By Matt Zoller Seitz
[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.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Point Blank: No Country for Old Men
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80 comments:
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.
*Spoilers*
What I found the most intriguing about the film's refusal to glorify or even depict the death of Moss was that suspicious slow fade out as he turns down the offer of beers. Upon first viewing, I had no idea of what was about to come, but that slow fade-out felt so... unnatural based on the film's reliance on other modes of cutting. Upon second viewing, the fade-out felt so right, as if the curtain is slowly drawing on a remarkable performance and a worthy adversary to Bardem's whirlwind presence.
wrongshore: "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."
I agree that they often portray decency as comically inadequate in the face of violent evil. But that's true of a lot of filmmakers whose work has lasted, and it seems an honest reaction to the presence of dark forces.
Just got out of it about an hour ago, so keep in mind that my thoughts might not be fully formed.
I agree that there's a strain of decency in the Coens' work, but I also agree with everyone who's said that it's never enough in the world. I don't think that's necessarily problematic or impossibly bleak, though. I like to think of it as a philosophy based on the idea that there's nothing else better to do, which I think Matt gets at in this fantastic review.
I'm not sure this movie contains any particularly fresh moral outlook, but goddamn if they don't present it in a continuously compelling way. Even if the Coens are a bunch of formal fetishists (which I definitely don't think they are), I can't see why anyone wouldn't love watching their work.
And Chigurgh definitely had the green light. The camerawork seemed designed to emphasize it, too.
But I think they portray that decency as always horribly, comically inadequate -- and that's where the accusation of smugness gets some root.
Now that I think about it, that's probably why Marge from Fargo was such a great character--she was decent, and comical, but far from inadequate. It was the villains, in fact (Jerry and the kidnappers), who were woefully incompetent.
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.
The range of the transponder was not so great, I suspect, as to enable Chigurh to find Moss in his trailer park without some pointer, although Chigurh might, with the glacial patience of the movie plot device, have been shown driving the nearby towns in neat grids, glancing at the receiver needle now and then as when he passed the motel.
The accident scene reminded me of Mr. Risk in that insurance commercial -- people getting killed just sort of followed Chigurgh around, even when he was just leisurely cruising through a green light in an idyllic neighborhood.
Matt,
I'm really happy I read your review after stumbling on an errant line in Manohla Dargis's review of Southland Tales which knocks the Coens and No Country in the way you outlined here. Enjoyable but too precise and hermetically sealed in some way. I honestly think it has a lot to do with their complete unwillingness to take credit for their successes as much as their failures. If you should have the chance, I recommend listening to this podcast they did with creative screenwriting magazine which is hilarious from beginning to end. They basically vacillate between sincerity and bullshit from one moment to the next as if they have no idea how they found themselves being interviewed as artists.
Very good review. Thanks.
This is beautiful, Matt. And in it's way, it's an "important" piece. Because the critical tendency is not to investigate the operating laws, moral and spiritual, which govern the Coen universe, but to shunt them off as ironist hipsters at best, chortling and condescending at worst. The unwritten law is Do Not Engage, and it may be because the Coens' worldview is difficult to stomach or too conflicted to be reassuring, or it may be that it simply doesn't align with what film writers personally hold in their hearts and heads. You can see this frustrating principle at work when P. Kael would review (or fail-to-engage) Kubrick or Bergman: rather than chew over the director's failure to confirm her personal Truths, she'd bat them away.
And, well, I just don't understand it. Ethan Coen has a philosophy degree, right? Not that it makes him a philosopher, but it means he's had some Thinking Time in his life. As Rasselas points out, you've actually pried out of NO COUNTRY exactly what the Coens did bring to the source material, namely a notion that historical trauma is cyclical, manmade but not a fall from grace, kind of awful-funny, and as for God, who knows? It's not so much that they entirely subvert McCarthy's ethos, but build a response.
NO COUNTRY sorta begs those questions, though, from opening monologue to closing monologue. The hardest work you've done is in tying the loosey-goosey threads of the Coens' comic thrillers and brutal comedies into a convincing holistic argument... 'cause too few are willing to try. And if their films are so cynical, sniggering and empty, why do they speak directly to the hearts of so many people who aren't empty sniggering cynics?
About Ethan's philosophy degree, Chris, it's no accident that the world of Barton Fink, which is set on the cusp of WWII, erupts into flames with the cry, "Look upon me! I'll show you the life of the mind!" Wasn't it philosopher-of-fascism Hannah Arendt who called one of her books "The Life of the Mind"?
I'll skip all of these spoilers until tomorrow, when I'm treating myself to a morning showing of this movie as a birthday present. But I can't wait to read the article.
Matt, a very helpful piece in many way. A few things, though, keep going around in my head.
While the storytellers may be using the coin toss as an emblem for posing larger questions about good and evil, I'm not sure that Chigurh's use of it points to any hint of him feeling guilt. He gets an extra thrill through being at once the "ordainer" and the "ordained," through the cruelly obvious pretense of the choice being out of his hands. It's simply another particularly evil act of sadism.
