Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
High
Noon on Blood Meridian
(No Country for Old Men, 12/3/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Ask
the friendly folks of North Dakota about the Coen Bros. thriller Fargo
and you might get a surprisingly uncivil answer. True, it remains one
of the brothers' most popularly acclaimed films, winning Oscars for
the Coens' screenplay and for actress Frances McDormand. But it all
came with what many consider a patronizing portrayal of our brothers
and sisters of the upper Midwest, who come off as affable but somewhat
dimwitted rubes. Fargo, along with Twin Peaks and David
Byrne's True Stories, epitomizes the view of our continent's
midsection as a kind of psychocultural theme park, where the basic madness
of the American character gets put on display for the amusement of bicoastal
hipsters.
No one will see the Coen's
No Country for Old Men that way. A sharp-hewn, wire-taut thriller,
it doesn't bother with the kind of smirking caricature seen in Fargo
or O Brother, Where Art Thou?. It is, like the Cormac McCarthy
fiction it's based on, a story that only has time for long vistas and
big themes. Maybe the most impressive thing I can say about it is that
I forgot I was watching a Coen Bros. movie at all.
Josh Brolin (American Gangster)
is Llewelyn Moss, a blue-collar type who, while hunting in the desert,
accidentally discovers a suitcase full of drug money. The original owners
of course want it back. To that end they unleash a killer named Anton
Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a psychopath who likes to dispatch people with
an air gun used for slaughtering cattle. Most of No Country is
concerned with a mano a mano duel between Moss and Chigurh that
ranges across the forever landscapes of West Texas.
The action combines the casual depravity
and gunplay in McCarthy's Blood Meridian with the visual inventiveness
the Coens best showed in their debut, Blood Simple. (The common
denominator, you see, is blood.) The sound is particularly evocative,
with its high-plains breeze and the crunch of boots on gravel. Not having
read McCarthy's novel, I can't speak to the movie's faithfulness, although
it is claimed that the Coens' stuck pretty close, even down to the level
of specific visual descriptions. All told, it's hard to imagine a happier
marriage of literary and cinematic styles.
As Chigurh, Bardem (Collateral,
Before Night Falls) shows the gleam of real madness in his eyes
as he verbally toys with people before killing them. Moss, a Vietnam
vet only a little less tough, is a typical "hero" in McCarthy's
universe of moral compromises. (He only gets in trouble when, against
his better judgement, he shows compassion by bringing water to one of
the wounded drug runners.) As such, he becomes the heart of the movie—making
the way his fate is disclosed a bit too incidental.
Tommy Lee Jones presents the opposite
problem. As the aging sheriff investigating the case, there seems to
be no good reason for him to be there than to wax poignant on the spectacle
of man's inhumanity to man. This was perhaps an unavoidable flaw in
adapting McCarthy to the screen: even as he conjures a world indifferent
to horror, the author is compelled to believe in the redemptive power
of the right word uttered at the right time.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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