The Coen brothers' latest No Country for Old Men (2007) is well made, in many ways terser more economical than even the Cormac McCarthy novel it's based on. Plenty agree this much with me, apparently-- it rolled up most of the major golden doorstops in the latest Academy Awards nights (the one supposed to be crippled by the recent writer's strike) including the Best Picture doorstop.
Really got only one problem-- couldn't buy it for even a minute.
Mind you that doesn't mean I didn't like it. The Coens have become expert entertainers, able to take classic genres like noir (Blood Simple), the gangster film (Miller's Crossing), comedy (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski), even a relatively obscure subgenre like '40s Capraesque (The Hudsucker Proxy) and give it their unique spin. Their cool flip attitude in the face of horrors (a man's hand pinned to the windowsill by an icepick; a woman bound and hooded runs for her life and promptly faceplants in snow) seemed refreshing in the '80s and '90s, when the biggest hits were E.T and Forrest Gump respectively.
If I consider the Coens more interesting than great that's because their love of their own cleverness shines through stronger than anything else n their films (admire them this much, that I'd call their work "films" instead of just "movies"). Until O Brother, Where Art Thou? at the turn of the millennium with its folk music and warm color palette wasn't sure they were anything more than a jaundiced view of humanity.
(Not that I'm down with every filmmaker down on people-- Kubrick comes to mind. But Kubrick brings magisterial skill to his examination of humanity's flaws, executes his projects on canvases so vast there's room for contrasting hues (the girl singing before soldiers in Paths of Glory; the fate of Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the final duel in Barry Lyndon))
So what happens when the Coens do McCarthy? In the novel assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), actually meets Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin); the film is devoted to the strange sight of three men (the third being Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Bell) chasing each other up and down Texas without once having a face-to-face. The Coens compose nifty effects from this sustained non-event, one of the niftiest being Bell on a sofa, uncomfortably aware that he's sitting on the exact spot Chigurh sat on just moments before, seeing exactly what he's seeing (his own reflection on a dead TV set). McCarthy in turn seems to bring out something more measured and thoughtful than is usual from the Coens, who largely eschew their comic pratfalls and grotesque caricatures.
The Coens pare away most of Sheriff Bell's musings from the novel (they occur in alternate chapters to the main action) and in one sense pare away much of the novel's sense of mortality (the title implies the world's basic hostility towards grizzled old veterans like him), adding at most sketches and indications of Bell's brooding mindset in carefully situated monologues throughout the film (his final monologue--where he relates a dream about his father-- suggests that any measure of comfort will only be found at the end of the journey (of his life, in other words)). Other changes are mostly minimal save two, the first being an extended sequence involving Moss and a young hitchhiker, which in the novel shows us a more scruffily compassionate side to Moss (the side that took that jug of water to the dying Mexican in the desert-- a silly act in my opinion, but who am I to judge? Without it there would be no novel or film), and sharpens our dismay at his ultimate fate. The second change makes up for the first deletion, by preserving the dignity of Moss' wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald)-- in the film she alone stands up to Chigurh, in her small, rabbitty sort of way.
Bell is the book and film's true protagonist (which may be why the Coens felt they could cut down Moss' hitchhiker to a brief flirtation), the filtering consciousness through which we gain a sense of McCarthy's fatalistic worldview, and Tommy Lee Jones plays him with a simplicity and directness that helps undercut what can easily have been the film's most pretentious moments. More problematic is Bardem's Chigurh, the badass killer that haunts the film's margins ("Just how dangerous is he?" "Compared to what? The bubonic plague?"-- McCarthy feels mere superlatives aren't enough, near-biblical calamities help place the man in context). Not that he's not fascinating-- like Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Bardem's brief appearances are cortisone injections that bring the film to spasmodic life, probably explain the picture's boxoffice appeal. As a figure of inevitable death, however, I find him with his captive-bolt pistol (basically a tank full of pressurized air driving a sliding bolt) and silenced shotgun too cool to take seriously. He's like the James Bond-- no, the Road Runner-- of assassins, slipping in and out of firefights, surprising fellow killers by outflanking them, surviving car crashes that might pulverize lesser men.
I like watching competent men on the big screen, like to watch them make their quiet way around, no wasted motion as they go about their job. A superman has a different fascination-- you revel in his powers, in the fun and fantasy of the impossible made possible right before your eyes. A superman asked to convince us of a concept difficult for most of us to accept-- that we all at one point or another will face death--is a tool asked to do the wrong job. You want more realism in your scenario, not less, otherwise the audience checks out of the picture, stops suspending their disbelief.
