable and not so in-your-face.)
View image To some, it's just another genre picture. Composition, color, movement, texture, shapes, faces, expressions, bodies -- that's where you begin to experience what this montage sequence is "about."
If film is first and foremost a way of seeing (and I believe that to be the case, even if not everyone sees seeing the way I do), then what we see in a shot, or a series of shots, is as important as... as anything. The movie is what the film does, as the mind is what the brain does. One of my oft-used analogies is Picasso's "Guernica." Now, you can know or not know what the painting is "about" -- the story it depicts, the historical-political events upon which it is based. You may even sense the emotions the artist is expressing and the techniques he's using to express them. But all those things don't even come close to adding up to "Guernica." "Guernica" is a large composition designed to evoke responses in the viewer. That's where you begin to discover the thing itself.
All of which serves as an introduction to one image from "No Country for Old Men" that I would like to point out (separate from the longer piece[s] I'm working on now). It's a second or two of film that occurs just after Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who is being chased through the desert by a truck at night, jumps over a river bank and glances back and up to see how close his pursuers are. It involves seeing dust produced by the braking truck, illuminated by the headlights as it breaks over the edge of the bank, darkly silhouetted against the light from above. It's Moss's POV, and it's a detail we notice because he notices it. The hounds of hell are loose on his trail (or will be in moments), but here's this moment of sinister beauty develops from it, and sticks around just long enough to register before more urgent matters assert themselves.
It's a directorial (and photographical) coup in many ways, but I was delighted to discover that it's one of those images the Coens visualized in advance and actually chose to record in an early version of their screenplay (which deviates from the finished film in several significant aspects):
Moss is almost to the steep riverbank. Another whump of the shotgun.
Shot catches Moss on the right shoulder. It tears the back of his shirt away and sends him over the crest of the river bank. Moss airborne, ass over elbows, hits near the bottom of the sandy slope with a loud fhump.
He rolls to a stop and looks up.
We hear a skidding squeal and see dirt and dust float over the lip of the ridge, thrown by the truck's hard stop.
That moment, in the middle of a deadly chase, is a "privileged moment" of a kind that, perhaps, Francois Truffaut did not have in mind when he coined that phrase, but it sure is one. For all we know, it could be the last play of the light that this man will ever see -- and we share the site with him. It's natural, it's what perhaps anyone in this situation could see, but the Coens make sure that we do see it. The next several images I don't want to describe right now, but they are among the most electrifying and surreal in all of cinema -- at least since the relentless approach of the nightmare dog in Buñuel's "Los Olvidados" (1950). But at this moment, we're awash in sensations: the squeal of the tires, the clang that tells us something or someone is getting out of the unseen truck atop the bank, the cold river into which the wounded and disoriented Moss is about to plunge...
But I just wanted to point this out, and that they wanted to be certain it was not just in the film, but even in the screenplay (which in other respects is somewhat different than the film itself). Writers often do that kind of thing, and the credit (or blame) for a shot or sequence will usually be attributed to the director, even if it was right there in the script. But it is the director who bears responsibility for realizing those images, and sequencing them, and presenting them so that they do what they need to do. The Coens, being their own writers, directors, producers and editors, pretty much understand what they're looking for. And they recognize what they've got when a miracle drops in their lap: the birds, and shadows of birds, over the highway in "Blood Simple"; the pelican plopping into the ocean at the end of "Barton Fink").
"Content, as I see it, is a series of connecting shocks arranged in a certain sequence and directed at the audience." Sergei Eisenstein, you are so right! (I wish I liked your movies more.) Shocks as content -- the junior-high equation [ART = FORM + CONTENT] trembles, previously secure elements threaten to swap sides. What Eisenstein theorized about cinema goes for writing, too: words as shocks; shocks arranged in a certain sequence. Words call up images and the images recur, mutate, cross-refer as the words extend in linear space and the reading-experience extends in time."
