[Editor's Note: Spoilers ahead.]
"What you got ain't nothing new," a retired lawman says in No Country for Old Men, counseling a colleague who's so traumatized by a recent mass murder case that he's thinking of quitting his job.
That's hard truth, and the fact that the sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), is more introspective than some of his colleagues doesn't make it go down any easier. Bell's astonishment at the violence unleashed by his quarry, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem)—an assassin tailing a Vietnam vet (Josh Brolin) who filched a briefcase full of drug money—is so deep that it spurs Bell to reconsider his life, his job, the nature of morality, the mind of God, the shifting cultural character of the border country he calls home, and the profound ways in which the United States changed between World War II and the Reagan era. Bell is one of many characters forced by Chigurh's rampage to consider his place in the universe: who he really is; what he stands for; whether he believes what he believes and behaves as he does by choice, predisposition or predestination; whether evil exists and whether God, if there is one, cares one way or the other.
All these elements and more come through in a movie packed with laconic lawmen and criminals that has very little exposition and almost no music. I haven't read the Coens' source material (a novel by Cormac McCarthy), which means I'm not sure whether virtues I attribute to the Coens are partly attributable to the novelist; in any event, No Country is an unsettlingly effective movie, different from, yet consistent with, everything the brothers have made till now. The film's leisurely ruthlessness—picture a John Carpenter ghoul loping toward its prey—is not just another demonstration of the Coens' eerie aesthetic assurance. The novel's title is drawn from William Butler Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium," but the Coens' film adaptation seems more aligned with another Yeats poem, "The Second Coming," with its warnings of a "blood-dimmed tide," a paralysis and decay in the face of seismic social upheaval.
Perhaps because so many current theatrical films have tried to address the post-9/11 world in a boringly prosaic way, the terse period piece No Country has been framed by critics as an assessment of America's moral health circa 2007. To a limited extent, it is that; given the time and place in which it was produced, it couldn't be otherwise. But it would be a mistake to presume that the Coens' main intent is to render judgment on U.S. foreign policy (or domestic morality) post 9/11, or even post-Reagan (the film is set in 1980). The film actively discourages such a narrow reading.
No Country's message, such as it is (the Coens aren't message-y directors) is not about Where We Are Now. It's simpler and more encompassing, less reminiscent of reportage or the editorial page than the admonitions of a philosopher or court jester: Get over yourselves, Americans, and everyone else, too. Look beyond yourselves and the time you live in. What is happening to the United States and the world—and every individual—is a variant of a dynamic that recurs throughout personal and political history, as predictable as the end of one year and the start of the next. What you got ain't nothing new.
Bell narrates No Country for Old Men, or at least begins to. But pretty soon his narration all but disappears. This strikes me not as a mistake, but a telling aspect of the movie's vision. Because Bell is played by Tommy Lee Jones, a star who specializes in hard-bitten, smart-alecky, "rebel" authority figures, we're predisposed to view Bell as a voice of wisdom, an amiable patriarch, and in certain superficial ways, he is that. But in a grander sense, he doesn't know shit. He's the latest in a long family line of local sheriffs. He's proud to inhabit such a mythic post. But he also fantasizes (openly) about what it must have been like to do his job in an earlier, more exciting time, when the world supposedly held more possibilities for heroism. This is a nod to modern Western convention—Bell is a lawman in a closed frontier—but the character's wistful unease is universal. He could be a ballplayer wishing he could have tested himself against Babe Ruth, or a musical performer pining for a time when Broadway meant something. He's a representative of a settled, complacent mindset: a guardian of the dominant culture. Bell's belief that he lives in a time of fixed realities and diminished potential is indicative of the mentality that makes a dominant culture vulnerable to aggressive revisionists. To the people Bell hopes to stop, the future is a wide-open road. The status quo's defenders are speed bumps.
