My friend has a theory about the career trajectories of auteur directors–a pattern to their outright successes and brilliant failures; a line of best fit for wunderkinds if you will. Their first film shows their promise, but is ultimately messy or too close to a rote genre exercise. They follow that with a bold expression of their talent onto celluloid–oftentimes their early masterpiece. Emboldened by this success, they overextend themselves in their third film and create something of a monster, from which they learn some important lessons before continuing on with their careers. Map Soderbergh, Aronofsky, or any Anderson to this and you certainly wind up with some interesting points/fodder for arguments; hey, there are worse ways to spend a Saturday night. I’m not saying I completely agree, but this does come from the only person I know with an Academy vote, so maybe it’s worth more than I give it credit.
I’d like to extend this theory into the later years of a director’s career, at the point when the director corrals all of his hobby horses into one pen, trying to tame them for one more ride. This results in their “late masterpiece” even if its more a distillation than a leap forward. Looking at the critical reactions toward this year’s eventual Best Picture, No Country For Old Men (and earlier, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive), I feel like I’m on to something here. Maybe that makes me like the scientists who discovered Neptune–not by actually seeing it, but by seeing the reactions of things around it–but if so, I’m in good company.
No Country For Old Men takes its themes, tone, and sometimes even its scenes from the Coen Brothers’ back catalog, to the extent that it sometimes feels like a K-Tel Greatest Hits compilation. Even so, the elements are compiled with such a deft touch and soldered together with such delicious tension that the film stands head and shoulders above anything the Coens have released since the 90s.
[Obligatory Summation] Llewelyn (Josh Brolin from the Goonies–and, I posit, one cannot mention his name without also mentioning the Goonies), a Good Man, stumbles across a drug deal gone especially bad and finds himself embroiled in a hunt for the cash/drugs/take your pick by a Sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), a bounty hunter (Woody Harrelson), a bunch of Mexicans, and the scariest dude ever to wear a dutch boy haircut (Javier Bardem). Along the way the characters ponder how the world has become something they really don’t understand anymore… yadda, yadda, existential this and that, yadda, yadda, yadda. There are also cattle guns.
My knee-jerk reaction is to invoke Hitchcock here–we are talking suspense, after all–but I see more in common with Terrence Young’s 1967 film Wait Until Dark, in which Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman terrorized by intruders into her home. What the films share is a hideously outmatched protagonist for whom we pity; because film audiences are realists to the core, and the odds against are so great. Each small victory that Susy Hendrix (Hepburn) or Llewelyn gains only makes us bite our nails harder. Bundling each scene with complex emotions like joy and dread: that is the mark of great cinema.
What makes the film a real hoot to watch is the way the Coens use the off-beat handling of film conventions to heighten the suspense in every scene. From first sight we know that we’ve never seen a villain quite like Bardem’s Chigurh before, and this is why that haircut works so well: we have no idea what to expect from him. The suspense comes from the Coens only giving us enough information to know that something seriously terrible could happen at any moment.
This is the randomness imbued into the world of No Country For Old Men, and it’s what ultimately Llewelyn and the Sheriff rebel against: no good man wants to live in a world where the rules have changed but only the bad guys know. The setting of a Texan border town is apt: the borders of right and wrong have shifted, and what once was something that we could keep on the other side of our fences has now taken over our world too. This is the sadness of the aging man, nostalgia for a time when things made sense. It’s also the most mature statement the Coens have made in their careers, and, if the theory holds, their “late-period masterpiece.”
4 Comments
February 13, 2008 at 4:23 pm
As a hopelessly loyal fan of those who early in their careers tickle my fancy but later leave other peoples’ fancies completely untouched, I tip my cap to the above soliloquy, and I posit the following:
Chigurh is the good man.
Shock. Awe. Pandemonium. Why.
Ed Tom(my Lee Jones) is at a crossroads, much like Britney Spears in Crossroads (not Glitter, mind you). He faces Chigurh, whom he perceives as pure evil: An immoral, homicidal maniac the likes of which he’s never seen nor prepared to imagine. The soulless modernity which Chigurh represents is reason enough for Ed Tom to retire with his tail between his legs.
But take a second look at Chigurh. Cold-blooded killer, yes. Soulless, perhaps. But he always, always does what he says he will do. He honors his word—even with the dead. In a sense, unlike the old men who long for the good old days and cower in the present, Chigurh honors the past to the greatest extent possible and brings it to the present. Ed Tom gives his word to be sheriff and protect the people, but he’s unable to. Llewelyn vows to protect his wife, but can’t. Chigurh says he’ll get the money back, and he does.