-- Richard T. Jameson, "Style vs. 'Style'" (Film Comment, March/April, 1980)
If Michael Bay turns everything up to 11 and assaults you until you feel bludgeoned and numb, the Coens do the very opposite. Bay, from the Alan Parker school of airless imagery, tries to shut you down, to restrict your imagination to fit his literal forms. (If you feel like cattle being funneled through the slaughterhouse, so be it.) The Coens open up the doors of perception, so that you become hyperaware of the many vibrant sensations -- light, color, sound, motion -- that are in the world around us every day, the kinds of living details to which most (flat, inert, mechanical) films just aren't attuned.
So, one brief shot of the dust in the headlights -- it's a small thing, but it makes all the difference. It's just one of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and one reason I emerge from a movie like "No Country for Old Men" feeling like my senses, my emotions, my mind, have been stimulated, invigorated rather than dulled.
View image This is this. You know what I mean, right?
"This is this!"
-- Michael Vronsky (Robert De Niro), The Deer Hunter
Three little words (well, two, really) -- each, individually and collectively, with flexible meanings. Yes, the significance of that short statement really does depend on what the definition of "is" is -- and "this," in both contexts, at the beginning and the end of the sentence. What does he mean when he says this? Well, to even begin to understand, you have to consider the moment in the movie and go from there.
When a critic adopts the attitude of De Niro's character, well, film criticism itself is automatically made superfluous. A bullet is a bullet, a killer is a killer, a zombie is a zombie, a gangster movie is about gangsterism, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, and don't even ask about the cigar. Lift and separate "content" from the movie and, once you've removed the context, what more needs to be said? In Keith Uhlich's eloquent words, such an approach exemplifies "the dubious product of American literalism, of an inability to grapple with a film's numerous layers of experience, falling back on easy prejudices and dichotomies as a way of stopping discussion and disagreement cold." (That's from a profile of Jonathan Demme at sensesofcinema that I recommend to literalists and non-literalists alike.)
We're familiar with the ways politicians use this technique (invading Iraq = war on terrorism; questioning policy = siding with terrorists; smoking gun = mushroom cloud). Substituting dogma for evidence is an easy way to evade the possibility of meaningful debate, something that might challenge an assertion of monolithic authority. The same thing happens in film criticism all the time. The trick is simply to eliminate the subject (the film itself) from the equation. This way, opinions don't have to be based on anything because there is no verifiable external reality with which to compare them.
Richard T. Jameson's article, "Style vs. 'Style'" (Film Comment, March/April, 1980), which I have recently re-read (and hence have been quoting a lot), ought to be as widely anthologized as any piece ever written about film, for the way it zeroes in on the heart of what a movie is:
"Content" is not content; "the meaning" is not a concrete certitude cunningly buried so that one may have the pleasure of a civilized, mental version of hide-and-seek, strip-mining through "the story" to get to "the themes." "The meaning" is only one more piece of material, as deformable by the operation of the artistic sensibility as the sea is by the pull of the moon's gravity. Content is what happens from moment to moment, and then in the suspended moment that is one's life within the aesthetic life-system the artist has created. And content is at the beck of style.
This would be a good opportunity to jump into a discussion of the confusion of "craft," "technique" and "style" (all related; by no means equivalent) that riddle so much film criticism today, but I'd like to save that for a separate piece.
In a moving and illuminating 2005 article (that poetically invokes Jonathan Richman's haunting "That Summer Feeling," a favorite song of mine), Adrian Martin wrote that his view of film, and writing about film, is shaped by "a rigorous analytical sense, a demonstration of some form-to-content logic... often dazzlingly intuited and demonstrated."
These days, film criticism — even the best-written — does little for me, finally, unless it can unearth, propose and in a way prove the existence of the logic that makes a film 'tick', as we say, that coheres it into some kind of whole work, whether classical-expressive or modernist-disjunctive. Godard, in fact, said it best in his challenge to Kael and, beyond her, all critics: "Bring in the evidence," he demanded. Film analysis or criticism without that logic, that evidence, is just assertion, and assertion is something I can take or leave (perhaps depending on whether or not I agree with it!).
