No Country for Old Men

Brilliant performances in a nihilistic film about the American Southwest. 

To compare a movie based on a novel to its source is unfair. The novel, by its very length, will ever prove more complex and profound. That is why no great novel ever made a great movie, and all great movies either derive from original screenplays or are based on second rate or inferior literary sources. Modestly, I call this phenomenon Park’s Law. Whether Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men will ever take its place alongside The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, and Huckleberry Finn remains to be seen. But McCarthy is a very good writer, one who can turn conversations in Southwest Texas dialect, which the movie copies verbatim, into poetry. Whatever its future standing, the novel is good enough to ensure that any film based on it will inevitably fall short of the mark.

Its title comes from the first line of William Butler Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” “That is no country for old men,” referring not to Byzantium but to our world where “An aged man is but a paltry thing, /A tattered coat upon a stick unless” one sails “into the artifice of eternity.” Taking this lead McCarthy has created a novel whose central character is an ageing Southwest Texas sheriff named Ed Tom Bell, played in the film by the ostensible star Tommy Lee Jones. Each of the thirteen sections of the book begins with a soliloquy by Bell on his life and its meaning. These provide a counterpoint to the plot, which consists of a drug deal gone bad and the resulting homicidal carnage. Bell cannot save the young man who, first through greed and then through mercy, gets caught in the mess, and he never apprehends the psychopathic serial killer who terrorizes the entire region. Thus at the end, he retires, feeling defeated, but along the way we appreciate both his struggle and his reflections on old age, mortality, life in Texas, the destructive influence of narcotics on a newer generation, and -- especially -- the moral consequences of our actions. Like the poem from which it takes its name, the novel is an old man’s work of art, somewhat as if Nestor, the oldest of the Greek warriors, who thinks the Trojan War not nearly as difficult as the Siege of Thebes where he fought as a young man, were the chief narrator of the Iliad.

Inevitably a movie, limited by convention to two hours, and depending more upon plot than reflection, is going to have trouble conveying the character and thoughts of Ed Tom Bell. So this film written and directed by the successful and highly respected Coen Brothers, Ethan and Joel, shifts the center of the film from the moral struggles of Bell to the pursuit of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), the everyman who discovers and takes the drug money, by the psychotic killer Anton Chirugh (Javier Bardem). Both of them in turn are hunted by the Anglo mob, in the person of Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), and an unnamed Mexican mob. All this makes for a very exciting cat and mouse movie. But it also results in a despairing and negative view of life, governed as it not just by chance but by an evil and cruel fate.

One might forgive the Coen Brothers on the grounds that there was no other way to film the novel, and that their cinematic skills and the superb acting by the entire cast justify the shifts in emphasis. Josh Brolin plays Moss as brilliantly as he did the crooked cop in American Gangster, an entirely different role. As Hollywood honored Anthony Hopkins for his portray of Hannibal Lector, we must expect at least an Oscar nomination for Bardem whose chilling portrayal of Chirugh is genuinely scary. Artists who haven’t gone over to the dark side must be cautious in their betrayals of the Devil or one of his minions, for he fascinates and easily becomes the most interesting character. In Paradise Lost Milton’s success in portraying Satan has led many to mistakenly interpret him as the real hero of the poem.

But the Coens have not stumbled into an aesthetic and moral dilemma; they have deliberately darkened the somber novel. For instance, in the novel Bell goes to visit his Uncle Ellis, another ex-lawman, crippled and half blinded in the line of duty. While there he confesses that he received a medal he didn’t want for his heroism in World War II, when in fact, though he was heroic, he also abandoned his wounded buddies to the Germans. He has suffered lifelong guilt for this decision, one that he is convinced his granddad, also a sheriff, would never have made. Understandably perhaps, the Coens have cut this dimension of Bell from the film. In consoling him Uncle Ellis remarks about himself: "I always thought that when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t. I dont blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does."

This provokes Bell to say, “You don’t know what he thinks,” and a few lines later he asks Uncle Ellis, “You aint turned infidel have you Uncle Ellis?” But in the film the Coen brothers have given the despairing “infidel” lines to Bell, who in the novel, despite his mistakes and defeats, never doubts God and the free will that turns life into a meaningful moral struggle. Not only is he very devoted to his wife, he is also pro-life, as when he reflects upon a pro-choice lady he once met: "She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said I don’t like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don’t think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I don’t have much doubt that what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation."

This lifting of a good part of Bell’s character from the film shifts the weight of meaning to Chirugh, an unfeeling fatalist, in fact a truly satanic character, who employs a method of killing that equates human beings with cattle. Like the Devil in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, he allows his intended victims to play games of chance with him, knowing that as Death, he will prevail. Indeed, instead of acting as a counterweight to the immoral mayhem of the action, Bell’s comments in the film, some newly added, others jumbled up, all of them truncated or misassigned, actually detract from the film and give it an abrupt and very unsatisfying conclusion.

Still another change illustrates the Coens’ darkening of the novel. In the book, Llewelyn Moss while escaping from San Antonio towards El Paso, picks up a runaway teenage girl. They too engage in a conversation about morals, fate, and chance. They stop in Van Horn to spend the night in a motel. To her surprise, Moss rents two rooms and declines her amorous advances. We learn later that when the Mexican mob hunts him down at the motel, he dies defending the girl, who is also killed. But in the film this episode is omitted. Instead we see Moss arriving alone at the motel and being propositioned by a poolside hooker. He appears to succumb to her appeal. Then later, we learn that he died at the motel, and we see the hooker’s body in the pool. So rather than being a loyal husband who is heroic, like Ed Tom Bell wants to be, he suffers an ironic and meaningless death, all the result of his decision to have a little fling on the side.