And I don't think Carla Jean's refusal causes him to accept responsibility, but rather to be denied that thrill of having utter and ultimate control over another human being -- something much more valuable to Chigurh than any possible need to remove responsibility. Her triumph over him is in taking that control away; he kills her, but it is not a satisfying kill given that she refused to let him terrorize her. He gets off on the terrorizing in the coin toss murders -- not the actual killing. That's why the experience is as satisfying to him when the gas station man calls heads and "saves" himself -- he's terrorized him just the same. Certainly he needs the triviality of the randomness of the coin toss. It's part of the humiliation, part of the game. It wouldn't work for him just to terrorize people, pretend he's going to kill them and then not. No, he needs to not know himself what's going to be "ordained." Not because of guilt, but because that conceit increases his excitement.
Also, I don't feel that Llewelyn descends into becoming a Chigurh-like creature. He's not Bell, never has been. He's profoundly, fatally flawed. But he's not without a conscience or heart. That's why we're rooting for him start to finish. Not sure we can call him a hero, or even an antihero, but he's certainly as close to that end of the spectrum as he is to Chigurh's.
"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."
Wrongshore: That's a horribly, comically inadequate statement on many of their best films. I think that if you really look at characters like Marge or H.I., you'll find that they are perfectly adequate human beings attempting to find reason and meaning in a horribly inadequate world. And ultimately, they do.
It's not smugness. It's hopefulness.
Pinning down some codification of the Coens' world view and their level of engagement in age old dilemmas is elusive. Not to say we can't come close; that's part of what Matt's done so well in this in this piece.
The charges of a kind of disengaged smugness are, I agree, a misreading. And nihilism? No, that's incorrect as well. I think Matt's right -- they endorse decency despite repeatedly showing us its impotence, despite what often seems the invisibility of God.
But hopefulness, as Joel says? I don't know . . . I didn't leave this movie with hopefulness. As a non-film person who has more or less conventional reasons for going to the movies, this is a problem for me. It's not that I need to leave happy. But, yes, I want to leave the theater with some sense of possibility, not impossibility.
The Coen films are a problem for me in this way. I find them -- the ones I've seen -- incredibly compelling with a kind of character complexity (and performance) that is so rare and so satisfying. And yet, I come away feeling a bit taken.
Great article, Matt.
I have a plot question, regarding the motel. Who gets the money? Did the Mexicans take it? Or does Chigurh? I thought the shot of the AC vent being unscrewed was to indicate that Chigurh took it (since he had prior knowledge of Moss' hiding technique) but I wasn't sure.
Also, when Bell returns to the motel room, the scene is cut in such a way that suggest Chigurh is lurking right inside the door. So why does Chigurh not kill Bell? Does he slip out the door (taking the money) as Bell walks past him, exploring the room?
I would argue against any "hopeful" strain in No Country For Old Men.
McCarthy and the Coens both enfuse the story with a cranky, skeptical wit, and the "comic inadequacy" of decent characters includes, ultimately - and to several of my co-audience members' dismay - Bell.
His realization that he's in way over his head - coupled with Chigurh's inculcating new greed in the boy with the shirt at the end - adds up to their most cynical movie yet. I loved it, but this is way more "Ran" than "Ikiru".
Steve,
I'd agree on No Country, but I think the smug and cynical tag on the most Coen Brothers movies is just plain lazy. But I'd also argue that No Country is a departure for them in some respects.
Definitely their darkest movie yet, I'll grant you that.
I thought Bell's final speech about his two dreams conveyed a sense of hope. The evocation of his father riding ahead, a torch-bearer in the darkness, was as stunning as the evil that preceded it. That the fire was carried in a horn signified that the light being carried is as ancient of a force as the darkness Bell was struggling with. It can also be read as a rumination on death, but I think that pairing it with the dream that he lost the money (or something similarly valuable, but he couldn't remember), the worth, his father gave to him, was a way of reinforcing the inherent value of his father and those who fearlessly ride ahead. There seems to be an echo of that in the scene where Bell goes into the motel room, knowing that Chigurh might be on the other side. As a torch-bearer himself, he had no choice but to go forth into that darkness.
Not fearlessly into the darkness. (Only fools have no fear.) Resolutely into the darkness.
Re: Rasselas' imaginary Terrence Malick "Leaves of Hypnos" adaptation - Mathieu Amalric would make an ideal Rene Char.
Yes, I think, to Anonymous's take on Bell's dreams at the end as having an element of hope. Though, perhaps, I'd call it more or a kind of "it's OK" acceptance, than outright hope, but at least on the life-affirming side of things. That was what I thought I was hearing anyway when I was watching the movie, but then I felt shaky when I read it described here as defeatist (I think? too lazy and late to check now . . . ). Still feel I'd have to rewatch to be more certain, but even with the most positive interpretation of his telling of the dreams (which includes, I believe, the implicit validation of the value of a kind of love that Chigurh is, of course, utterly incapable of experiencing, and Llewelyn has likely never known either), I am left with neither enough hope to feel hopeful, nor enough hopelessness to be able to dismiss the whole thing as an exploitive piece of manipulation -- a most uncomfortable spot to be in.
