A Hard-Boiled Western, Coen Style

The Coen Bros. take a bad novel, No Country for Old Men, and turn it into a decent flick

By D.K. Holm

It’s a good year that has a Coen Brothers release in it. Thus, you can say that 2007 is turning out to be a very good year, not solely because of the string of good, solid films from top directors, but because as of November, it has a Coen film on offer. We look forward to the Coens because their work is deft, tight, imaginative, both broadly and wryly amusing, and shows traces of a complete engagement with the art of cinema, from story construction to music to framing and editing.

All that said, it must be admitted that the valedictory No Country for Old Men is second-tier Coen Brothers. The saving grace is that second-tier Coen is still about 200 times better than the best efforts of most others.

Part of the problem with the film is that it is the result of the Coens apparently being on the hunt for a prestigious but compatible literary adaptation. The Brothers’ first 10 films were all original screenplays (if you take O Brother Where Art Thou’s source in The Odyssey as primarily a joke), which Ethan nominally directed and Joel produced, although by all accounts they collaborate closely throughout a film’s production. But some years ago the Coens were slated to direct an adaptation of James Dickey’s 1993 novel To the White Sea, a Pacific-set WWII tale that almost starred Brad Pitt as Muldrow, a B-29 pilot trapped in Japan and struggling to make his way north to safety. The script has virtually no dialogue by Muldrow, and was imagined by those looking forward to it to be something akin to a modern silent film by a duo noted for their deep knowledge and understanding of American cinema.

Looking for high-profile literary projects is a symptom of many things, among them a desire for respectability. Their films have been nominated on occasion and won this or that award, including an Oscar for best screenplay for Fargo, and they are favorites at Cannes. But Cannes awards—despite the high esteem they garner in some quarters—don’t match an Oscar. Mostly the Coens have ransacked American film genres from noir to screwball comedy to crime films, and for the most part, Hollywood views genre work as bread-and-butter stuff, not the highest level to which their “art” can rise. Most American filmmakers aren’t good enough—that’s why the British usually end up getting all the awards. The Coens are no longer spring chickens, no longer the young Turks taking on the industry and beating it at its own game. They might just want a bit of the stature that a Spielberg or a Zemeckis are accorded.

This is all speculation, of course. But the fact that when the Dickey adaptation didn’t work out, they eventually found their way to Cormac McCarthy says something.

McCarthy has slipped uneasily into the role of our modern Faulkner. He is a reclusive loner who dislikes other writers, he finds most contemporary and almost all historic literature to be bad (he says that Proust and James aren’t literature, for example), and his novels are essentially arty Westerns vaguely in the Larry McMurtry mode, but with a higher pulp level. Yet newspaper reviewers bend themselves into pretzels trying to find new ways to parse encomiums to this curmudgeon’s talent. One overheated scribe let his metaphor get loose, writing that McCarthy is a writer who “brands the reader’s mind as if seared by a knife heated upon campfire flames.”

Only the lone voice of B.R. Myers has spoken out to assess realistically the work of a writer whose subjects could exist comfortably with pulp covers slapped on them. McCarthy’s prose evinces “Melvillian stiltedness,” he writes in A Reader’s Manifesto. “Conrad understood better than Melville [that] the novel is a fundamentally irreverent form,” unsuitable to the epic, biblical language that writers with an ear for sounds but not content—from Melville to McCarthy—are attracted to. In contrast to McCarthy’s pretentious prose, Myers offers up Louis L’Amour, quoting a passage from Hondo that does everything McCarthy tries to do but with greater skill and subtlety. Every age needs a glorified hack to be its leading “contender,” as Hemingway would have it, and McCarthy is ours.

The Coens have remained essentially faithful to McCarthy’s novel. All they leave out are a few long-winded speeches and the tormenting WWII “past” of the main character, County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who’s got an odd case on his hands. It’s 1980 and the world is changing. Out in the desert on the Mexican-American border, a drug deal has gone bad and a Vietnam vet and antelope hunter named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) has stumbled upon it and made off with two million dollars. Besides Bell, two other men are after Moss: Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), a slick fixer hired by the ultimate gangster behind the whole deal, and his counterpart, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a relentless sociopath with a cattle stunner who, as a lad, must have dreamed of being Jason Voorhees when he grew up.

The Coen film closest to Country is Blood Simple, another example of the genre of film soleil, in which film noir tales are set in the blazing sun of the desert, as opposed to the moody, rain-washed street corners and shadowy alleys of the more urban noir. But the differences are more than simply cosmetic. Soleils benefit from a more permissive age, and frequently in films soleil, attractive good-bad guys get away with their heists, and bad-bad guys triumph over a compromised good. Among the leading examples of the genre are Chinatown, Red Rock West, The Hot Spot, After Dark My Sweet, and, of course, Blood Simple.

No Country for Old Men posits a world in which evil is relentless and implacable and there is little anyone can do about it as the world deteriorates. When the Coens get arty, it is in the opposite direction of McCarthy, toward spareness and invisibility. Like most Coen Brothers movies, No Country for Old Men is also about how Americans talk: what they say and what they don’t say with their individual and florid lingo. People talk more in the movie than they “do,” and some moments are presented elliptically, sure to displease action-oriented audiences. A major shoot-out is shown only in its aftermath, and a final hit is left ambiguously unconfirmed after a bit of speechifying. And some scenes are unanchored to any other part of the movie, discrete sequences that advance character and morality but not the plot. Still, one would rather be scorched by the Coens’ heat, however muted, than sit through another feel-good comedy or quirky indie film.