I saw this movie last weekend, loved it enough to go buy the book and read it immediately, loved that to, and have spend the time since then feeling unequal to the task of writing anything about it. But via Ross here's a very interesting essay on the film by Matt Zoller Seitz.
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No Country for Old Men
17 Nov 2007 02:08 pm
Comments (44)
tootootootootoo!
it hurts my eyes!
If this is your first taste of Cormac McCarthy, you are in an enviable position. Each of his novels is worth its weight in gold. Literally. Greatest living Mercan writer, no doubt. The earliest ones, Blood Meridian, Outer Dark, Child of God are unlike anything you've ever laid eyes on. I've read every one of his books several times, some several, several times.
"The Road" is a severely disquieting book, the first I have read of McCarthy. And the "No Country" movie makes me want to read the book immediately as well.
I don't have much confidence in his rendering of female characters, but other than that...
I loved the review enough to read 10-12 other pieces on the site. There is talk in the article about NY critics being oh so wrong about the Coen's and condescension, but I am so so sure we are supposed to take Marge in Fargo with the landscape painting or the trailer-trash domestic bliss in Raising Arizona or Lebowski completely without irony and with unreserved admiration. Remember, the kidnapping victim did die in Fargo, and Marge drives from the scene, after a little clucking at the waste, with "what a beautiful day." I despised her, and recognized her from my years in the midwest. Bergmann pessimism Americanized, shouldn'ta let those Scandys in.
Are the Coens nihilists? Close enough for me to like em.
I second the praise of McCarthy. Wow. And I found "The Road" too disturbing (as a father) to finish, but my wife loved it. I'm listening to "No Country" now, and to be honest, it certainly doesn't rank as his best.
Just in passing, and since this basic plot reminds me a little of Dog Soldiers/Who'll Stop the Rain, I gotta wonder why McCarthy gets such props and Robert Stone, who last I heard was still doing good and relevant work, has been nearly forgotten? Stone is I think more "literary" and less minimalist than McCarthy, and stuff like allusions, context, and mise-en-scenes more complicated than the cowboy west may be more than the current generation can handle. The generation of the comic book.
As a fan of the Coen Brothers, I decided to read the book first since their style is so distinctive, I knew reading the book after would make it hard to judge the book.
I'm not sure why McCarthy gets so much praise. I've tried to read "The Road," but I can't get past the fact that nothing happens and the father isn't that interesting. The conversations aren't that interesting. The travels (as far as I've gotten) don't reach any points of interest. It's almost over-the-top, like a canvas covered evenly with black paint. What little content appears to be maudlin. I think I lost patience when we learned that the mother committed suicide after whatever killed the world. It just seems over-wrought to the point of comedy.
"No Country..." did seem to be a good fit for the Coen Brothers. It was hard reading it and not interpreting it with a Coen Brothers' sensibility - Chigur's patter is funny in an absurdist kind of way. Is that what McCarthy was getting at, or was he really hoping that the "killer with his own code" was in any way a deep idea?
"No Country..." felt like it would have been a much better short story.
...stuff like allusions, context, and mise-en-scenes more complicated than the cowboy west may be more than the current generation can handle. The generation of the comic book.
Disabuse yourself of such generalizations. If younger people today have perhaps less reverence than you'd like for the kind of "stuff like allusions, context, and mise-en-scenes" (and let's not omit Marxist politics from that list) which Robert Stone and other Sixties-era writers seem to represent for you, it's maybe an understandable backlash against the era when that kind of high-formalist approach was the only literary game in town.
Misplaced Patriot: Try Blood Meridian. But brace yourself first.
Bob McManus: Robert Stone has several extraordinary books, but a couple of weaker ones too.
Oh, and one thing to realize is that Chigurh's choice of weapons is also a comment on the domestication of the west. In the past, a man like Chigurh would kill with a gun, they way that you kill a wolf or bear or hunted game. Heck, you even use a gun to hunt rabbits. Chigurh views his prey with no respect or care or fear. He is indifferent to their fates.
Blood Meridian.
Here's an excerpt from my review of the movie:
Developing video games is consuming more and more of today's creative talent, with little benefit to show for it in the broader culture. Traditional art forms such as poetry, music, and painting tended to inspire each other forward in a virtuous cycle, but video gaming, a mostly solitary vice, has been a cultural black hole. Game-inspired films, for instance, have largely failed, because watching a movie star frenetically shoot bad guys is missing the point of playing, which is to shoot them yourself.
Finally, Joel and Ethan Coen ("Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski"), the most gifted of the many brother-act frauteurs making films today, have figured out how to bring the pleasures of a problem-solving first person shooter game to the movie theatre. Strangely enough, they've done it in their first literary adaptation, a faithful rendition of "No Country for Old Men," the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, an acclaimed master of American prose.