Then again, assertion as a substitute for thought, as David Bordwell has written (citing specific examples), is "so glancing and elliptical that we can scarcely judge it as right or wrong."
Here's a sampling of various political/ideological (and generic) readings of Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country For Old Men." This just gets more and more fascinating to me -- probably because I would not emphasize such an approach to the movie myself. (Not that all the following do, either.) I'm frustrated that, before I can write about "No Country" again with a fresh memory, I have to wait another week for it to open in Seattle. For now, a critical debate/montage from multiple perspectives -- those who love it and hate it and have mixed feelings:
The mechanics of "No Country for Old Men" recall those of a vintage film noir, and in that respect, the movie is brilliantly executed, as gripping and mordantly funny a treatise on the corrosive power of greed as "The Killing" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" were before it. [...]
View image Malcolm McDowell in Lindsay Anderson's 1973 critique of capitalism, "O Lucky Man!"
It’s easy to imagine how the Coens, whose Achilles’ heel has always been their predilection for smug irony and easy caricature, might have turned McCarthy’s taciturn Texans into simplistic Western-mythos archetypes — the amoral criminal, the righteous peacekeeper, and the naive but basically goodhearted rube in over his head. Instead, they’ve made a film of great, enveloping gravitas, in which words like “hero” and “villain” carry ever less weight the deeper we follow the characters into their desperate journeys. Like McCarthy, the Coens are markedly less interested in who (if anyone) gets away with the loot than in the primal forces that urge the characters forward. “They slaughter cattle a lot different these days,” sighs a weary Bell late in the film. But slaughter them they still do, and in the end, everyone in "No Country for Old Men" is both hunter and hunted, members of some endangered species trying to forestall their extinction. -- Scott Foundas, LA Weekly
... [T]he Coens have made a crime movie that seems quietly aghast at the likelihood of death and menace occurring on American soil. Unlike "American Gangster"’s sensationalized crap, this is a crime movie/western exercise that contemporizes the miasma of a world at war. [...]
Coen artistry heightens our level of perception. They reveal the first murder with an astonishing image of shoe sole scuff marks on a jail floor that looks as avant-garde as a Jackson Pollack painting—a harbinger of modern chaos that puts post-9/11 terror in artistic focus. But not sentimentally. When Sheriff Bell expresses existential fatigue, the sorrow he vouchsafes to his father is actually spoken to himself (thus to us in the audience). And still, the Coens contextualize: Bell is brought to reality when his father tells him, “What you got ain’t new. Can’t stop what’s coming. Ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.” The Coens make that wisdom mythical and all encompassing—from Vietnam to 9/11 to Iraq and to the Texas homeland. -- Armond White, New York Press
(headline: "A crime movie for a world at war")
The most rewarding thing about "No Country" is the way in which its narrative is set up as a singularly unstoppable force, a shark constantly moving forward (every scene seems to have a goal, every frame initially gives off the impression of tightly relaying crucial plot information), only to allow itself to purposefully break down, both in terms of resolution and traditional narrative payoffs. What initially seems perfectly calibrated and dazzlingly "efficient" is finally revealed as a false comfort: the film's trio of sad characters will probably never be able to emerge from its shadows. The trail of bloodshed that occurs in the wake of the film's central crime feels increasingly less like whiz-bang noir pastiche and more like the final actions of a nation in irrevocable moral decline. -- Michael Koresky, IndieWIRE
On the face of it, "No Country for Old Men" doesn't need to be set in 1980. [...] It could be taking place anytime in the past 40 years, really.