Bell has no idea that his circumscribed perspective as a sixty-something white Texas lawman hampers his ability to understand the forces at war in his territory: Mexican drug runners and Anglo-American bankers, strange bedfellows who have nothing in common but an implacable urge to make a quick fortune. The horrors Bell encounters expand his perceptions—his sense of what's possible, for better or for worse (mostly for worse). But his evolution ends before it can really take root, and his final monologue has a defeated, even mournful tone. Bell gives his word that he'll find and save the Vet, Llewelyn Moss, before Chigurh (or other drug thugs) can kill him; but he arrives too late. (Shades of Fargo: Marge Gunderson's smart police work cracks the case, but when she arrives at the kidnappers' hideout, she finds a dead victim and a perp feeding his partner's corpse into a woodchipper.) Llewelyn's death is made more poignant by the Coens' decision to have it occur off-screen; likewise the sequence with Llewelyn's wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), refusing Chiguhr's demand that she flip a coin to determine a fate that's ultimately settled behind the door Chighur shuts in the film's penultimate sequence.
The Coens' shift from up-close, graphic violence to obscured or elliptical violence cements the sense that we've been privy to a mysterious but fundamental change in the universe. We see bloodied flesh close-up when it's a new phenomenon; when it ceases to be noteworthy, the filmmakers stop showing it. A notable exception is the climactic car wreck that injures Chigurh. It has the hallmarks of a deus ex machina, but it occurs too late to prevent the assassin's campaign of terror and it doesn't so much end his rampage as interrupt its denouement. Chigurh enlists two teenage boys in his escape, paying one of them $100 for a shirt to use as a sling (echoing Llewelyn's furtive bribery of tourists on a U.S.-Mexico border bridge). It seems significant that the killer's escape is aided by kids who have no connection to, or stake in, the apocalyptic crime war we've been watching. The accident scene's whiff of cosmic retribution reminded me of the Coens' shooting gallery-like dispatching of the bad guys in The Ladykillers. But given the rest of the story, I doubt that's what was intended—and did my eyes deceive me, or did Chigurh have the green light when his car got rammed?
Spiritual but not religious, the Coens are Stanley Kubrick-style secular theologians. Their awe of the unknown is comprised of equal parts humility and philosophical-scientific curiosity. Their films tease our suspicion that powerful, unseen forces move the universe—moral and ethical forces that sometimes seem to be rendering judgment or sending a message.
But at the same time, the Coens insist that no man can verify if these forces actually exist or if we insist they do out of vanity—in order to convince ourselves that our existence matters to anyone but us and our loved ones. The confluence of forces that suggests fate or justice might be evidence of a higher power (represented in the conversation between Bell and the old lawman about what God wants), chance (Anton Chigurh's tossed coin, which decides if a person lives or dies—an intriguing hint that on some level, this stone-cold psychopath feels guilt and perhaps wishes to reassure himself that his bloody deeds were inevitable) or free will (a subject broached in the scene where Carla Jean declines the coin toss to force Chigurh to accept responsibility for his deeds). Or it could be the result of electrons colliding to produce a result that might have been different had a single electron bounced differently. This free will vs. destiny thread runs through all of the Coens' work, even their most maligned and dismissed movie, The Hudsucker Proxy—a comedy in which the story's microcosmic society, the Hudsucker Corporation, persists no matter what executives, workers, stockholders and outside agitators do to influence it. That film's most revealing image is dolt hero Norville's blueprint of three ridiculously successful toys, all represented by the same drawing, a straight line (the side view: free will) and a circle (the overhead view: destiny).
The Coens' narrations often hint at, but rarely confirm, the existence of deliberate, supernatural forces. Their narrators purport to know the whole story, but mostly they know what they saw, heard or read. Blood Simple's narrator is dead; Hudsucker's is a corporate servant who seems to have gleaned much of what he knows from newspaper reports and the company grapevine; Lebowski's narrator is either a literary conceit or a figment of the hero's bong-addled imagination, and in any event, he's so self-satisfied and scatterbrained that he can barely follow his own train of thought. The most humble (and therefore trustworthy) narrator in the brothers' filmography is H.I. McDunnough in Raising Arizona, whose after-the-fact account of a kidnapping gone awry mythologizes and caricatures what is, on its face, a rather sad little story, then accepts a few shreds of hope (a reconciliation with his wife; a coming-to-terms with adulthood; a dream of fertility and old age) as a truly happy ending.
