No Country For Old Men

In Chinatown, the malignant Noah Cross remarks that “politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” He could have easily added filmmakers to that list. Hollywood is as brutal a business as any on the planet. It’s also fond of snubbing great works, and showering accolades upon lesser contributions if the talent can remain standing long enough to accept them. (Scorsese is the most recent recipient of this largesse, receiving Oscars for his decidedly minor work The Departed as a consolation prize for being snubbed for his masterworks Goodfellas, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver.)

The accolades currently being showered down on No Country For Old Men say more about the poor quality of films in release this year than it does for the greatness of the Coen brother’s current film. Over the years, they have established themselves as one of the pillars of independent American cinema, but they firmly remain a niche product. The mainstream found a flavor of the month in their quirky crime drama Fargo, but their films mostly survive among the art house audiences.

The Coens are master craftsmen, perhaps the last of a cinematic breed. They write, direct, and edit their films themselves. The Coen-verse is an arch, formal place to live, where the slightest gesture is a coin flip away from morphing into an outburst of violence. Their films veer from the comic to the casually sadistic, but all of them exist in airless worlds, hermetically sealed off from the concerns of reality.

No Country For Old Men is adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel. Josh Brolin is Llewelyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles into the wreckage of a drug deal gone bad. He steals a satchel full of money from the scene and almost gets away cleanly, until a simple act of kindness complicates his getaway. Moss goes on the run, pursued by the malevolent Anton Chigurh, a killer who might be the devil incarnate.

There’s an extremely high level of craft that is on display. Perhaps instead of the tradition “directed by” credit, a more precise description might be”engineered by”. It’s one thing to marvel at a beautifully constructed piece of work. It’s quite a different thing to be engaged by it, or moreover deeply moved by it. The Coens create perfect – but perfectly airless – pieces of cinema. They’re unsympathetic, emotionally distant observers disinterested in sharing their inside jokes with the world at large. Real life isn’t allowed to intrude or disrupt the clockwork windings. There’s nobody to root for, or against, the audience just gets to watch the springs uncoil and cleanly run their course.

Purists might hail it as a triumph, but No Country For Old Men isn’t more than a minor work from the Coens, as they’ve been essentially re-making the same existential crime drama since the beginning of their career. If you lined their films up on a map, the drive from Miller’s Crossing to Barton Fink to Fargo to The Man Who Wasn’t There to No Country For Old Men would be as flat and empty as the drive from Abilene to El Paso. Despite the masterful craftsmanship, the sum of the parts is never greater than the whole. After the quirky moments and pinpoint specific dialects, there’s no greater moral or philosophical weight to take away.

No Country For Old Men is as opaque as Barton Fink, offering little insights to its characters. The act of kindness that ultimately dooms Moss is brief and soon forgotten. The motivations to stay one step ahead of the ruthless Chigurh are never more complex than simple survival and the outcome is rarely, if ever, in doubt. A Simple Plan – both the novel and the film – takes a similar setup and weaves a far more compelling drama. In the Coen-verse, life might be nasty, brutal, and short but fortunately, it’s painlessly free from consequences.

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The basic problem of translating a book to the screen is neatly illustrated in No Country For Old Men, as well. Cormac McCarthy, to the extent that he’s readable, is strongest as a minimalist. He’s a prose artist, which is the worst thing of all to translate to the screen.

Books are not movies. Movies summon their power from the near god-like abilities of the director – controlling light, shadow, sound – every aspect of reality but time. Movies work because they play out in a fixed, unblinking stream. All of the cinematic elements are choreographed and unfold in a precise, unswerving 24 frames per second. It is, in many respects, an experience of tyranny. Go get popcorn in the middle, and every frame of film you missed is gone.

Cinema does not lend itself to elaborate poetry and long recitations. The Coen brothers are an ideal choice to adapt McCarthy, and a shining argument against adapting him at all. The beauty of his books drips from his Hemingway crisp prose. The final speech, on the page, is fantastic. But it takes a moment to sink in, and to really comprehend the speech and the nuances of it requires you to spend a moment looking at it on the page.

Loretta Bell: How’d you sleep?
Ed Tom Bell: I don’t know. Had dreams.
Loretta Bell: Well you got time for ’em now. Anythin’ interesting?
Ed Tom Bell: Well they always is to the party concerned.
Loretta Bell: I’ll be polite.
Ed Tom Bell: Okay. Two of ’em. Both had my father. It’s peculiar. I’m older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he’s the younger man. Anyway, first one I don’t remember so well but it was about money and I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and snowin’, hard ridin’. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead. And then I woke up.

On screen, that moment appears out of nowhere and is over before the words can even sink in. Any impact that they gain from Tommy Lee Joneâ’s bone-weary drawl doesn’t off-set the inability to read and absorb them. Savoring them is impossible, because the magic isn’t in the drawl, or the granite features of Tommy Lee Jones or his character, the beauty is in the west Texas dry language. Soon as you inflate those words to life size and real time, the magic disappears.