Despite the 74-year-old McCarthy's august reputation, his book is a surprisingly high-energy art-pulp Western. It's essentially a chase featuring two highly competent antagonists: a West Texas good old boy (who, while antelope hunting, finds $2 million among the bullet-riddled bodies of Mexican drug-runners) tracked by a relentless killer hired to retrieve the money. ...
The Coen Brothers have discovered that the paradoxical key to making a video game movie is to slow down the action, allowing the viewer to think along with the hero and villain. Not since the sniper scene that makes up the second half of Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam film "Full Metal Jacket" has a movie played fairer with the audience in detailing the physical puzzles confronting the characters. How, for example, could you best hide two cubic feet of $100 bills in your motel room? And how could your enemy find such well-concealed money?
I know I've seen a well-crafted film when I walk out of the theatre yet still feel like I'm living in the movie. Leaving the amnesia thriller "Memento," for example, I was convinced I'd never remember where I'd parked my car. With "No Country," this post-movie spell lasted longer than I can ever recall. Even the next night, every car that passed me on a quiet street seemed an eerie, sinister harbinger of sudden violence.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/11/no-country-for-old-men.html
From the 12/03/07 issue of The American Conservative
"which Robert Stone and other Sixties-era writers"
"Despite the 74-year-old McCarthy's august reputation"
Apparently McCarthy is about 5 years older than Stone.
http://www.brassland.org/ahb/writing/archives/2007/01/stone_warm_sobe.html
Interview with Stone 2007 ...bask in the hippieness. Dude hung at La Honda. Far out. But I link for this:
RS:[Kids today]: But I think there is now a kind of moralizing, and I mean moralizing as opposed to moral consciousness. A conformity of attitudes that seems a little dolorous."
"People who were making a lot of money in the '60s were kind of ashamed of it. Poverty was really kind of valued, and today is a very materialistic and really cynical era, in spite of the moralism" ...RS
The bourgeois opportunistic schlubs in Dog Soldiers not only got away from their heroin deal, but probably saved their marriage and souls along the way. McCarthy is writing to an audience that demands death for sinners.
High-falutin pulper.
No Country the book is dreadful. Chigurh is a Batman-level villain - perfectly unbelievable as a human being. And the blowhard lawman just will not shut up. Perhaps the movie is better.
The Road is a mediocre example of post-apocalypse genre fiction.
All the Pretty Horses, on the other hand, is not bad at all.
quite a furor has started here in chicago with jonathan rosenbaum's review of the film in the Reader (www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/moviereviews/2007/071108/)
frankly, i think he's right: this movie's popularity does not say much about the times we live in. A minor McCarthy novel turned into a cynical violent movie.
Best living American writer - Philip Roth.
No Country.. is the weakest of the McCarthy books that I've read. It's way over the top in violence. The entire nation would have been swept up in the news of such a crime wave. I do think it's ironic that the sheriff muses that things have gotten worse in the modern era, but his own family's generational saga is full of bloodshed and loss.
Best living American writer - Philip Roth.
People who say that are the same people who think Smashing Pumpkins was the best band of the 90s.
Whoever above called "No Country for Old Men" and art-pulp western, I think got it right. When I read it a couple years ago, the only other McCarthy novel I'd read was "Child of God", which is quite another thing altogether, but I remember thinking that it seemed more like the author's take on the crime thriller genre than a serious literary novel.
Whether you like that novel or not, there's no denying that McCarthy is a writer of supreme gifts and power. I've read all his novels save "Suttree" since first picking up "Child of God" two years ago, and there hasn't been one that I haven't enjoyed or been stirred by. He's certainly not for everyone, but for the combination of beautiful and grotesque, I don't think you can possibly beat the combination of "Outer Dark", "Child of God", and "Blood Meridian". All quite disturbing, but all written very beautifully and powerfully.
The movie was good. The Zoller Seitz piece, not so good. Among other things, he thinks the title comes from "The Second Coming", presumably because it's the only Yeats poem he's familiar with. (It's from "Sailing to Byzantium".)
Much as I admire the video-game-on-film aspect of "No Country for Old Men," as a satisfying story it can't hold a candle to "Fargo." Frances McDormand's eight months pregnant character in "Fargo" may not look like a sheriff, but she sure gets the job done. In contrast, Tommie Lee Jones' character looks like an archetypal sheriff, but, in his loquacious way, he turns out to be frustratingly ineffectual.
Beware the temptation to over-intellectualize the film, to relate it to the war in Iraq or whatever else pundits are programmed to do. In this movie, the Coen Bros. have expertly worked out how to push certain buttons in the brains of males with 3-digit IQs. It's not worth trying to come up with high-minded rationalizations for why you think the film is cool.
