No Country for Old Men
March 2, 2008
by Nate
No Country for Old Men, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. 4/5 monads for craft, minus one monad for involving a psychopath. 3/5 monads.
From now on, when people recommend movies to me, I'm going to ask if the stories involve a psychopath. If the answer is yes, I'm not going to see the movie. Not unless the person can provide some substantial justification.
The primary reason is that I'm just tired of it. I'm tired of murder after murder, created or recreated for me in vivid and imaginative detail. I'm tired of simultaneously trying to care enough about it to be in the story, but trying to distance myself from it enough not to be emotionally wounded.
The second reason, though, is that I'm tired of the lack of insight behind psychopathic characters like Anton Chigurh, characters who are presented as titillatingly terrifying forces of nature, as characters who, on some level, are put in stories because they lead enviable lives: lives without apology to anyone. Psychopaths are real, and they are terrifyingly unfathomable; they seem to be people unlike other people, whose relationships with other human beings seem to defy ratio. This single aspect of character is so overwhelmingly important that I consider it dangerously inappropriate to focus on any other incidental aspects of such humans. As it stands, however, they are used like midgets: characters whose souls are unimportant, but are brought into the circus for their fabulous extremity.
No Country for Old Men is extremely well crafted, and the cinematic devices that propel the storytelling, from the use of reflections in things like televisions and blasted-out locks to the recurring marker shots, like Llewelyn Moss lying in his bed awake before coming to a decision. There's also an entertaining movie within it: Moss's dueling with Chigurh is fascinating at first, as the possibility is raised by the storyteller that Moss may actually be resourceful enough to deal with this force of nature.
Tommy Lee Jones, as Ed Tom Bell, is the best part of the movie. His ability to recreate and make authentic Cormac McCarthy's imaginative Texas dialect is astounding, and his stories and prose are the orchestral score that is deliberately absent in the rest of the movie. The movie's end--with a beautiful monologue from him--is particularly fine.
But I don't recommend the movie. Not unless you know you're the kind of person that can forgive an awful lot of killing. To describe some of the key moments where the movie falls down, where it shifts from an interesting movie to a morbid, glassy-eyed one would spoil things for those who haven't yet seen it. So I'll simply assert that they're there. And it hurts, feeling a movie sag like that. I'm not sure of it's the Coen's fault: McCarthy may not have handled those transitions any better. I suspect that he may have, though; that he had an authorial understanding of the different possibilities that the different movements in his story embodied that the Coens lacked. Having seen a number of other Coen bros. films, I wouldn't be terribly surprised.
Comments
On March 4 at 11'16 AM
, Jez wrote:
The term psychopath just means that the person has difficulty empathising with others. Most managers, and bosses, of businesses have some form of mild psychopathic tendancies as they have to be able to fire people even if it means they’ll be seriously affected. In fact in business it helps to have psychopathic tendancies as it’s a dog eat dog world.
Now if you transpose this to the movie world you have to have little or no empathy for others if you’re going to kill them. So tell me how could you have any sort of murder, or killing, without it involving a psychopath? James Bond is a psychopath. Ethan Hunt was a psychopath. It seams to me that you object more to the gruesome reality of the deaths in this film (which I haven’t seen so won’t claim that it’s not something that detracted from the film) rather than having a psychopath. Also it’s the 2D nature of so many Hollywood villains and murders that id the problem, not the exitence of a psychopath. Hannibal Lecter has to be the most infamous psychopath yet he’s also a rounded character, proving that you can make psyopaths into fully fledged characters if you try.
On March 4 at 6'38 PM
, Mike G. wrote:
The adaptation is remarkably true to the book. I suspect if you read the book your transition suspicions would be confirmed, however: Other of Ed Tom’s meditations that aren’t directly connected to the plot but insert pauses in the narrative are most of what gets cut from the book. I can’t say whether leaving them and the other little bits of cut detail in and adding 30-40 minutes of voiceover-driven runtime to the film would have served it well. But they served to make reading the book worthwhile for me, even though it felt very much like a re-run for most of its length.
On March 11 at 12'48 PM
, patrick wrote:
i tend to think the same thing about psychopath movies, but this one surprised me
On March 20 at 6'07 PM
, Margaret wrote:
I was blown away by Tommy Lee Jones’ performance. All due respect to Javier Bardem, but it’s a shame that most reviews give the psychopath all the credit for carrying the film.
On March 21 at 8'12 AM
, Nate wrote:
Agreed, Margaret. I must admit, though, to renewed affection for Javier Bardem after realizing that he plays one of my favorite characters (with perhaps five minutes of total screen time) in Collateral:
I love this monologue… not exactly because it’s good. The transition between “Do you believe in Humpty Dumpty?” and “Do you believe in Santa Claus?” has always struck me as humorously random. But Bek and I love the final quotation. “How FUCKING FURIOUS do you think Santa Claus would get?!” one of us will ask. To which the other responds: “Umm… pretty mad? I guess?”