By locating the action in the year of Ronald Reagan's ascension to the presidency, though, "No Country" stands at the pivot of the Old West and the New Avarice, a point in time when the last vestiges of frontier morality have been washed away by a pitiless modern crime wave fueled by drug profits. -- Ty Burr, Boston Globe
The story takes place in 1980, but cut out the cars and the drugs and we could be in 1880—look at Bell and his deputy, saddling up to scour the crime scene. (“You can’t help but compare yourself against the old timers,” Bell confides to us, in voice-over.) Indeed, the characters’ rapport with the soil is more reliable, in its grounded primitivism, than their relations with one another, and the Coens certainly honor the novelist’s abiding preference for the mythical over the modern. -- Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
There are hundreds of things thrillingly right with "No Country for Old Men," the new film from Joel and Ethan Coen, and the temptation to describe a few dozen of them must be resisted at this time. But let's allow ourselves just one, from early in the movie.
A Texan named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) has left his trailer-park home in the middle of the night, climbed into his pickup, and driven to a remote area where, the previous day, he happened upon a grisly scene. Moss pulls his truck right up onto the rim overlooking the place, gets out, and starts walking down into the gully where the bad thing happened.
Never mind what he's up to, especially since he may not be entirely sure himself. He's come to a lonely and dangerous location where a shocking number of people got themselves killed, and as he descends, somehow it matters that the filmmakers keep his truck in view behind him, crisply silhouetted on the rim. It's a small thing, but so satisfying. It means that whatever happens down below, Moss still has a way out, a way back to the rest of the world.
But it also means more, is more. Just the sight of the truck is peculiarly thrilling. The truck is unquestionably real, not a special effect, yet there's a preternatural vividness about its stark black outline against the charcoal night sky. Cinematically, it's too good to be just a truck -- it's the corner of a pattern yet to be disclosed. And a minute later, after Moss has discovered a gruesome new dimension to the scene in the gully, he looks back up at the rim and sees that alongside the truck's silhouette is that of another vehicle. And the silhouettes of men who now almost certainly will come to kill him.
I submit that such cinematic moments define the Coens' artistry, beyond any ideological agendas imposed upon them from the outside.
RTJ (who put "Miller's Crossing" on the cover of Film Comment when he was the editor of that publication) cites three examples from "Blood Simple" that matter to him, and explains why:
[They] could be found art, shards of experience and texture glimpsed where they lay. What all share is the joy of, "We get to do this" -- to put into a film the kind of accidental, trivial, evanescent, but piercingly evocative detail we've all noticed, while walking along a lane or registering the tricks of perspective when looking out of a moving vehicle, and thought, "Somebody ought to put that in a movie sometime."
The Coens put stuff like that in movies all the time. That's one of the best reasons for valuing them, and for not being stampeded by those critics -- professional and amateur -- who decry them as heartless ironists and mere connoisseurs of the grotesque.
Given what the Coens' best movies do, I find the most common and predictable criticisms of them beside the point -- like complaining that Jackson Pollack didn't paint recognizable figures: "Hey, are those supposed to be portraits or landscapes or still lifes? Who's this guy trying to fool?"
But I think it may come down to one's view of the world (and of cinema), and whether you recognize it in their films or not. Some of us find beauty and meaning in the absurdity and incongruousness of life, and the ways the Coens capture and shape it; others see only ugliness and amorality that does not conform to their experience (or their view of themselves), so they reject it with disgust and contempt. Both, I suppose, may be understandable responses, as long as they're acknowledged for what they are. But there's evidently no bridging the two...
View image Something dark and shapeless approaches in "No Country for Old Men."
"Adapted from what is generally considered a minor Cormac McCarthy novel, 'No Country for Old Men' is a very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse."
Here's where I agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum on the Coen brothers' new movie: 1) it is based on a ("minor") novel by Cormac McCarthy; 2) it is a very well-made genre picture; and 3) Rosenbaum does not understand why it has been accorded so much importance. When Rosenbaum says the only way he can account for the critical response to "No Country for Old Men" (and "The Silence of the Lambs" before it) is to assume it's "because it strokes some ideological impulse," I believe he means what he says even though I don't know what he thinks he's trying to say. [Rosenbaum responds, in comments below that "the core of my argument [is] the occupation of Iraq and the daily killings and torture that we simultaneously support and strive to ignore."]