Oh, also, I have the same questions as TuckPendleton. But it's the second one that's really bugging me: Where the hell is Chigurh when Bell goes into that motel room? I don't understand the point of that kind of confusion.
Just to be more explicit about my point about love being a part of what's being validated when Bell tells his dreams -- I mean the love between him and his father and him and his wife. The despair, longing, impotence and fear that he feels is mitigated by that love, by being able to experience love. And it is, I think, through that love that he's able to hear that what he's got ain't nothing new.
I believe that Chigurh was on the other side of the motel room door the entire time Bell was there. However, because Bell didn't see him, Chigurh was not compelled to act - when the accountant asked if Chigurh would kill him, Chigurh's reply gave a clue to some of what motivates him. "Did you see me?" Lends weight to the reading of Chigurh as Grim Reaper.
thanks, Anon 11:04am. I guess that had been my assumption, but I felt like Bell's movements within the scene led me to think that he turned 360 degrees in the room. Of course, we know from earlier in the movie that he's not a completist, (sp?) so I guess if he saw all he thought he needed to see, he wouldn't necessarily poke around.
And thanks for the call back to the "do you see me" with the accountant. That makes sense here. I certainly hope to catch this again the theatre, so I will pay extra close attention.
An excellent piece, Matt, and some excellent commentary here in the comments. (And bonus points to Hayden Childs for the nihilism gag.) I personally found No Country very nihilistic (and very worthwhile), but most of that amoral darkness is from McCarthy's book, I'd say. (That being said, The Man Who Wasn't There, which isn't discussed here, tends toward the nihilistic side too.)
Tuckpendleton (is that from Innerspace? Nice): In the book Chigurh definitely takes the money. In the movie, I believe he does too, since he seems to pay the children at the end with a c-note from the stash.
I've never understood the Coens-are-smug-emotionless-formalists argument either, and I'm quite often irritated by it (as I was in the Dargis review of Southland Tales, which is a film I absolutely loathed.) Perhaps this is because I find it hard to see how you can't be moved by, say, the pitiable icescraper or Mike Yanagita scenes in Fargo, or almost any scene from my personal favorite, Miller's Crossing.
You mention Johnny Caspar and Bernie Birnbaum in this piece, and, if anything, I think Miller's Crossing is absolutely central to this discussion of the Coens' view of ethics and morality. As Caspar notes in the opening monologue, this film is about ethics. What prompts Tom to follow the path he does, at great emotional cost (so long, Verna) and great risk to his personal well-being? It's because he's at some point subscribed to a code of how one should act, even if he won't admit it to himself. ("Do you always know why you do the things you do, Leo?")
Also, if Tom and Chigurh both have their life codes (the latter obviously darker than the former), it's interesting to note that, like Llellewyn Moss, the consequences for Tom of a pang of conscience -- letting Bernie live at Miller's Crossing -- ultimately redound against him. (Speaking of which, what exactly are we to make of Tom's final dispatching of Bernie?)
"If the rule you followed brought you to this," says Anton Chigurh to Woody Harrelson's (smug) bounty hunter, "then what was the use of it?" It often seems in Coen territory that the value is in the rule itself, of adhering to your own system of ethics when the chips come down. This is not to say that all moral systems are relative: The Coens show through story that the H.L. or Marge Gunderson code -- love, family, doing the right thing -- is often better than a lot of 'em out there. ("He treats objects like women, man!") Still, whether your own moral code consists of abiding by the dictates of cruel Fate, come coin tosses or car crashes, or just not standing for having another man pee on your rug, it's better to have a code than not have one. As Hayden pointed out above, say what you will about Anton Chigurh, the Dane, the tenets of national socialism, whathaveyou, at least they all have a f**king ethos.
My reading: The only "hope" in Bell's speech at the end comes from his ability to realize he can't reconcile his dreams with the reality around him. (which, of course, he realizes once it's too late)
It sounds mundane, but I doubt Tommy Lee Jones' face would wear the expression it does when the movie cuts to black if the intended idea was a hopeful one.
KCM - I always thought Tom's final dispatching of Bernie was the monkey wrench in the movie's otherwise straightforward moral evolution: he basically snuffs Bernie out because Bernie violated their implicit agreement and even tried to use it against him.
On the one hand, this is understandable, but on the other - not exactly turning over a new leaf. Which makes Miller's Crossing even better, IMO.
KcM, re Miller's Crossing: "Speaking of which, what exactly are we to make of Tom's final dispatching of Bernie?"