I think the Coen brothers purposely work to demonstrate the bankrupt nature of the viewpoint that our generation is uniquely bad in one of the last scenes of the movie...when the injured ex-cop tells about the brutal murder in 1909.
Okay, for some reason I hunted up the novel and read it straight thru tonight, which makes it one of maybe a half-dozen literary novels I have read in 25 years. Then I remembered why I stoppoed reading good novels back in the early 80s, because the good ones are really fucking depressing. I take back what I said about McCarthy.
Sailer, as always, is totally wrong. Of course the book is about Iraq, and about the country that committed Iraq.. And Jamie, your generation is not uniquely bad. All generations are equally bad.
What can I say? I am an older man, and we older men almost always believe the country is going to hell in a handbasket, and we are almost always absolutely right.
No no, best living American writer- Gore Vidal.
I am really suprised to hear anything positive about the 'no country for old men' book. Cormac McCarthy was a brilliant writer--up through the first ~200 pages of the crossing (the 'wolf' story there is to my mind among the finest pieces of american writing, ever).
In all subsequent books, the plots and characters (never a particular strength) became quite simply horrible....it is painful to see a great writer write so poorly. That said, while reading the book, it certianly felt like a perfect movie, and I could take great comfort knowing that I couldn't be disappointed in the movie.
If the book is "about" anything currently topical, it's not Iraq, it's about the vicious drug cartel violence in Mexico that's been spilling over into Texas in recent years. (I know nobody follows the news from Mexico, but, trust me, it's quite lurid.) We've seen a ratcheting up of violence in border towns like Nuevo Laredo, with lots of beheadings, and killing of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez.
You'll note that most of McCarthy's books since he moved to Texas in mid-life are about the Hobbesian violence that has off-and-on been a feature of the Texas-Mexico borderlands since the 19th Century, and this is another one. It's about a West Texas good old boy out hunting antelope who stumbles upon a bunch of dead Mexican drug dealers and their $2 million. McCarthy's alter ego is the conservative old Texas border county sheriff who decides to retire because the new level of violence is so much more extreme than what he's used to.
On the other hand, the movie is explicitly set not in the present, but in 1980, when the Mexican border was a little quieter than it is now (and Iraq was a long ways off). 1980 was a peak year for drug killings in the powder cocaine trade, but that was then centered in Florida, not Texas.
The Coens's dating is based on a conversation where the Terminator-like hit man says a coin minted in 1958 is 22 years old. The book seems less clear about what year it is -- there's the same conversation about the coin, but there are more computers and other electronic gizmos than were actually around in 1980. Clearly, the Coens, who are master period piece set-decorators, are much more obsessive about what year it is than McCarthy, who is more into timeless myth. So, trying to figure out the year the story is set is a dead end for analysis.
In fact, non-technical analysis of the film is a dead-end in general. The movie's not really "about" anything in the news, no more than "Halo" is about the Law of the Sea Treaty. It's about pushing certain buttons in the male brain, which it does quite well.
McCarthy is the most overrated writer today. Once upon a time, there was more to art than an aestheticized love of killing.
In this movie, the Coen Bros. have expertly worked out how to push certain buttons in the brains of males with 3-digit IQs. It's not worth trying to come up with high-minded rationalizations for why you think the film is cool.
It's nice to see Sailer is consistent in his defense of unexamined prejudices.
Steve, seriously, why do you comment here? We all hate you. Really, sincerely hate you.
Haven't seen the movie, but in reading the book it seemed from the start as if McCarthy had written it with a movie in mind.
I like McCarthy, but I think this is his weakest effort--an attempt at something that Elmore Leonard and any number of others have done as well or better. Blood Meridian is McCarthy at his peak, and it's been downhill since then. I'd like to see anyone dare to make that movie.
I'd say that any writer that can put the Diamond Sutra in the mouth of a homicidal maniac is worth your time (Blood Meridan).
"The Coens's dating is based on a conversation where the Terminator-like..."
Wrong. Moss & the hitchiker are drinking beers outside the motel and Moss says he is 35-36 years old. Moss was a sniper in Vietnam and married a 16-yr-old Walmart clerk. So early 80s, unless McCarthy and the book are confused.
Whether there are deeper meanings and/or relevance to recent events depends partly on how seriously you take the italicized sections and the grumblings of at least two old men, Bell & McCarthy, and the bullshsit of Chigurh.
And I have read 20+ Elmore Leonard Books, and for a while a decade ago was reading "tough guy" books by the bucketload. Burke, Crais, Lincoln Childs, Harlan Coben...McCarthy was obviously more ambitious, it is in a short space, multi-generational.