In No Country, Bell's narration primes us to expect answers, but its true purpose is to spur admission of how much we don't know and steer us back to what we do know, or should know, based on a cursory study of history: The new order invariably overthrows the old, then gets comfortable, all the while nostalgically wishing it could have experienced what prior generations went through, back when the world was new and people were decent and there were rules or a code or somesuch nonsense. (It's no coincidence that once Baby Boomers took control of the media, we saw a wave of films and TV shows characterizing the '60s as the most important decade ever, followed by a wave of movies mythologizing the World War II generation.) Once the new order gets settled, it becomes the old order; then, like clockwork, new forces arise that seek to topple the current powers-that-be. These new forces terrify the establishment by behaving not merely as if its written-in-stone traditions were Etch-a-Sketch doodles (in a conversation with Bell, the El Paso sheriff lumps in hippies with the forces of darkness), but as if the establishment itself is merely a glorified obstruction that will be inevitably be toppled or abraded by time.
No Country reinforces this theme from start to finish, in ways both small and large. In a grand sense, Bell, his fellow lawmen and the white, working class Texans down near the Mexican border are representatives of the Powers that Be, forced to reckon with a threat that seems fresh (Mexican drug runners, their American enablers and their unseen customers). But the "fresh" threat is the latest incarnation of meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The Coens' italicize this point by comparing (through compositions and editing) the murders Chigurh commits with an air-gun designed to kill livestock (and Chigurh's impulsive shooting at a pheasant on a bridge, a moment reminiscent of warthog-from-Hell Leonard Smalls' destruction of a lizard and a bunny in Raising Arizona), and the white Texans' subjugation of the land and its resources (acknowledged in the early scene where Llewelyn snipes at antelope from a distant ridge). Once a man has decided (as Chigurh has decided, and as Leonard Smalls and Johnny Caspar and the kidnappers in Fargo decided) that another person (or creature) is a valueless object, he can kill without remorse. In the Coen Brothers' universe, the abandonment of empathy (and the accompanying detachment from civilization's agreed-upon laws and traditions) is a dark key that unlocks the door to absolute and terrifying freedom, leading to existential rampage. No Country makes the key-and-door analogy explicit: Chigurh uses the same air gun to blast through door locks and attack his quarry. The projectile is almost exactly the same width as the lock, and its passage leaves such a clean hole that it's as if the lock never existed.
Though they are habitually described as snotty formalists with nothing on their minds but cinematic gamesmanship, the Coens' body of work is one of the most sneakily moralistic in recent American cinema. To some extent, all of their movies poses questions that supposedly deeper filmmakers have broached time and time again: if we cannot be certain of God's existence; if there is a possibility that no one's watching what we do; if, to reference Johnny Caspar in Miller's Crossing, "morality and ethics" are agreed-upon lies; if the evil can destroy the good with impunity, and if the wicked often die for reasons unrelated to a hero's good deeds (throughout the Coens' filmography, bad guys often destroy themselves through vanity or stupidity, or get snuffed out by coincidence or bad luck), then what's the point of being good? Just because. "There's more to life than a little money, you know," policewoman Marge Gunderson tells the dead-eyed killer in the backseat of her police car at the end of Fargo. "Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it."
In Raising Arizona, Leonard Smalls is a manifestation of H.I.'s untamed id; he literally enters the film through the hero's nightmare. No Country visually quotes Arizona at several different points, notably in the sequence where Llewelyn discovers the wounded dog (the cutting between close-ups of his boots striding through the desert and the low-angled shot of his face as he walks exactly mirror shots of H.I. and Smalls in Arizona); in the aforementioned shooting at the pheasant; and in the overhead shot of Llewelyn lying awake next to his wife, thinking about the criminal adventure he's about to embark on. In Arizona it seemed as if H.I. dreamed up Smalls; in No Country, the stalker appears first, and Llewelyn's descent into criminal mayhem makes it seem as though he is an extension, or a would-be protege, of Chigurh. At times Bell, Llewelyn and Chigurh seem like aspects of one human soul, fixed on different spots in a moral continuum: the good (Bell), the evil (Chigurh) and evolving man (Llewellyn). Llewelyn initially suggests a younger version of Bell—with his narrow eyes, walrus mustache and broad-shouldered confidence, Brolin looks like a young Nick Nolte—but gradually, through manipulation, corruption and violence, he becomes more like Chigurh. When Chigurh tells Carla Jean that her husband is ultimately responsible for her impending death, he's being self-justifying—but he's not wrong. Sometimes you reap what you sow—and your loved ones do, too.