It's a complicated film with one of the most opaque main characters in gangster movie history, but this one act struck me as fairly cut-and-dried: Tom whacks Bernie for plot purposes and personal reasons. The plot purpose is to get rid of two people who are ruining his life, Bernie and Caspar, one of whom will presumably kill the other in the meet-up. The personal reason is, Tom's life goes from bad to worse when his boss, Leo, decides to protect Bernie out of pride rather than let his upstart rival, Caspar, kill him (a course of action Tom strongly advises). His life gets worse still when he himself gives in to mercy and lets Bernie go in the woods. Bernie says to Tom on the stairs at the end, "Look into your heart," the same thing he said to Tom in the woods, prompting Tom to let him go rather than execute him. This time Tom replies, "What heart?" and blows his brains out. Tom gets a chance at a do-over, and this time he does not make the same "mistake" (being decent) that he made with Bernie in the woods earlier. What I got from this was a sense that Tom had discovered the even more ruthless person inside of his already ruthless personality and was determined never again to let himself get tripped up by the impulse to be kind (equated with a loss of control, which is what the recurring dream of the hat is all about). When he pulls that hat down on his head extra-tight at the end, it's like he's saying, "This will never leave my head again," meaning "I will never again allow my gangster armor to be penetrated."
Interesting that the last scene leaves him utterly alone, and this is equated, in the movie's overall scheme, with utter independence. Here, though, as elsewhere in the Coens' movies, the image of an utterly independent spirit is fraught with ironic undertones. Something about that last scene with Tom in "Miller's Crossing" reminds me of Chiguhr walking away through the suburbs at the end of "No Country," or Leonard Smalls roaring through the desert solo in "Raising Arizona." They're free, all right -- free to be without connections of any kind. All of these characters seem pretty comfortable in their own skins, but there's still something sad about them, particularly when they justify themselves to baffled or terrified "normal" people. They're not terribly attractive, either, as a rule. The biker's nasty and dirty, Anton Chiguhr is creepy as hell, the kidnappers in "Fargo" are grimy, petty and vicious, the Nihilists in "Lebowski" are hateful clowns whose very presence is ridiculous, even when measured against non-standard men like The Dude and Walter. Even the most dapper man in this gallery of loner/outsiders, Tom (who, along with the narrator of "The Man Who Wasn't There," is the closest thing to an antihero in the Coens' filmography) is not an outwardly happy person. He's so alcoholic that he'd rather get drunk than get laid, and he's a gambling addict to boot. This is a man with issues, hardly a poster boy for the loner lifestyle.
Anyway, back to Tom: his arc is consistent with everything we're discussing in this thread: in the Coens' universe, being decent is equated with being a full human being; the problem is, being decent exposes a person to being taken advantage of by less decent people. This happens to Tom in "Miller's Crossing," and in a sense it's what happens to Marge in that much-argued-about scene in "Fargo" where her old schoolmate Mike tells her a sob story that turns out to be untrue (prompting Marge to realize she's not as good at detecting untruth as she thought, whereupon she goes back and re-interview Jerry and sets in motion a snowball effect that resolves the movie, albeit too late to save poor Mrs. Lundegaard.) Interesting that there's sort of a decency hierachy, with ruthless people triumphing over marginally less ruthless people. To give just one example, the duplicitous scumbag Visser in "Blood Simple" double crossing Marty, the guy who hired him to commit a contract killing.
Steve: "It sounds mundane, but I doubt Tommy Lee Jones' face would wear the expression it does when the movie cuts to black if the intended idea was a hopeful one."
I agree.
The more I think about it, I have to retract my thought on Bell's dream and the hope therein. He is a decent man, but he is overmatched. He is not of the same ilk as his father - thus the dream of having lost what his father gave him. There's no hope in that. I think it just gave me a measure of peace to go with my previous interpretation. This movie got under my skin in a bad way. I had no idea what to do with myself after it was over. Predominantly, I wanted to find a bunker. This has been a wonderful discussion, and has helped me reason through that sense of being overwhelmed.
Hm. So, I'm just fooling myself too?
KCM -- yes, this is my tip of the hat to my much-loved Innerspace.
Re: the ending of NCFOM...I feel like there is hope there, regardless of the look on Bell's face. The image or idea of one's father riding ahead in the dark and preparing a fire for you is undeniably one of comfort, I would say. Certainly there is the idea that Bell's father is waiting for him in the great beyond, which Bell's knows he is close to, and maybe Bell is also melancholic because he doesn't feel like he has lived up to his father's standards (his being overmatched) and that he will be called to account when he does face his father again by the fire. So yes, the hopefulness is certainly tempered, but I don't think it is completely drowned out. I would argue that if the Coen's wanted to end on a total note of hopelessness, they could have done so with Chigurh staggering away after the car wreck, suggesting that evil always triumph. By ending with Bell's speech, I think the Coens allow a little sliver of light into their world. It also ends with a very comforting "at home" kind of scene, with Bell being ribbed good-naturedly by his wife for being retired and not having anything to do.
Carla Jean is the real hero of the story.