His review is based on the assumption, stated in the third paragraph, that "No Country For Old Men," is a "psycho killer" movie like "Silence of the Lambs," which it most emphatically is not. It is a genre movie, but Rosenbaum gets the genre(s) wrong. It's a noirish crime thriller and a western and a detective story. (The Library of Congress catalogues the book under "drug traffic," "treasure-trove," "sheriffs" and "Texas.") But the motives of Chigurh (Javier Bardem's character) have nothing to do with the psychology of a serial killer like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates or Michael Meyers. There's no psychologist on the scene to explain him ("What does he seek?," as Lecter puts it), because he is not compelled to kill and he derives no pleasure from it and he does not choose his victims or his methods according to some profile or pattern.
Chigurh is out to retrieve a MacGuffin (briefcase full of cash), and he simply eliminates anything or anyone that gets in his way, using whatever means are available to him. The plain fact that he favors an efficient tool for quickly dispatching cattle (something not uncommon in Texas ranch country) reinforces how little emotion he attaches to the killing of most of his victims. He'll just as soon strangle them or shoot them. Or maybe he won't, if he has nothing to gain. He doesn't fit Rosenbaum's profile any more than he fits the ones Law Enforcement initially tries to impose upon him in the movie.
As for Rosenbaum's confession -- "I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse" -- I can only wonder what that ideological impulse might be, but it's clear Rosenbaum does not succumb to it. Do those who accord the film importance even know that their response is based on an ideological impulse?
I remember writing something similar about "Rambo: First Blood Part II" and "Back to the Future" in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan presented us with "Morning in America," which meant that the way to face the present and the future was to return to an idealized fantasy version of the past. Heck, it wasn't even too late to retroactively win in Vietnam! (Never mind that John Rambo was a psychologically disturbed Vietnam vet in the first movie.)
Rosenbaum compares Chigurh to the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which is an illuminating comparison, though not necessarily for the reasons he gives:
In O’Connor’s vision, perfectly captured in a mere 16 pages, the Misfit is an emblem of religious despair, but in the less considered genre mechanics of Cormac McCarthy and the Coens, religious despair is nothing more than an alibi for violence. It’s invoked as a way of covering all the bases, tapping into fundamentalist fatalism without really buying into it.
"Religious despair"? "Fundamentalist fatalism"? Loaded terms, but they reflect a very limited reading of O'Connor and McCarthy and the Coens, of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "No Country for Old Men." Perhaps if Chigurh needs to be reduced to an "emblem" of something, it's ruthless, indifferent force in the single-minded pursuit of any goal (religious, financial, political, genocidal). Some people would define that as the nature of "evil."
I've read two or three other bewildered reviews of "No Country for Old Men" that concentrate on the plot and/or Javier Bardem's haircut, or how the stuff they think is supposed to be funny isn't funny to them. And everybody -- even those who really don't approve one bit -- want to assure their readers that the Coens and DP Roger Deakins are technically proficient, which tells us almost exactly nothing except that they think it has "beautiful cinematography" or something equally meaningless. But, fine, if that's what somebody feels the need to write about in response to this movie, then that is evidently what they have to say about it, and that's that.
I have more to say, but I would like to refresh my memory of the movie, which I saw once last September near the beginning of the Toronto Film Festival. Here's something from my initial (preemptively defensive) response back then:
"No Country for Old Men" is one of those movies I think provides a critical litmus test. You can quibble about it all you like, but if you don't get the artistry at work then, I submit, you don't get what movies are. Critics can disapprove of the unsettling shifts in tone in the Coens' work, or their presumed attitude toward the characters, or their use of violence and humor -- but those complaints are petty and irrelevant in the context of the movies themselves: the way, for example, an ominous black shadow creeps across a field toward the observer ("No Country" has a credit for "Weather Wrangler"); or a phone call from a hotel room that you can hear ringing in the earpiece and at the front desk, where you're pretty sure something bad has happened but you don't need to see it; or the offhand reveal of one major character's fate from the POV of another just entering the scene; or... I could go on and on. To ignore such things in order to focus on something else says more about the critic's values than it does about the movies. It's like complaining that Bresson's actors don't emote enough, or that Ozu keeps his camera too low.
