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Review: No Country for Old Men (2007; Joel and Ethan Coen)
"Good but not great."
The new film by Joel and Ethan Coen is well-staged, well-filmed, well-acted, and in many ways works as an impressive "how-to" for conversations, shoot-outs, and impersonations of a geographical dialect, all of which have always been a strong point of the Coens. However, I've been stuck for a few days now trying to write my thoughts on this film. No Country for Old Men is good but I may be buying my own bullshit when saying that the film is not great... maybe. The issue is with the possibly-moot, possibly-only-theoretical difference between a director telling his own story and a director impersonating another storyteller's take on the same story. There is a clear difference between the two beyond the world of pastiche or homage. Even my idol Godard suffered from such a malady between 1968 and 1972 when he made films mixing politics and cinema in ways with which he has since admitted that he didn't fully agree. Though I doubt he would have admitted the misdirection to himself at the time as he was both somewhat lost as a filmmaker and in love with a much younger woman who was radical but artistically unamusing. So it was art he wanted to make vs. art he thought he wanted to make. Real? Trivial? A similar criticism of the Coens follows....
I don't buy that the amoral, survivalist, hell-on-Earth landscape -- one that Werner Herzog surely loves "against my better judgment" in Burden of Dreams -- is anything more than the Coens' own impersonation of Cormac McCarthy. Tommy Lee Jones' Bell incessantly mopes over the state of humanity, something that becomes even more repetitious when paired with the nightmarish game of cat and mouse between Josh Brolin's Moss and Javier Bardem's Chigurh. Does the Coens' need to construct this hell-on-Earth mean that -- at least to them -- this world needs to be constructed in the first place? Is this a world that they see for themselves or a world that they see only in McCarthy's novel? And if it doesn't exist for them independantly of the novel, how does that change the meaning of the film? Or is it merely to convince themselves that such a place does exist? (I know repetition of Bell's monologues alone isn't enough to prove my point, so I'll say the rest is just my own instinct that the Herzogian landscape is disease-of-the-week for the Coens, or worse, a hipster requesting Iggy Pop on a jukebox.) If so -- and I'm leaning that way -- then I can't help but think the Coen Brothers aren't sharing their own thoughts but are relaying the message of someone else's story, and I'm not sure what that means in terms of reading the film. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing when it comes to directing a movie, but the result of this specific issue may explain the lack of thematic development in the film as a whole. Bell's thoughts carry less and less insight with each reading of them, Moss's actions never surprise us, and Chigurh is predictably sociopathic, despite any momentary suspense of an individual coin toss's outcome. Within the first twenty minutes of the film, we get the point. What remains is the mise-en-scene and its default commentary on comparable mise-en-scene in generic films of its time, which at this point is always the consolation prize of any film directed by genuine talent. Now the Coens have genuine talent for sure (just look at their many how-to's), but maybe I'm just now realizing they can't develop their themes or concepts beyond the simple log-line. I'll have to re-watch Fargo to see if that has always been the case.
UPDATE: More thoughts on the film here.
7 comments:
Here is my own recent review. I definitely thought the film added up to much more than you did, and I think the Coens' engagement with McCarthy's worldview and ideas is anything but superficial. The Coens' films have always been concerned with the workings of morality in a corrupt world, and in that sense McCarthy seems to be a perfect match for their sensibilities.
This may very well be their darkest and grimmest film (though by no means without humor), but that's not even entirely attributable to McCarthy, since from my perspective they even consciously diluted what humor exists in his novel. Then again, I've seen other reviews which have credited the Coens with increasing the humor of the original, so maybe I'm totally off base. But the only instance I can see of added humor is the mariachi band, whereas at other points (the recurrring dead dog I mention in my review) they have purposefully called attention to the darkest elements of the film and subdued the dialogue's verbal wit.
For me, this film was much more than just an accumulation of genre references, though those are there too. The Coens use genre here, as always, as a way to explore issues of morality and violence. I especially appreciated the Coens' little Funny Games moment, where the braying deputy, laughing at a grim newspaper story, stands in for an audience similarly willing to laugh at atrocities. The brilliance of this film is the way it complicates such laughter and easy viewing habits, setting up a morbid identification with the brutal killer Chigurh only to upset that identification in the end by emphasizing his own equal place in a world of chance violence.
I'm still thinking about this film, and it's by no means easy to unpack what it's doing, but I think that's a side effect of the film's complex relationship with its source novel, rather than the Coens' supposed inability to clearly articulate their ideas. Nothing is spelled out here, but I can't see that as a bad thing.
But what is it about a film being dark that makes it impressive? On one extreme, isn't it just another anti-genre that questions our enjoyment of violence? After more than forty years of this sort of commentary, I have a hard time calling it brilliant.
Similarly, like I wrote about Arronofsky and his morbid fascination with anal dildos (all while telling us its horrible, of course) there is clearly something hypocritical about basking in violence and then using a moral code to tell us it's tragic. Maybe the Coens handle it a bit better than most, but this is just a trump card used to show they are socially conscious about their love of violence.
No Country for Old Men, for me, is all about tone. More to come soon, I'm about ready to pass out.
Well, I certainly don't think the film is great just because it's "dark," and I think Joe is onto something by saying it's all about tone. It's a film about morality, chance, and violence. The need to confront such violent immorality head-on is reflected on the one hand in the story, in Sheriff Bell's failure to deal with the evil of Chigurh, because he's mired in a backward-looking morality that assumes Chigurh is a unique product of the modern age, rather than an eternal representation of the worst in men. On the other hand, this confrontation with violence from a moral standpoint is reflected in every facet of the film's style and structure, which is set up to encourage the audience's engagement with the moral issues behind this narrative. Such questioning might not be totally unique, and like I said at least one scene reminded me of Funny Games, but I do think the Coens engage in very interesting ways with McCarthy's novel.
One may "get the point" of Bardem's novelty early in the film, but to "get the point" of No Country for Old Men, you need to take the film the whole way through. I had to read this post three times to really understand what you were trying to say, Eric, as these issues you take up almost feel critical for the sake of nit-picking. I don’t mean that as an insult, of course, yet why would it bother you that the Coens have adopted these themes from another source? As I said earlier, No Country for Old Men is purely about tone. It isn’t “dark” and is it “lamenting.” I don’t so much see the landscape of the film as the Coens’ vision of McCarthy’s “hell-on-earth” as much as the question, “is earth hell?”
I still don’t quite get the issues you’ve taken up, but thought I’d throw something out there anyway.
Yes, there is nothing wrong with their adapting a novel. But the themes of this story appear -- to me at least -- as only an aesthetic coating as opposed to a real attitude of the Coens. And that too is fine, but then the film is entertainment and I'm not sure how to treat it any other way. So I'm nitpicking the themes because they seem a little exhibitionist and not quite as honest as I was expecting them to be. It's as if the Coens aren't IN the film but are instead watching it from the sidelines. And I think the other aesthetic choices such as tone, staging, editing, acting styles, etc all work as great entertainment or as interesting commentary on decisions other directors have made when faced with similar subject matter. But that's as close this film gets to art, and even then it's a bit masturbatory.
Similarly, at some point punk became just an aesthetic. Many current bands that exploit that sound or its "attitude" don't really have it, they just like how it looks/sounds and wear it as such. I think the Coens are the same way with their depiction of hell on earh, or as you put it "is hell earth?" Godard's Alphaville had the same issues to me and it's the main reason why I think it's minor Godard, despite its popularity in certain circles.
And yes, this is most definitely nit-picking.
So, what is it that leads you to believe that they aren't IN it?
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