Enjoyed the commentary, and I linked to you at my own post.
http://otherpoisondevils.blogspot.com/2007/11/free-will-and-anton-chigurh.html
Great article/discussion; a few rambling thoughts:
In one scene, Chigurgh says to his victim “hold still.” In the very next scene Moss says “hold still” as he hunts for antelope. There is a connection between the two. Granted, there’s a huge difference between killing people and hunting animals (some may argue that the degree is negligible, if non-existent), but violence is violence.
There is also the contrast in the scenes of Moss buying a jacket for $500 from the frat boys and Chigurgh trying to buy the shirt from the kids after the car crash. The frat boys are pure capitalists. Instead of trying to help, they’re out for money and want more for the beer. The kid at the end is willing to give his shirt for free. He took the hundred (ostensibly to keep his mouth shut) but the money was irrelevant – until his buddy wanted a cut from it. When one has money it begets greed.
The doling out of money is also a recurring image. The two scenes mentioned above, plus with the Mexican Band, the cabbie and the hotel clerk. Money buys silence or action.
Finally, no one has mentioned the performance of Kelly MacDonald as Carla Jean, but her performance blew me away. I recognized her, but couldn’t put a name to her face till the middle of the movie and then I realized she was from “Trainspotting.” It was a hell of a southern accent given her English/Scottish accent. In contrast to Woody Harrelson’s scene, Carla refused to cower. Woody tried to make a deal. Carla refused. If she died, she died honorably and refused to let Chigurgh win.
"My reading: The only "hope" in Bell's speech at the end comes from his ability to realize he can't reconcile his dreams with the reality around him. (which, of course, he realizes once it's too late)
It sounds mundane, but I doubt Tommy Lee Jones' face would wear the expression it does when the movie cuts to black if the intended idea was a hopeful one."
I don't think the Coen's were even as subtle about it as this, considering the dialogue note on which they cut to black.
"And then I woke up."
Oh, man. I'm actually going to see this movie a second time in an hour and a half. It will literally be the first time I've ever seen a movie twice (in the theater) that I really don't want to experience again.
I blame all of you.
Yeah. "And then I woke up" is a line loaded with subtext, regardless of whether or not you end a movie on it.
I've been meaning to see this movie twice, but haven't gotten to see it again yet. I am curious to hear from more people who've given it a second viewing. Does it seem stronger or weaker the second time around? Vaguer or more specific? More timeless or more obviously of-the-moment?
I was unhappy with my first review and so wrote a follow-up after my second viewing, Matt. The complicated answer to your questions is all of the above: a stronger film just in terms of following (mostly) everything that happens; a weaker film regarding the character of Chigurh, whom the Coens seem to want to be both omnipotent and fallible at the same time (hence much of the confusion in the last 20 minutes). For me, he's less scary and a shade more ridiculous the second time around. This is my favorite movie of the year so far, but it's got some holes.
I saw the film a second time, after watching the film first and then reading the novel. The second time, I was viewing it as allegory - and it was a very different experience.
I also think you can (need to) bookend Bells opening and closing monologues because they provide insight/context for the Chigurh/Bell tension.
Re: Bell's dream - it's a pretty overt reference to a prophecy in the gospel of Luke.
On second viewing: More timeless; stronger, but I think not more so than any very well made film is going to be when you're able to take in details and layers that you were unable to absorb the first time through. Vaguer or more specific? Um, both?
On Bell's dream at the end, the second one: For me, my first reactions were confirmed. Hopeful? Not exactly. But comforting in that they assure Bell that despite his own feelings of failure and inadequacy, his father loves him, knows he did his job as best as he could -- and, as well as any of them did facing the same "nothing new" horrors.
Bell's expression at the end there strikes me as one of deep emotion, perhaps a kind of release of the sense of duty he'd held onto for so long, which would be at once painful and new -- potential freedom of acceptance, but also the acknowledgment that his life is coming to a close. But . . . well, now it's going to sound like I'm talking about another movie, but I can't help hearing his wife saying, "I'm not retired," and wondering if Bell, who's clearly at sixes and sevens sitting there without his work, is going to go back. I know, I know, that's a different picture, but, still, why do they have her say that like that? Anyway, back on track. I do not find Bell's final words hopeless, nor his expression hopeless.
The cut to black is, to me, a somewhat irritating reminder that we're not watching a sentimental film. "Don't get too carried away with romanticizing these dreams; this is still a disturbing, ambiguous film." Similarly, with his saying "And then I woke up." I don't truly feel we're meant to take that as "and then I woke up to the grim reality of what life really is." That's too easy. But it is another way of countering something that could, God forbid, slip into a kind of unironic sentimentality that must be avoided, sometimes to a fault. However, since the Coens rarely move so far in that direction that something can't be read another way, I can just as easily see that line as the final line of anyone telling any dream, particularly in the context of a man, the only man in this movie, able to sit at breakfast with a woman who loves him and understands him. What he's gone through ain't nothing new, and she knows that.