Those words were written in the thrall of the movie, and I stand by them. Rosenbaum begins his review with a quote from George Orwell:
The first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.
So... "No Country For Old Men" should be pulled down because it is a cinematic concentration camp? What of those who don't recognize a good wall when they see it, and mistake it for something it is not? What if they think they're pulling down a concentration camp wall, but it's actually a New Orleans levee and there's a hurricane on the way? What if they think it's a terrorist outpost and they bust down the walls only to discover it's really the home of an Iraqi family? What if the sturdy walls and magnificent arches of the Mezquita de Cordoba are left standing after the Moors are vanquished and the Christians build an elaborate Baroque Cathedral smack in the middle of the mosque?
Toronto's is an international film festival, and naturally the films are shot in locations all over the world. But one thing so many of the best films in this year's fest have in common (a thing all great films have in common) is not the places in which they're shot, or set, but the places they create, and pull you into. These aren't travelogues. The films are the places, whether the geographical locations exist independently of the pictures or not.
There's Texas and there's Mexico and there's "No Country for Old Men."
Tommy Lee Jones' character, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell begins Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men" with an elegiac monologue about missing the "old times." His words are spoken over a montage of western landscapes in blazing oranges and reds (the incomparable Roger Deakins is the DP). By the end of this reverie, we're no longer in the past but in the harsh daylight of the present, and the color has drained from the images. The way Ed Tom sees it, he's outmatched in the modern world where violence is random, unmotivated, and unpredictable.
Within moments we see a shocking example of what he's talking about, as Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) strangles a man on the linoleum floor of an office, his dead yellow eyes fixed on the ceiling. That's a terrifying touch: Chigurth doesn't even look at his victim, even while he's garroting the guy. And then, one of those Coen touches: a shot of the floor, covered with a mess of black heel marks from the killer and his prey.
"No Country for Old Men" is one of those movies I think provides a critical litmus test. You can quibble about it all you like, but if you don't get the artistry at work then, I submit, you don't get what movies are. Critics can disapprove of the unsettling shifts in tone in the Coens' work, or their presumed attitude toward the characters, or their use of violence and humor -- but those complaints are petty and irrelevant in the context of the movies themselves: the way, for example, an ominous black shadow creeps across a field toward the observer ("No Country" has a credit for "Weather Wrangler"); or a phone call from a hotel room that you can hear ringing in the earpiece and at the front desk, where you're pretty sure something bad has happened but you don't need to see it; or the offhand reveal of one major character's fate from the POV of another just entering the scene; or... I could go on and on. To ignore such things in order to focus on something else says more about the critic's values than it does about the movies. It's like complaining that Bresson's actors don't emote enough, or that Ozu keeps his camera too low.
A moment here to celebrate the genius of one of the greatest talents in motion pictures, supervising sound editor Skip Lievsay, who has worked with the Coens (and Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese and others) since way back before the mosquito buzzing and peeling wallpaper of "Barton Fink." Since the bug zapper in "Blood Simple," in fact. Also, composer Carter Burwell ("Psycho III"!) has been associated with the Coens for just as long. He's credited with the music in "No Country," too, but it's to his merit that I don't even recall any music in the picture -- except for one memorably Coen-esque appearance by a mariachi band.
When I read Cormac McCarthy's novel, it struck me as a Coen screenplay just waiting to become a Coen film. Indeed, by that time it already was. And it could serve as a model of prose-to-film adaptation, choosing exactly the right moments and movements for the picture, and leaving alone others that are better suited to literature. (This is especially true of some very savvy omissions in the latter part of the movie.)
"No Country for Old Men" makes me want to echo Jean-Luc Godard's famous celebration of Nicholas Ray: "Le cinéma est les Coens!"