The film contains no sexual scenes, but it more than earns its R rating with graphic violence. The novel also has such scenes, but the film amplifies then to an extraordinary degree. So we witness prolonged strangling, pools of blood, numerous blood spattering executions, and do-it-yourself treatments of deep and gory bullet wounds. The Coens have a middle brow following among Baby Boomers, but in this film they pander to depraved and ghoulish tastes.

No Country for Old Men belongs to a category of film known as “neo-noir.” Such films descend from the film noirs of the 40s and 50s, black and white crime films characterized by murders, fallible protagonists, flawed lawmen or ordinary people who make bad decisions, and consequent investigations. The original noirs are set in corrupt cities at night, but neo-noirs, like this one, being shot in color, prefer the desert as their image of the wasteland. But the greatest difference between these two versions of the noir genre is that the originals, bound as they were by the Production Code, always had a moral framework. If the DA or the mayor is a crook, the governor stands for law and order. Such a moral framework was not merely imposed but more often than not supported the story’s structure and meaning. Not so with neo-noir. Starting with Chinatown (1974) the crooks get away with it. Crime pays. Public morality doesn’t exist and private virtues, though not always, lead to ruin or despair.

It is only natural that artists who ignore Providence construct ironic plots about characters in an all too human world from which there is no way out. The naturalists, Zola, Dreiser, Wright, and others favored protagonists doomed through circumstance, chance, and oppressive and deterministic social conditions. Hemingway and existentialist writers created heroes who attained a kind of dignity through their codes of honor, investing with meaning what the authors saw as an abysmal world. But the Coen Brothers have in this film chosen a deeper level of despair. Here Fate does not appear as indifferent, but consciously evil, embodied in a satanic character who walks away triumphant from his own encounter with chance. I suppose in Hollywood such stuff passes for “seriousness.” But it annoys me that two well educated gifted guys, living in sunny California, one of them married to a talented and beautiful actress, both of them raking in the dough, have the nerve to tell us, not just that because we die life sucks, but that it’s dominated by agents of evil.

William Park is a veteran film reviewer and the author of "Hollywood: An Epic Production", a highly praised verse history of American cinema. He lives in California.

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Comments (5)

Mariusz Wesolowski said...

Fatalism has always been one of the cornerstones of the Coen Brothers' vision so it is not quite fair to accuse them of using it again. What I find more disturbing, from an artistic point of view, is their sliding towards more and more graphic violence (a sort of "tarantinosation", if you will). I have always admired the unrelenting, elegant simplicity of "Blood Simple", or - to a lesser extent - of "Fargo" but now this quality is mostly gone from their movies. Speaking of simplicity, I wonder if someone is going to turn Cormack McCarthy's chilling minimalist novel "The Road" into a film? An idea both titillating and scary...

Canada | Monday, 3 December 2007 at 4:09 am

Charles Mangerian said...

The question behind Park's movie review begs asking: How did Western Civilization reach the point where the purveyors of popular culture deem it not only acceptable to present the public with morally ambiguous entertainment, but feel compelled to water down whatever residual virtue could be found in the source material.

"Hollywood Hates America" may be a cliche on the right, however the entertainment industry's animosity towards western civilization is far more insidious than can be captured by a cliche, however true.

As important as it is to critique the dominant culture, one must surely hope for the development a real political alternative that will put Hollywood in its place and punish in a real and effective way the individuals who've created and benefit financially from the present cultural morass afflicting the West.

United States | Monday, 3 December 2007 at 10:21 am

George Sim Johnston said...

I'm a great fan of Cormac McCarthy, who is more deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature than most of its recent recipients; and when reading "No Country for Old Men" I immediately thought: A Coen Brothers movie! And I'm glad they've done such a good job. Yes, the film is violent, but so is the novel. The problem with both is that the ending leaves the reader/viewer hanging somewhat. It's a taut cliffhanger until almost the closing credits; then it's a tad confusing. The psychopath killer and the sheriff ought to have had "closure" of some sort. Still, I'm a sucker for beautiful photography of the south-west, and on that score alone I'd gladly see this film again. The acting, moreover, is extraordinary.

United States | Tuesday, 4 December 2007 at 12:46 am

james o. clifford sr. said...

"Pander to bootmers"? Not thise time. If "pandering" is done it is to military veterans. World War I, World War II and Vietnam are all mentioned, at least in the book. Korea is forgotten, which would seem apt since such a reference would take a history lesson because we've all forgotten it.
"No Country" makes it clear that the U.S. is no longer a country for anyone who believes that "giving the shirt off your back" is done without question. I suggest this reviewer take another look at the two scenes involving shirts and give them some thought. Also, ask some veterans for comment.

United States | Sunday, 23 December 2007 at 4:51 am

Paul said...

I don't think it's fair to say the Coen brothers strip the novel of all moral content. The pair seem to have a kind of Dickensian faith in the essential decency of ordinary people, that Tarantino, for example, lacks. This faith -- refreshing in this cynical age -- perhaps shines through less clearly in NCFOM than it does in Fargo, which mercilessly mocks the mannerisms, tastes, accomplishments and speech patterns of the American Midwesterners it portrays, but forces you to see through all that dross just how kind, generous, honest and enduring those people are. It's unfortunate the Coens didn't have the courage to portray Bell's pro-life sentiments (they'd never have won the Oscar if they'd done that), but they certainly applaud the essential decency of his life and the enduring but simple love he shares with his wife. I loved his "I pretty much find when you stop hearing sir and ma'am, the rest pretty much follows." On such simple niceties do indeed rest the pillars of civilization.

Paul Waters
Montreal

Canada | Sunday, 23 March 2008 at 11:06 pm

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