BUT what really tripped me up this second time through was realizing in a much more specific way that Bell is never really going after Chigurh like a law man should, in the way he should. We come away from the movie thinking, hell, that monster was unstoppable (or, with broader more philosophical versions of that same idea.) Maybe true. But there are numerous instances of Bell simply not doing all he could. The most explicit is at the trailer park when his deputy (Garrett Dillahunt!) upon realizing that they've just missed him says they've got to go put this out immediately. Bell says what are we going to say, looking for man who just drank milk? Huh??? The woman in the office there could have described him to a tee.
He's given up. He doesn't believe he's capable of stopping what he sees as an un-understandable force of evil. He still wants to save Moss, and does go out of his way to try to do that. He sees Moss as an over-matched pig-headed innocent, identifies with him, and wants to be able to protect him, save him.
He fails. But is that because we can't fight these forces, or because Bell thinks he can't?
I agree with Dragon management. Carla Jean is the real hero of the movie. But does her triumph compensate for the obvious satisfaction we are denied? Hell, no.
The comment about "did my eyes deceive me or was his light green?" raises an interesting point. I believe his light was green and after spending two plus hours with this character and every situation you can think of he gets hit by a car. Love the thought of Chigurh leaving this world in such a banal way.
Great essay! I purposefully avoided reading it until I was able to see the film on Saturday. Like many other commenters have alluded to, it was an overwhelming experience and I've been puzzling over what I saw for the last two days. For me BLOOD SIMPLE, MILLERS CROSSING and FARGO have been the perfect Coen Bros tryptych. It's now a quartet.
I had no knowledge of the novel and so had the thought as the screen faded to black that Sheriff Bell DID fall victim to Chigurh in the hotel room and his subsequent scenes with Ellis and his wife were occuring in some sort of afterlife state (hell? purgatory?). I see now that is probably not a valid theory/interpretation...if such can ever be said of a Coen film.
A few rambling thoughts:
- Excellent review, Matt, as always.
- If you like Kelly Macdonald, you should check out Two Family House, an excellent little film from a few years back. She was also in Gosford Park and Intermission (well, I enjoyed Intermission). Um, and she was Peter Pan at the end of Finding Neverland.
- On the green light, I'm pretty sure it's actually the second time he goes through an intersection that he gets hit, but with the first intersection, there was something about the framing of it that I was actually expecting him to get hit. (Maybe it was in the trailer?)
- Someone at another site was asking what we were supposed to take away from the last scene with Chigurh. My quick response was that it was such an obvious callback to Llewellyn's earlier scene that Chigurh is now where Llewellyn was then, which is not a good sign for him. I know he took out Stephen Root, but does that mean no one else is coming after the money? Granted, Chigurh is more capable than Llewellyn (he knows enough to buy silence as well as the jacket), but he's now the prey, not the hunter. That's just a theory, though.
- I wasn't all that crazy about Bardem's performance, and this seems to be just me. But the character was just so over-the-top and theatrical, from the haircut to the exotic weapon to the coin-tossing, it became too much for me. (Then again, if he's not supposed to be real, it may make more sense.)
- Did Chigurh kill the accountant? We don't know how he answered the question.
- Yeah, Llewellyn did try to go and bring water to the injured man, but how many hours later? Even if he wants to get the money away, he still waited until the middle of the night. (Also, it turns out there's a river not that far away, which someone who goes out hunting in that area regularly would presumably know.) If he'd done the right thing at the start, he'd have been much better off.
I think the thing that bugs me most about the idea that Chigurh isn't really in the motel room, that he is either supernatural in this sequence, or a figment of Bell's imagination, is that the Coens, it is safe to assume, are well-versed in film theory. And isn't the first thing you learn Eisenstein's theory of montage? The way in which disparate shots can be cut together to form a reaction? (The example I was told was a shot of a branch snapping, and a second shot of a deer looking up. Two completely separate images, but together you assume the deer is reacting to the branch.)
Anyway, the cutting in the film suggests that Chigurh is looking at Bell's reflection in the key lock cylinder. This can't be accidental. The Coens know exactly what they are doing, and this sequence would not be put there haphazardly. I believe the sequence goes:
Bell approachs motel door
Sees cattlegun-blown lock, considers it
Reflection in lock
Chigurh looking at door (and presumably, the reflection)
Must. See. Movie. Again.
To me it is cut as though Chigurh is behind the door. The problem is, though, that when Bell opens the door, Chigurh's feet would have to be about four inches long to fit in the space left -- the door appears to open virtually all the way.
I do agree that there is a suggestion of the supernatural about Chigurh's imperviousness. But not in a literal way. I can't buy that he simply disappears. That would be ludicrously inconsistent.
But where the heck is he? I understand the idea of frustrating or subverting our expectations, but I don't understand the usefulness of this kind of confusion.
One more thing to throw into the mixer...was anyone else told the story as a kid about looking through a keyhole? That if you did, you would either see the Devil or a ghost?