The Coens aren't nihilists. There may or may not be a God in their imagination—the only Coen Brothers films that definitively confirms the existence of intelligent, purposeful, supernatural forces are Hudsucker and The Ladykillers, easily their dopiest, least consequential films—but the lack of theological clarity doesn't necessarily mean that the Coens endorse their characters' decision to be indecent or cruel. Quite the contrary, the Coens' movies strongly endorse the notion that one should honor certain bedrock principles for their inherent rightness (or, barring that, for the benefits such a life might confer). Decency is the Coens' version of piety. It's not just a rock to cling to in hard times, but a quality worth cultivating for self-interested reasons, because it makes a character more likely to know love and comfort. The Fargo kidnappers live for the moment, and their existence is defined by cheap motor inns, bored hookers, an increased likelihood of getting shot in the face or stuffed into a woodchipper, and the impossibility of every truly trusting anyone. Straitlaced Marge, on the other hand, goes to sleep each night in a warm bed beside a man who loves her. In the Coens' world, acceding to certain customs and laws means sacrificing visceral liberties to gain deeper and more satisfying ones: freedom from fear of loneliness and the nagging suspicion your existence is meaningless. H.I. and Ed McDunnough and Florence and Nathan Arizona are cushioned against despair by their love for, and commitment to, their respective unions. Leonard Smalls in Arizona, like Chigurh in No Country, is utterly alone in the universe, connected to no culture, beloved by no person; if they weren't committed to the loner lifestyle, they could start a support group, and invite Visser in Blood Simple, Bernie Bernbaum from Miller's Crossing, and the Fargo kidnappers to join.
Chigurh's wraithlike presence makes him a Grim Reaper in a chili-bowl haircut. He's half man, half literary device. Bell likens him to a ghost, and he does have a touch of the horror movie stalker about him. He lopes after prey like Michael Myers or the Terminator, verbally toys with them like The Hitcher and Richard Ian Blaney in Frenzy, and has a Droopy-like ability to materialize in places that his victims chose as sanctuaries. But he's not a contented man. He only seems fully actualized when he's killing people barehanded—as in the early scene where he strangles the deputy, his rapturous psycho grin photographed from overhead as if he's daring God to intervene. When Chigurh uses a gun, he's a Satanic cattleman putting down bipedal animals, like the (invented) farmer in the anecdote that Bell tells Carla Jean. Bardem's astounding performance—he's the most terrifying yet multifacted psycho since Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth in Blue Velvet -- subtly hints at the fathomless despair that must fuel a man like Chigurh. Something in the way this murderer peers at his soon-to-be-victims suggests an internal, perhaps subconscious process of translation: a means of turning self-contempt into contempt. The apparent "code" that Bell attributes to Chigurh is the code of a fascist; to Chigurh, the wrong decision is one that goes against his wishes, and the penalty for resistance is death. He's the freest man in the movie, and he knows it; he carries himself like a self-created dark prince. Yet he enters the story in handcuffs and leaves it bloody and broken-boned, trudging through the suburbs on foot.
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Matt Zoller Seitz is Editor-in-Chief of The House Next Door.
Excellent piece, Matt, but I think you credit the movie with more maturity and depth than the Bros. Coen are inclined, or perhaps able, to provide.
I read the book some time ago, and it is not, I think, McCarthy's best — Blood Meridian stands out for me as it does for many others, and in my fantasy world Terence Malick is scheduled to start filming it not long after he finishes editing the coda to his film of Leaves of Hypnos, in which the elderly Heidegger (played by Bruno Ganz, I suppose) visits the poet and former Resistance fighter Rene Char (a French actor ought to do the job, I suppose, but I don't know of one who strikes me as appropriate) at his home in the south of France, and their silent comity is doubled and challenged by the sounds of warring nature around them — it was sticky enough, not least because of the fearful amount of blood splashed around.
McCarthy chooses to view the modern world as corrupt and degenerate, even compared to the violent era of the expansion into the West, and, crucially, doesn't think the corrupt and depraved state of things is at all amusing or anything but lamentable and wretched, but the Coens, at least as the movie strikes me, seem to think it's pretty damn funny from time to time (Woody Harrelson, Stephen Root, the frat boys, the conversation in the hospital). A dark canvas on which to paint the foibles of devolving humanity: cruel, violent, vain, stupid.