As Pat Graham of The Chicago Reader points out, Michael Haneke's 2008 Funny Games does the same thing: shows us likable people trapped in a no-win situation. Haneke expends less effort than the Coens-- he confines the action to a single house, gives his antagonists ordinary weapons (a golf club, a kitchen knife, a shotgun sans silencer). His killers are not exotic assassins with faintly foreign accents but a pair of clean-cut youths, recognizably of the same class as their victims-- they could have just stepped out of a neighbor's vacation home to start their predatory work (and in fact did). His visual style (unlike the Coens') avoids gliding shots and clever angles, settling for setups that hold us viselike in their grip while Haneke's scenario plays out, step by agonizing step.
It's every bit as artificial a situation as in McCarthy's story, but Haneke takes the extra step of anticipating our disbelief by openly acknowledging it, commenting on it, making fun of it with jokes and asides to the camera. Ostensibly the Coens and McCarthy take the loftier road, attempt to say something about mortality and our (not very central) place in the world ; Haneke with his baby-faced thug looking straight at us sticks pins at that pretension: it's all about the violence, not the mortality, not the metaphysics (which could change, anyway, with just the touch of a rewind button). We're sitting in the theater seats (or watching the DVD) because we want the violence visited on the film's characters. One may ask if the punishment Haneke metes out is appropriate to our crime (of wanting to see this picture), and Haneke even has an answer to that (did the family ask to have their home invaded?).
Of course Haneke says all this artfully (the vicelike camera, the carefully neutral lighting, the total lack of a music soundtrack other than at the film's start, and whatever incidental tunes can be heard from the television set). Is he so to speak shooting himself in the foot? Or is this his way of including himself in the equation, exposing himself as yet another exploiter of onscreen violence, only more cunning and self-conscious than others?
Eventually you hit a wall or (as with No Country) fail to take off, because the premise (thanks to Anton Chigurh) failed to find sufficiently solid ground against which to purchase traction. Funny Games is perfection of sorts, a sealed-off box with no escape route other than out the theater (that or the STOP button on the remote) but it's a sterile perfection, a squared-away dead end; I for one am happy to see Haneke move on to other themes, in films like Code Inconnu (Code Unknown), or Le Temps de loup (Time of the Wolf). Will the Coens do the same? They've been trying; thanks to Mr. McCarthy they do take a few steps forward. Not quite far enough, I think.
First published in Businessworld, 4/11/08
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7 comments:
Noel, read your review in BWorld. This some badass writing, man. The wife standing alone to Chigurh in “a rabbitty sort of way” was pretty precious. Personally, I’ll take the Coens over Haneke any day. You’re probably right—they’re much too clever for their own good to make a thriller for thriller’s sake (the rah-rah-rah kind). But NO COUNTRY is as close as they’ll get to it, I think. Too bad it becomes an anti-thriller in the end. Really cynical, too. But you must admit that they’ve had that “Road Runner” vibe running through their work(s) for some time now. In fact, Bardem’s assassin might as well be a darker –more brought-to-life-- version of the Tex Cobb bounty hunter (another uber-man) in RAISING ARIZONA. And the Coen’s near-fanatical attraction –and treatment-- to American “regular folk” characters is so bizarre that these people appear anything but normal, but almost alien! Ey, there’s that Road Runner thing again….Brolin as Moss reminded me of a young Nick Nolte-- nice.
That quality of the bizarre, of this sense of a parade of circus freaks, is what keeps me from totally embracing them, rico.
As for styles--well, it may be my preference (I talk about 'viselike grip' and all), but I prefer Haneke's. More claustrophobic, too. And not too far from your own, I submit (like you he likes simple camera setups that capture the action nicely, then cut it all together to flow).
Ey, thanks, man. On my part, I really have no choice (static camera stuff) because of budget constraints. I shouldn't really speak about Haneke, cause I've only seen the original GAMES and nothing else. RAISING ARIZONA I remember watching at a double bill in Concord, California. I was just so blown away by the action montage in the end. I rewatched the film again 3 days later. Had to figure out how they shot and cut that knife (thrown by Tex Cobb)plugging onto the wooden board Nick Cage was holding. I told myself, "all this, in a comedy, too."
On Haneke, try out Cache, Code Unknown, The Piano Player and Time of the Wolf and see what I mean.
As for the static camera setups, that's what I love--turning a limitation into a distinc visual statement.
like it or hate it, Funny Games U.S. is one hell of an experience. Frack!
Michael Pitt is also one of the better actors out there who specializes in playing sickos and damaged people.
Bully, The Dreamers, Hedwig and the Angry Inch...
About Funny Games--what he said.
About Pitt--not too familiar with his work. Well, I liked The Dreamers, and Angry Inch.
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