In the final scene with Llewelyn’s (Josh Brolin, who was in the Goonies) wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), Chigurh upholds the bargain he made with Llewelyn before his death: namely, murdering Carla Jean because Llewelyn refused to spare her life in exchange for his own. Chigurh gave Llewelyn the option to save her life, but he tried to fight back instead. Chigurh was then obligated to uphold his promise. There is a purity to his methods, to his existence. Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson, who would have liked to have been in the Goonies) even describes Chigurh as principled; it’s the principles that are in question. He is principled in his refusal to accept hypocrisy. He redefines what it means to be good in a modern world based on morals of the past.
By Chigurh’s own rationalization, an encounter with him is death. All paths lead to him. This is where things get interesting. If Chigurh is the endroad, then what of the chaos. The film is riddled with references to dumb luck. Chigurh’s coin. The thirteenth floor. Every hotel room in some way associated with the number thirteen. The car crash at a green light. Chigurh is a character of chaotic order. This is what makes him frightening beyond recognition.
Little known fact: Cormac McCarthy’s novel was originally titled No Country For Old Men: One Eyed Willy’s Revenge. Widely known fact: I don’t understand what I just wrote.
February 13, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Steve, I admire your thesis. It is bold, it is intelligent, it is perhaps wrong.
I believe the film is something of a condemnation of value systems. If a set of rules governing one’s personal behavior (“principles”, for short) leads him to put a cattle gun to a man’s head, it has given rise to a value system that lacks any intrinsic morality.
True, Tommy Lee Jones gave up his badge. He also didn’t kill anybody. Yes, Josh Brolin put his wife on a bus. He also got her far away from Chigurh. These men may lack the principled nature of Chigurh, but they are not morally bankrupt as he is.
If I believe in the principle of hard work and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, I can let a homeless man starve. If I believe in the principle of finishing what one started, I can let thousands more Americans die in Vietnam. I can have my principles and do the wrong thing.
Chigurh has cobbled together a value system out of individual principles, not overarching moral values. He is a Reagan-era Republican. He is soulless.
February 14, 2008 at 12:59 am
It seems to me that the West (“Wild” or not) was and is filled with characters just like Chigurh. Take John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards from The Searchers for example. He too lives by a strict ethical code, and he too is feared by civilization because of it. Ethan winds up on the right side of morality and becomes a hero. Chigurh does not, and becomes a villain.
The question I have is whether Chigurh is really ushering in a new era, or rather, returning the West to a time before progress and civilization changed its brutal realities. Is it a step forward, a step backward, … or perhaps a step closer to … ?
It seems to me that John Ford was saying with The Searchers that civilization needs people like Ethan; he’s a morally ambivalent tool to re-set the world on its proper course. Chigurh acts more like one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but he too is setting the world on a different course, or at least preparing people like Ed Tom for what will come next.
What do you think? Is Chigurh just a post-modern Wayne?
May 20, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Have you heard the Jim Gaffigan bit about finally seeing “Heat” and wanted to talk about it, but it came out 9 years ago, so nobody else did? Well it’s kinda like that.
I don’t think Chigurh lives by a strict ethical code. He tends to do anything that lets him kill the most people (which, I guess, includes not killing a few people so that he can tell himself it wasn’t their destiny). Else how do you explain the bird he shoots at going over the bridge?
To undercut Mr. Duman’s thesis, when do you think Chigurh gets the money back? Further, when does Chigurh kill Moss?
The movie I saw featured the drug runners killing Moss at his hotel, and the silent Chigurh standing behind the boltless door is all in Bell’s head. Unless, Chigurh broke into Moss’s room, shot him, THEN the crazy Tech-9 drug runners came by the same hotel room, shot indiscriminately, jumped in the large truck and took off.
In the second place, what is the value system the story condemns. The whole reason Moss is followed in the first place is because he goes back to give a dying man a sip of water. Hardly a cold, and calculating move! Had he steeled himself to the dying man’s inevitable … death, then the transponder with the 50 foot radius would have been lost forever. Save for the VIN pried off his door, Moss was home free.
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Overall, I thought the book was mediocre and that the film was a faithful execution of a mediocre book. There were a lot of missed chances in this movie (for one, the fact that Chigurh keeps a gas-powered stun gun up his sleeve gives him the perfect opportunity to kill people in a manner resembling a blessing–open palm to the forehead; for two, even a terrible writer could craft some pretty amazing backstories for these partially sketched characters).
Done well, yes. But as I said on my blog post on the subject, “[I]t’s a swan dive the Coen brothers are attempting here, not one and a half somersaults with three and a half twists, in the Free position.”