I suppose I might be reacting this way because of the Harry Knowles-type reactions of other young male critics of the It Rules! It Sucks! school to the depiction of Chigurh. Crediting him with a movie star's charisma, and Bardem has that to spare, even with that haircut, and a movie star's inevitable victory over every adversary, valorizes the character that is, in the book, typical of the degenerate state of humanity.
I did think all the actors (except maybe Jones, who fell into the lawman groove a little too easily) were doing work several cuts above the average, especially Brolin, whom I first remember from The Goonies and the short-lived '50s-set NBC series Private Eye in the '80s.
Perfect comparison of Brolin and Nolte, by the way.
Three things:
1. I'd always thought it was the other kidnapper, not Jerry's wife, who was getting wood-chipped at the climax of FARGO. Am I wrong? If so, it radically changes the tone of the scene.
2. [spoilers about NO COUNTRY film & book follow] Interesting that Carla Jean refuses the coin toss in the film. In the novel, she doesn't really believe Chigurh but takes him up on it anyway, and loses. She tells him she believes he would have shot her whatever the result, but he insists otherwise, although he's confident that since this was (in his view) her preordained fate, her winning the coin toss was basically impossible on a cosmic level.
3. Is HUDSUCKER really the Coens' most maligned/dismissed movie, you think? More so than INTOLERABLE CRUELTY or THE LADYKILLERS, even? If so, that's mind-boggling; I've always thought HUDSUCKER was fantastic. Everyone I've ever shown it to has loved it. Although I guess I've only shown it to 4 or 5 people…but still…
Okay, four things:
4. I'll never be able to look at Chigurh the same way now that he's been compared to Droopy. Makes me long for a future YouTube mashup that adds some Tex Avery music cues to some of those currently music-free set pieces. Also makes me kinda wish the film had ended with an iris-to-black on Chigurh murmuring directly to camera: "You know what? I'm happy."
Also, re: rasselas's comment, I've been thinking of Brolin as the new Nick Nolte ever since I saw PLANET TERROR. That film also made me think that Michael Biehn is slowly aging into Dennis Hopper, but I seem to be alone on that one…
This is one of your best pieces of writing, Matt. It should be anthologized in a book on Aught Cinema, and it was just the thing I needed to wash away the taste in my mouth that was left by Amy Taubin's review of Southland Tales in the latest Film Comment. Can someone please tell Amy that's it's not 1969 anymore, that she doesn't have to worry about whether or not her friends at the Factory think she's hip or not? It read like something out of 16 Magazine.
Another thoughtful write-up, Matt. I half-wish you'd read the book first and had been able to write the review from that perspective to match my own. But I haven't decided yet whether I'm glad or regretful that I'd read the book before seeing the movie, as the book reads exactly like a screenplay; it's a difficult adaptation to watch on the big screen because of all the preconceived images I'd had in my head.
One thing to note is that Moss's death is also written "off-camera" in the book, so to speak, which was just as shocking in the book as in the film. The originality of it is to McCarthy's credit, but it's to the Coens' credit that they kept it intact (along with so much else in the book).
I was right about FARGO. Here's Marge's line, from IMDb: "So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper."
Matt, this is a great write-up! Since I won't be able to see the movie until I head back East, I took the time to read the screenplay and the book. I'm pretty sure I'll love the movie, as I can see how this would fit in the Coens universe. I can't say I'm one of those who fall all over McCarthy (I don't see what the big deal is, but I've only read two of his books), but I'm looking forward to the movie for Deakins' cin-tog and the performances.
I must second futurefree: I thought it was Buscemi's foot sticking out of the woodchipper. It had a sock on it, and I saw it as the Coens' way of identifying him, as a lot of his scenes are framed so you can see he's roaming around in his preternaturally white socks. I know the wife gets killed in Fargo, but I thought she was found on the floor dead. I haven't seen the film in a while, but I wrote in my review of Fargo that it was Buscemi's leg in the woodchipper.
Wait! Even Marge says "and I suppose that was your accomplice in the woodchipper…" We're right, futurefree!