I could see how a lot of people would find the themes disagreeable. What has survived in America is Bell & Chigurh. We really fucking suck, folks.
I'd say that any writer that can put the Diamond Sutra in the mouth of a homicidal maniac is worth your time (Blood Meridan).
I haven't seem the movie or read the book under discussion, but the kind of high-low juxtaposition you're referring to as a source of humor was something I loved--ten-plus years ago--in "Fargo" and "Pulp Fiction." Over the last decade, though, it's become vastly overused and now it's just tired, tired, tired.
You know, I get all medieval(parables, metaphors, allegories) as a habit, but as I was reading the final conversation between Clara Jean and Chigurh I kept thinking of America and Democrats and schmoes out there in the heartland.
Iraq is a mere symptom of a long disease.
"You don't have to do this" & "I don't deserve this". And Bell's line about if y'all got a bad enough dog in your yard the bad guys(Bush?, al-Qaeda?) don't come in.
Hammer gonna come down on this cesspool of a nation and everybody gonna cry for mercy. It ain't your fault and you don't deserve it but you're still gonna get crushed.
Blood Meridian is McCarthy at his peak, and it's been downhill since then. I'd like to see anyone dare to make that movie.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0983189/
2009. Ridley Scott. Yup, Ridley Scott.
I don't have very high expectations for a film treatment of "Blood Meridian". I don't care who does it, I can't imagine making an adaptation of that could both do justice to the book, and satisfy the Hollywood bottom line.
Also, I haven't seen the movie yet, but the scene between Moss's wife and Chigurh in book is some of the most gut wrenching prose I think I've ever read. Just shattering. Its pretty much on the basis of that scene alone that I'm still uncertain that I even want to see the film at all. Just too much to take.
There's also a film version of The road supposedly in the works.
I obviously liked the book. I don't know if I need to read more McCarthy, the art is just art, and the wisdom is not that far from my own world view.
I have to re-read the Zoller piece. Rosenbaum in Chicago is just an idiot. "America sure loves it's serial killers." 1) Chigurh is not a serial killer, just an efficient killing machine. 2) In the progression from Shane to Bonnie & Clyde to Network etc Americans are just fed up with being told that this is a world of justice.
Talking about efficient killing machines, and going off-topic, if Blackwater is given the mission of safely escorting Condi Rice thru Baghdad to the airport, it ain't Blackwater's fault if a hundred Iraqis die. Blackwater is not allowed to fail in that mission, and the problem is with whoever thinks Condi Rice is more valuable than 100 or 1000 Iraqi lives. Blackwater is just doing its job. FWIW, which ain't much, I think Condi Rice is worth about -100 dead dogs.
"No no, best living American writer- Gore Vidal."
God forbid.
"Best living American writer - Philip Roth"
Nope. And not Updike either.
Those who answer: Evan S. Connell or James Salter win the prize.
Over the last decade, though, it's become vastly overused and now it's just tired, tired, tired.
That would be relevant, if Blood Meridian hadn't been published in 1985.
Over the last decade, though, it's become vastly overused and now it's just tired, tired, tired.
That would be relevant, if Blood Meridian hadn't been published in 1985.
You caught me. Unfortunately, if McCarthy was ahead of his time it still doesn't make his approach feel any less dated to me today.
Saw the movie last night, it was a beautifully shot film (love that West Texas/New Mexico landscape). But I regret seeing it after American Gangster because of one part in that film makes No Country suddenly seem very stupid-- the scene where Denzel's mom begs him to not kill a cop.
Once Tommy Lee Jones tied the drug shootout to the murdered deputy (via the burnt out car), there's no way in hell a cop killer would be hunted by only a lone beat up Sheriff. You would have dozens of federal, state and local cops out looking for the guy and the odds are pretty good he'd be shot "resisting arrest".
Haven't seen this movie, but from the trailer it looks exactly like "Charlie Varrick," a Walter Matthau/Joe Don Baker thriller from 1973. Except in that one, the good guy wins.
In this movie, the Coen Bros. have expertly worked out how to push certain buttons in the brains of males with 3-digit IQs. It's not worth trying to come up with high-minded rationalizations for why you think the film is cool.
Guilty as charged! I loved this film. The bit with the Mariachi band playing to a wounded Josh Brolin in Mexico? Genius. Maybe I'm just easily amused.
Comments closed December 01, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I saw this movie last weekend, loved it enough to go buy the book and read it immediately, loved that enough to immediately move to the West, loved that enough to start stealing drug money, and loved that enough to actually become Javier Bardem by chanting ancient Sanskrit incantations.
It's been a helluva week.
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I'd say the correct reaction to loving the movie would be to rent some other Coen brothers movies, but then again, you are a writer's kid.
Posted by Petey | November 17, 2007 2:19 PM