That just occured to me in thinking about the motel scene, and Bell looking through the blown keyhole...
I thought maybe Chigurh was hiding under the bed in the motel room.
Nomi, you touched upon one of my problems with the movie: Bell is not a good lawman. He spends most of his time whining about how times have changed (granted, it's Tommy Lee Jones in laconic Southern delivery, but to me it still registers as whining), he doesn't diligently follow up leads, and he continually destroys evidence at crime scenes.
Forensic science wasn't nearly as advanced in 1980, but they still had stuff like fingerprints. If Chigurh already had a record, maybe they could've circulated a photo of him or something?
I just didn't have much respect for Bell, which I think is problematic when his character is intended to carry significant moral weight.
I'd like to change my previous post just a bit. It helps to "re-read" the post in word (i need the cheater spell check help).
I also added my last bit of opinion regarding the line "Then I woke up". I end the post with my thoughts on this. Thanks.
**************
In my opinion the 'message' of the movie was left for us in the last speech of the sheriff (Jones) where he describes not one, but two dreams.
The first dream was about receiving 'something' from his father while in town. The sheriff believes it was money, but he wasn't sure. Whatever it was 'he lost it' and felt devastated for doing so.
The second dream was about being on a perilous journey with his father. His father went on ahead, left him behind, and the sheriff hoped he was going to make a fire.
Then the movie ends.
Now, before I give my interpretation as to the message of the movie we can all agree that about three quarters of the way through the movie it changed - dramatically. For me, it started when the cowboy, Lewelyn (spelling?), was all of a sudden found dead in that hotel room. I don't know about you, but that was really abrupt. For me, he was the guy I was rooting for so when he all of sudden showed up dead ... well, at that point I said to myself, "This movie is not going to be about what I thought it was going to be about ... about the money, the drugs, the bad guy, the good guy, etc. It "MUST" be about something else."
So, I started to look for something else and I found out loud and clear in the last speech of the movie - the two dreams.
That being said, here's my take:
1. The two dreams are prefaced by the movie itself and they change the movie entirely – from what we all thought was the "plot" to becoming simply a "point" trying to be made. And in my opinion the point is this: we are an absolute mess. There is too much random violence and senseless evil stampeding all around us. And we are focused way too much on this violence b/c of the pleasure we receive from watching it (or participating in it). We thought the whole point of the movie was the cat-mouse game between the cowboy and the killer ... and right about as we were going to get to the climax of that storyline the director's pretty much pulled the plug on us as to say, "Ah-hah. We caught you all with your hand in the cookie jar! See how titillated you've become with this violence, money, drugs, etc." Taking this away from us right when we wanted it most shows us exactly what we want so much. What a genius way to show us.
2. We are in such a mess b/c whatever fathers have passed down to their young sons the sons are confused about what they actually got. Additionally, "whatever" it is they were supposed to receive from their fathers while young sons they've gone ahead and lost it anyways (the first dream).
3. The sons are still alone today in their scary, perilous journey through life - REGARDLESS OF AGE. Not only did fathers not pass down to their sons whatever it is we all needed them to have in order for our society to escape the epidemic of vile, random, and senseless evil acts AND our entertainment of it, the 2nd dream reveals that we as sons are still not getting what we need from our father's today. Our fathers have left us and we're still holding on to a hope without hope they've gone ahead to make us a fire (warmth, light, security, etc). But, just as the inference in the movie was one of despair and defeat, we too in our hearts know there's no fire up ahead. Dad is gone. He' left us and we're on our own to fend for ourselves on a long, cold, lonely dark road.
Lastly, we need to start as the movie ended, “Then I woke up.”
We must wake up. We must wake up and stop the violence. We must train our sons, as young men, to be men and stand up for what is right and good. We must as fathers pursue the “fire” in our dark journey. We’ve been left no light, path, or company, but we must move forward with the “hope” of the fire being the best light to guide us. And, we must as fathers build that fire WITH our sons, showing them how to build it for their sons to follow.
Just my opinion and what I took from the movie. Great movie in that regard.
Re: Craig’s Coens’ [w]holes: Chigurh’s as omnipotent as Death and as fallible as the universe. And so should Chigurh be 'less scary and a shade more ridiculous' at second glance; a slave to “Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men”. When all, all is said and done, Carla Jean’s defiance outlives, transcends the skulking, pathetic, absurd cipher who only kills to cover his backs, and checks his boots for tracks. Death be not presumptuous;
like my comments.
I can't believe nobody has picked up on a very important part of the film just before the crash. It's the only time we see the behind Chigurh's mask, a clue to what he was and how life shaped him. I'm referring of course to his reaction to the boys on the bikes with the clicking from the spokes, an expression washes across his face almost Mona Lisa like. Is he thinking about the innocence of youth, his own one time innocence or indeed what it happened in his youth that made him the way he is?
