Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
One of the last times I really wrote about the Coen Brothers here at AICN, I pissed off a lot of you. I stand by everything I said in that piece, and I’m including a link so we can simply pick up the conversation from that point. If you haven’t read it, pop over there now, check it out, and then come back. It was an open letter written in April of 2004 in which I begged them to stop making movies. Not just bad movies, but movies at all. I just couldn’t watch it anymore, this collapse by a team I once considered the only infallible filmmaking unit working anywhere in the world.
I never expected them to actually stop making movies, of course. And I never wanted them to. But I did start to wonder if I’d ever see any sign again of the filmmakers whose work captivated me for much of the ’80s and ‘90s.
The answer to that question is, happily, yes. The Coens are alive and well and back on top with the remarkable NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, an ominous little slice of redneck apocalypse that perfectly adapts Cormac McCarthy’s novel. Everything that makes them great is on full display this time out, and seeing them make a great film reminds me of exactly why I loved them in the first place.
Each of the great movies that the Coens made take place in self-contained worlds. Unlike Wes Anderson, who has created one self-contained world that he seems determined to explore every broken-familied corner of, the Coens create whole new worlds each time out. BLOOD SIMPLE and RAISING ARIZONA don’t take place on the same planets. MILLER’S CROSSING might as well be about a different species. BARTON FINK is a snapshot of the sweaty interior of one particular writer’s overearnest brain, and it doesn’t feel anything like MILLER’S, the film it followed. It also gave no hint of what to expect from HUDSUCKER, a gorgeous cartoon, lusher than anything they’d tried before. FARGO. THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE. Both crime films, but totally different in the way they play. Both exist as wholly realized realities that make me want to climb up into the screen.
THE BIG LEBOWSKI... a cult movie with a cult that grows more every day... a deliberate riff on the same tradition of detective fiction that also inspired MILLER’S CROSSING, but so stylistically different that you would never automatically assume both films sprang from the same minds. Same thing with O BROTHER. How is that similar to LEBOWSKI at all? It’s not. Not remotely.
I think the reason I dislike INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and THE LADYKILLERS is because they both feel pressed from more ordinary studio movie templates. INTOLERABLE CRUELTY feels like a Nora Ephron movie. It’s a little more wacky in a few places (I like Wheezy Joe, but he hardly makes the entire movie worthwhile), but it’s basically a generic chick flick in terms of look and style. Pretty. Forgettable. And with THE LADYKILLERS, it feels for the very first time like the Coens trying to do what Barry Sonnenfeld does, broad mainstream comedy. I think it fails as a mainstream film, but it also fails as an eccentric pleasure. It feels like the Coens imitating the people who imitated them, and the results left me cold.
With NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, it’s obvious that the crisp, spare language of McCarthy’s book moved the Coens. Their work here is inspired, original. Once again, they have established their own world, and in this case, what makes the accomplishment even more impressive is how accurately they seem to have captured the world that McCarthy described. He’s a pretty powerful stylist in his own right, one of the most iconic currently working, and the only attempt at filming his work before now was the troubled ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. That film never quite worked for any number of reasons, and it certainly didn’t capture the quality of McCarthy’s language. Seemed impossible that anyone would, frankly. And once again, great filmmakers prove that any book can be adapted. There is always a way. There are a lot of bad ways to adapt novels, certainly, and even the easiest book can get fumbled during the translation. But to take something as beautiful and elegiac as NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and to figure out a way to evoke all of the complicated feelings that McCarthy dealt with on the page... it’s inventive and incredibly faithful, both at the same time. Considering this is the first time the Coens have actually released an adaptation of someone else’s material, it seems like a marriage that was meant to be.
Josh Brolin continues his amazing year with a starring role as Llewelyn Moss. Llewelyn is an old fashioned cowboy with no range to ride, the proverbial ten miles of bad road. He’s become a fairly unorthodox lead in a film at this point. He’s not the guy you make a movie about. He’s just some guy who lives in a trailer with Carla Jean Moss, his wife, played by the increasingly adorable Kelly Macdonald. She’s a sharp and funny actor, and as she hits her 30s now, I think she might even rival Kate Winslet for loveliest Brit in film at the moment. She makes Carla Jean more than just a throwaway character. She makes you understand why Llewelyn loves her, and the affection the audience has for her really gives the film high stakes. We want to see Carla Jean come through okay. We don’t want another ending like SE7EN. And even though Llewelyn isn’t exactly cuddly and sympathetic as a lead, it’s hard not to identify with him and the choices he makes when he finds some money. And that’s about as old a set-up as you can have for a film... someone finds money and takes it, and bad things happen as a result. There’s nothing new about that description of things. That really is what the film amounts to, when you strip away the language and the mood and the characterization. A guy finds money that’s not his, takes it, and bad things happen.
Anton Chigurh is one of those bad things that happens, and easily the most significant. As played by Javier Bardem, Chigurh is one of the great movie monsters in recent memory. He’s merciless, unstoppable. He’s armed with a fascinating toy that does unthinkable damage a few times. And the way the Coens portray Chighurh is one of the many ways they take this super-simple and familiar idea and make it seem completely new. I think it’s impressive how there’s no sign of the wise-ass Coens in this movie at all. They have always had a hard time keeping the absurdity to a minimum in their more serious pictures, and you get the feeling they can’t help it. They don’t lean on familiar cast here at all. Bardem, Brolin, Macdonald, joined in the film by Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Garret Dillahunt (who’s had a pretty damn great year of his own), Tess Harper, Barry Corbin, Stephen Root... familiar faces each and every one, but not in films by the Coens. Maybe that was a conscious thing, stepping outside their comfort zones. Or maybe it’s just one of those happy accidents, and maybe they just didn’t think some of their more familiar actors fit their overall plan for the film.
I’ve heard much debate about “the ending” of this film, but I think it’s really a bigger issue. The stuff that frustrates some viewers is pretty much part of the reason this story was even told in the first place. As much as I said this is a story about a guy finding some money, it’s also a story being told by the guy who finds the remains of the guy who found the money. Tommy Lee Jones plays Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a guy whose attitude marks him as the last of a dying tradition. Tough, a survivor who’s seen it all. The film is more about his observations on the incident than it is about the incident. By the time the film reaches its conclusion, I think it’s managed the difficult feat of switching perspective, gradually, eventually telling us a story we didn’t even realize we were watching. Maybe that’s what throws some people, that thunderclap as they realize that this is Bell’s story, not Llewelyn’s. This is a film about how wicked we can all be under the right circumstances, but it’s also a film about what it does to someone when they spend their time chasing all these wicked people around, cleaning up the messes they leave behind.
Roger Deakins continues to stake his claim as one of the great cinematographers working in film today, and Carter Burwell’s score throbs with menace in all the right places. It’s a great mood piece, and I want to see the film again just so I can really focus on the score. I also want to see it again so that I can enjoy it without constantly being on the edge of my seat. There are very few films this year that kept me this worked up for such a long time, and part of that is because you get the sense that there are no rules… anything can happen. Chigurh ain’t exactly playing fair. I always love movies in which you really put the screws to the lead characters, and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN tortures these characters with glee. It’s been a fall season full of dark and pessimistic world views, but don’t be discouraged. NO COUNTRY may play rough, but it goes down smooth. This is a confident piece of film entertainment. I’m going to enjoy putting this one on the shelf with the rest of the Coen classics, and I have no doubt this is one I’ll revisit in the future.
Thank God almighty... the Coens are back! The Coens are back!
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