Futurefree: Good catch on the woodchipper. I'll fix that now.
As for which Coen brothers film is most critically despised, I'd say it's neck and neck between "The Ladykillers" and "Hudsucker." The latter is thought of somewhat more fondly now, maybe because it came out 13 years ago and people have had time to revisit it and reconsider it. "Ladykillers" is more recent so I think the sense of overarching critical vitriol seems more intense than with "Hudsucker," but if you go back and read reviews of "Hudsucker," it was generally described as a bunch of great sets and a few funny gags, with not much else going on.
As for "Intolerable Cruelty," I could be wrong about this, but since the Coens did not originate the project (the did it as a work-for-hire gig at their pal George Clooney's request) I don't think it's generally thought of as truly being a Coen bros' film. Personally I don't think of it as one, maybe because it's their most boringly lit and uninterestingly directed film. Parts of it are funny but overall I get the impression their hearts weren't really in it, and they were just doing it to get square with Clooney for making "O Brother" possible.
Matt,
While the themes of the movie may suggest "The Second Coming," the title refers to "Sailing to Byzantium":
THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
Michael: Agreed. But there were images and lines in the film version that definitely seemed more "Second Coming" to me.
Matt, this is another example of why I value your writing so much. And I'm not even done reading it. I got five or six paragraphs into it and was blown away by how you connected with what the movie is doing — but now I have to stop because I'm heading to a 2:00 matinee (PST) so I can see it for the first time since September and write about it again myself! More later…
Jim: I'll be interested to see what you think after seeing it a second time. The Coens are on my short list of directors whose movies I prefer to see twice before writing a review — the first time to disabuse myself of what I expected to see, the second time to really look at what's there. I went ahead and wrote about it after one viewing because I just needed to get those initial thoughts down and see if I could get some discussion/argument going — of course I hold open the possibility that the second viewing might confirm that the film is more (or less) than I originally believed.
I'm also intrigued by how the Coens, like Spielberg, De Palma and a few other productive American auteurs, have managed to vary their style and experiment with form without ever losing touch with the essence of their personalities. That the same director made "Jaws," "Schindler's List," "Munich" and "Minority Report" is fairly staggering. Ditto "O Brother," "Miller's Crossing," "The Big Lebowski," "The Man Who Wasn't There," "The Ladykillers" and this.
That was a fantastic article, Matt.
Also, to this point:
The Coens aren't nihilists.
Say what you will about national socialism. At least it's an ethos.
You've outdone yourself, Matt. This is, without question, one of the most thoughtful critiques that I've ever read about the Coens, and it should really be collected in some sort of anthology in the future (perhaps an update of the "Blood Siblings" collection, edited by Paul Woods).
The film was a bit of an overwhelming experience for me, and I'm planning on reading the book over the weekend and seeing it for a second time, so I'll comment on a more substantial basis then — but should I forget, I just wanted to offer my props.
I'd been hoping something like this was coming… After catching this last week, I was telling my wife about your review of "The Ladykillers" in the NY Press and how you really delved into the latent morality in the Coen brothers' films. We talked about how the themes you mentioned really came to the fore in "No Country". I think you're dead on about how this is kind of an Iraq movie without being "An Iraq Movie" — if nothing else, it's strong evidence that these ideas about morality, death, etc. were on the brothers' mind recently.
I've also never quite understood the smug argument. I'm originally from Dayton, Ohio, and that's where I first fell in love with the Coens' movies. Our local film critic loved them, my friends all liked the movies, and none of us ever found them snarky or condescending. It was only after moving to New York and encountering a wider breadth of film criticism that I discovered the long history of critics calling the Coens "smug". Yes, their characters are often idiots, but I never feel that the brothers condescend to them. Most people I know have very warm feelings towards their characters, and I don't think you can chalk that up to a string of magnificent actors somehow bravely overcoming the hateful, condescending roles they're asked to play.