Here's my take on the Bell/Chigurh scene in the hotel room. In the scene immediately preceding it, Bell & his deputy marvel at how Chigurh returns to the scene of his own crime (killing the hotel proprieter @ the hotel eagle), to kill again (carson wells). I think that this thought is in Bell's mind when he approaches the hotel door behind the police tape--he imagines that this is the case here as well and that Chigurh is behind the door waiting for him. You can see the resolve in Bell's face as he decides to enter anyway, letting fate be what it may. So it seems to me that it was Bell's imagination at work, and that Chigurh wasn't actually behind the door. I do like how it is left a bit ambiguous though!
Greets all ...
Here's my take on the final Bell/Chigurh scene in the hotel room.
In the scene immediately preceding it, Bell & Old Deputy sherif speak of life (theres "NO Counrty for Old Men"....Realy.) and Chigurh's audatious returns to the scene of his own crime (killing the hotel proprieter @ the hotel eagle), to kill again (Carson Wells). I think that this thought is in Bell's mind when he approaches the hotel door behind the police tape--he imagines that this is the case here as well and that Chigurh is in the room.
You can see the resolve in Bell's face as he decides to enter anyway, letting fate be what it may. Most blogs I read say Chigurh is behind the door.
The film trick- is in the split screen of both Chigurh and the dead bolt hole in the door.The hard to see Split-Screen showed Chigurh on the left and door hole on the right.
THIS confuses the viewer into thinking Chigurh was behind the doorhiges. He was UNDER the BED.
The next view of the hole only shows it from the eye view angle of Chigurh's under the bed position.
It seems to me that it was Bell's poor detective work, sitting on the bed etc...and that Chigurh simply did not kill him because Bell "did not see him" like the Accountant had.
I do not really like how this type of filmography has to be anylzed to this level of ambiguous depth though!
I also never could figure out why Chigurh deserted the money under the tree in the first place.
A plant maybe?....he had the homing device....Perhaps he was cleverly caught by the cop he strangled.
But a great movie anyway.
Wolfgang Youngs
Poughkeepsie NY
shoulda read the book fellow, lot of stuff you praise the filmmakers for came strait out of the book.
anon: I did read the book prior to a second viewing of the film. This is not an article about the differences between the movie and the book.
The point of this piece is not to imply that the Coens are responsible for ever single element of characterization and plotting. If there were things that the Coens didn't like or agree with, they would have changed them outright or altered them to bring them in line with what they wanted -- and they did make changes, some major, some minor. The purpose of the piece is to show how their adaptation of a source results in a movie consistent with the values and themes expressed in their other work. For "Goodfellas," Martin Scorsese kept the core of Nicholas Pileggi's book "Wiseguys" and changed and embellished a lot of the particulars, but the movie is still an expression of the director's artistic sensibility and world view.
"shoulda read the book fellow, lot of stuff you praise the filmmakers for came strait out of the book."
i agree. i love the book. i love the movie too although i don't think they dealt with the character of the sheriff as well as they could have and i think that's kind of essential to the take-home message of the movie.
anyway, as far as the sheriff/chigurh scene in the motel room, i just wanted to throw some comments out there because i'm writing a paper about this movie for a class right now and this scene is driving me fucking nuts! :) i've read a lot of good interpretations but i just wanted to point out some erroneous observations that have been made as well as air a couple of questions about the scene that bother me.
1. the shot of chigurh inside the room does not show the shot-out lock on the right. instead, what you see is a circle of yellow light shining through the hole in the lock and onto a wall. therefore, chigurh is not behind the door. instead, he must be against the back wall, or i guess really in the back left corner of the room (what would be the left as you enter the room).
2. based on this, i think my favorite explanation is that SOMEHOW (though it's kind of a stretch), the sheriff does not see chigurh when he enters the room, and chigurh slips out while the sheriff is in the bathroom. i agree with what others have said, that chigurh doesn't kill people unless he needs to.
3. what still BOTHERS me, though, is that after the movie makes such a point of showing us that the bathroom window is LOCKED, the sheriff HOLSTERS HIS GUN and sits down on the bed with his head in his hands! the first time i saw this movie i thought the window was unlocked, and that the sheriff therefore presumed that chigurh had escaped through the window and that the scene was now safe. obviously that's not what happened. i guess i just don't get why they make such a point out of the window being locked if the explanation i described is correct. to me, the locked window screams, "CHIGURH'S STILL IN THE ROOM! TURN AROUND WITH YOUR GUN DRAWN!" but the sheriff's actions obviously don't jibe with that.
so what's the deal?! :P great movie, but now i'm going crazy!
Rachel: I went into detail about this scene, complete with screen shots. Might help you. I'm not sure we agree on where Chigurh is standing in the shot of the light coming through the door, but when Bell opens the door Chigurh certainly isn't behind it.
It is interesting that Bell sits down on the bed and puts away his gun. Then again, he's seen enough of Chigurh's carnage to think that if Chigurh was in the room and wanted to kill him that he'd be dead by that point.
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