The Shot/Reverse Shot reviews you linked to the other day brought up this same old nonsense again, saying that Chigurh's haircut was the Coens' way of letting us know we shouldn't take him seriously. Huh? What about that role, in that movie, comes off as "just kidding, it's all a joke"? There was a little article on the Coens accompanying a photo spread in last Sunday's New York Times magazine, and in it Joel refers to Chigurh as "like the man who fell to earth. He’s the thing that doesn’t grow out of that landscape.†Chigurh's haircut was chosen because it's odd and doesn't quite fit (and you're right about him being half man, half literary device). But no, that makes too much sense — it's because they can't take anything seriously and/or their only joy is making fun of stupid people (including the audience). I think the Coen bashers should take your advice and see their movies twice before writing reviews — maybe once they get past their expectations of "smugness" they can actually watch what's on the screen.
A bonus joy of "No Country" has been reading the reviews that cite some of the same themes you mention but then act like the Coens somehow "stumbled" onto these themes accidentally. These reviews act like the Coens set out to make an all-plot thriller about a mean guy in Texas and then whadayaknow? Some questions about morality popped up! How'd that happen? They've been making movies for over twenty years! You can't condemn them as soulless technical perfectionists in one paragraph and then act like they have no idea what they're doing in the next.
I've been on-again, off-again about the Coens their whole career, but I agree (to a point) with Steve that I don't think they're (entirely) smug. One of the best moviegoing experiences of my life was seeing Fargo during a January snowstorm in a large art-film theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where many Minnesotans reside and there are many cultural common denominators, and hearing the audience roar with laughter every time the characters opened their mouths (and at the hilarious shot of the vast desolate snowy interstate where Steve Buscemi hides the loot). That film's portrayal of its characters was affectionate and the audience recognized that. I think the Coens identified with the people in that film (and in Raising Arizona) a bit more than in some of their other movies, where it seems they're above-it-all.
In any case, gangbusters review, Matt. I'm holding off reading all of it until after I see the movie. Ironically, the Middle America the Coens commonly depict is the last place their films arrive!
I'm saving reading your review in full, Matt, for after I see this film, which hopefully will be soon, once it goes wider on Nov. 21 (that and "I'm Not There" are the two big ones I'm looking forward to next week). I just wanted to say: I'm actually kinda hoping the Coens bring some of their trademark sense of humor and playfulness to this film. I read the Cormac McCarthy novel, and while I was impressed by its tough, spare writing style and attention to detail, I found myself turned off by its nihilism, which, while not lacking in soul (mostly provided by the sheriff, who, in the book, begins each chapter with an internal monologue, if I remember correctly), struck me as rather shallow, like yet another old man simply making one long sigh and saying "These kids today…" I know, Llewellyn Moss and Anton Chigurh aren't kids, but they might as well be, since they're hardly developed beyond notions of "evil" or "good man who gets himself into hot water." I guess, if one starts the book in an allegorical frame of mind—which wasn't easy for me, because McCarthy seemed to be aiming for some kind of arid realism amidst the carnage—one might find it more substantive than I did. (Maybe I just need to read more McCarthy; "No Country" is the only book of his I've read so far.) Anyone agree with me about the book? Maybe the Coens, by sheer craft, have improved on it; I hope so.
I'm from Dallas by way of Kansas City, Kansas. One of the things that struck me when I moved to NY in 1995 was how New York Film Critics tend to call films "smug" or "condescending" or "exploitative" simply for depicting the lives of people who live between the coasts, don't have much money or have regional accents.
Sometimes the charge is true but the vast majority of the time it's not. I eventually came to believe that this complaint was actually a self-flattering, disguised version of cultural anxiety and class resentment. These people have so little contact with anything outside the NY area (LA people are guilty of this behavior as well) that they have an allergic reaction seeing that world onscreen. Middle-American people and themes must be depicted with the utmost seriousness in order not to be called "smug" by coastal big-city critics. God forbid the film should find any of the characters amusing, much less allow them to laugh at themselves or one another.
It's as if some critics are so baffled (perhaps even fearful) of such characters that they can only deal with their existence by pre-emptively turning protective on their behalf.
Very strange.
Great review, Matt. Some minor notes:
-Chigurh doesn't actually kill that pheasant – he merely shoots at it, then we see a shot where the pheasant flies away unharmed from the bridge. Chigurh was merely flipping the coin on the pheasant's behalf, it seems – but the bird & the gas station attendant are the only two who get away in the whole film.
-Chigurh doesn't buy the shirt from the boy to wear; the scene does parallel Moss's buying the coat, but Chigurh uses the shirt as a sling.
-You're indeed right about the car crash; Chigurh has the green light. I believe the same was true in the book – that the driver of the other car was to blame. It is interesting that the only force that comes even close to killing him is that of chance.
Jason: Thanks. I just made those changes.
This was a great and insightful take on the movie. I'm someone who finds the Coen Brothers hit and miss (although, like you, I find little to defend in "Intolerable Cruelty", their most impersonal movie), but I don't think they're given enough credit for what they're work is attempting to say and the themes that run through their work.
I've found too many people willing to tag them as empty stylists all of the time when I find that it has often depended on the balance between theme and form whether they're movies work or not.
I saw the movie a month ago and read the book afterwards. If anything, I found the Coens grounded the story more in realism than McCarthy did. Especially when (SPOILERS!!!) in the book, there is one scene at the end where Chigurrh returns the money to who it belonged without accepting any payment in return.
That really demonstrated to me that he was dropped to Earth to make sure the balance between good and evil landed on the right side and someone like Moss wasn't someone allowed to ever have $2 million fall into his lap.
Oh, and by the way, in the book, Chigurrh was the victim of a drunk driver at the end, from what I remember, although it wasn't specific in the movie.
This is a great discussion, Matt. Thank you. My main question after leaving the theater was what, exactly, is the Coen's (or McCarthy's, as I don't know if the scenes were in the book) point regarding potable liquid-based morality.
The two moments in the film in which events turned decidedly against Moss were(1) when he decided to go back to the scene of the shootout to bring the remaining Mexican some water, and (2) when he refused to have beers in the motel lady's room, because of what that would lead to, and instead agreed to have beers with her outside.
The actions of Moss at these two moments were the most moral actions of his in the film and he was punished, severely, for both of them.
Matt:
Re: "The Second Coming."
I had a similar impression to yours while reading the book, so I think you're dead on. But we shouldn't forget the ironic implications of the title: the old narrator of "Sailing to Byzantium" is on the outside looking in, regretting that Byzantium can't be his world. Ed Tom Bell, of course, is stuck in his world and really wants no part of it the way it is.
It's funny, but the only McCarthy books I've read are "Blood Meridian," "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road" — all set in an apocalyptic landscape. There's an evil at work in each three, a cruel, unrelenting evil, and the books seem to form a loose trilogy of sorts (I'm likely reading it this way because of my ignorance of McCarthy's other works). Judge Holden is the so-called cosmic egg of chaos and war, armed with a philosophy. Chigurgh is a similar spirit, but it has grown more indifferent and allows chance to be the judge. And finally, the world in "The Road" has been ruined and that same spirit of evil dominance has infected nature itself.
This is a great review — glad to find your site, consider it subscribed.
I think it's not far off to say that the Coens set up decency as a bulwark against nihilism in an uncaring world. But I think they portray that decency as always horribly, comically inadequate — and that's where the accusation of smugness gets some root.
Combine this with the compulsive comic gesturing of their direction — the kind of dead-on posing that Wes Anderson has abused so much — and I at least get the sense that all human activity is folly, that bad things are going to happen to good-but-not-good-enough people and at least they'll be there to catch the fall.
The actions of Moss at these two moments were the most moral actions of his in the film and he was punished, severely, for both of them.
While this is true, you must remember: If Moss doesn't return to the massacre scene with the water, he wouldn't be aware that he had been "made," so to speak, by the antagonists. He'd have stashed that cash under his trailer and let Chigurh roll up with his transponder and blow him all to hell. Returning to the scene actually provided Moss with a fighting chance.
I found the film's treatment of opportunism to be pretty intriguing. It's not just Moss taking the drug money, it's the three normal guys crossing the border who ignore Moss' battered and bloodied body for a few hundred bucks and then try to pump him for more. Or the boys who provide Chigurh with the shirt/sling and then immediately begin fighting over their windfall, and who in exchange for the money agree to lie to the police about Chigurh's whereabouts.
These are "normal" people, outside the web of the plot, and yet they behave in amoral ways because they feel they have something to gain in the moment. Their gains aren't as grand as those that Moss, Chigurh, or Stephen Root's character are aiming for, which in a way makes their choices even more sad and discouraging.