No Country For Old Men

[Gold Trumpet]

I thought this movie could bring me to like a Coen brothers film, but I guess it wasn't meant to be between us. The original novel wasn't very good, but all the positives the novel had going for it is lost in this film adaptation.

The reason is simple. The Coen Brothers dedicate the majority of the film to making a thriller. In the novel, Tommy Lee Jones character is at the heart of the story. His commentary and experience guides everything. The mishap of misplaced money and a subsequent chase for it (while still prominent in the novel) doesn't take on such a large percentage of the story time as it does in the film. The only times we see Tommy Lee Jones is in small spurts where his character interaction provides better anecdotes than anything else. The Coen Brothers embrace the chance to take a killing spree and make it an elaborate noir spectacle. The composition and filmmaking has thriller written all over it. It marginalizes all chances for characterization.

Also, in the novel, Llewelyn Moss is much more human. He isn't an adversary of Anton Chigurh but a dumb guy who got in the wrong situation and never knew when to stop. The novel highlights his fear a lot greater and focuses more on his bad mistakes. The film tries to make up for what it doesn't acknowledge in the novel by showing his fateful mistakes later on, but his characterization is still pure grit, a kind of offset of Chigurh who can go toe to toe with him in deviousness. The final scene with Chigurh and Moss' wife is very annoying. He says her life can be saved if her husband chose her over himself, but the question of morality doesn't match the undertone of the characterization. It feels like a wrap up to give meaning to an out and out thriller that looks and feels like every other thriller.

The final 20 minutes feel like the novel. Jones' character takes prominence and it has a tone that feels like the novel, but it isn't satisfying. It feels tacked on like the film knows it has to make meaning out of all the ridiculousness of the rest of the story. The film could have made choices to make the film feel more realistic to life circumstances, but it just gravitated to the large number of deaths in the novel and exploited it. I'm not saying the film should have been a true dedication to the novel. Considering the novel was far from perfect, it shouldn't have. Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.

As a thriller, it's well made. Parts of the film are really well done, but the film needs to be looked at for its overall qualities. It doesn't just want to be a thriller but something more. This isn't like Fargo where the heightened accents made a stark drama a slight comedy, but instead a noir ode with greater dramatic intentions. The Coen Brothers film to the limits of their limited personality and infuse dated references (noir) and small quirks and details everywhere. Moss' wife is killed at the end and you only know it because Chigurh checks his boots on the porch for blood. That was a good touch, but those touches don't make a film. I think the Coen Brothers lost the larger scope of characterization that was needed.

My favorite line was, "You're going to have to ride bitch" when Chigurh had to ride in between two men in the pick up truck. I liked it for no more reason except that I hadn't heard that expression used since I was a kid. I come from a pick up truck world and it was once common.

the chilling thing about this movie is that.. you end up agreeing with the killer and pointing the finger at Lewellyn.

I didn't agree with Chigurh. Moss' wife was correct for calling him out on the coin toss. Chigurh can't handle making the choice himself at all. Yes, the film is right to point a finger at Lewellyn, but it doesn't need to make it a big deal at that time. Lewellyn's choices beforehand should have already made it clear he was wrong. It's just his actions when he did them were presented as gritty and tough. A hollow personification.

[squints]

Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.

What parts would these be?

[Gold Trumpet]

Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.

What parts would these be?

That line just refers back to everything I say in the review.

[last days of gerry the elephant]

I thought the movie was really great also, great storytelling/filmmaking (I didn't read the novel and I had no idea what to expect. I Don't pay much attention to trailers so I was pretty much in the open walking in). But how many people witnessed the audience in the theater booing the film by the end?

The events of tonight, just seeing how many fucking ass clowns would show up to a movie like No Country, expecting some Die Hard action flick and then have the nerve to boo it... It makes me despise going to the theaters all together. Especially when there's talking and obscure laughter coming from certain people throughout the movie, it really just skews your attention away from the screen. I'm sure it's an experience that we've all had at one point or another but to have it happen at a movie like No Country, it really just... fucking... *Insert Pesci rant*

Moss' wife is killed at the end and you only know it because Chigurh checks his boots on the porch for blood. That was a good touch, but those touches don't make a film. I think the Coen Brothers lost the larger scope of characterization that was needed.

That was my favorite part. I hate to single out one particular scene but if I were to share the one scene that stood out for me it would be Chigurh walking out that door and checking his boots. To me, that was great filmmaking.

[squints]

Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.

What parts would these be?

That line just refers back to everything I say in the review.

i see what you're saying. the acting was so much better in the novel

[Gold Trumpet]

Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.

What parts would these be?

That line just refers back to everything I say in the review.

i see what you're saying. the acting was so much better in the novel

Haha, I guess I'm not going to go to you for an accurate summation.

[RegularKarate]

awesome... GT and I back into massive disagreement territory...

What view-points were expressed by Bell in the book that were conveyed in the film?  I think you're off on that point.

also, I think you're wrong about Moss being "just a dumb guy" in the book.  I'm pretty sure he was just as clever and his motivations were just the same as in the film.

[Gold Trumpet]

awesome... GT and I back into massive disagreement territory...

Haha, I think I just stopped posting as many reviews. The world is what it is. We will never see eye to eye, but it's not a big deal.

What view-points were expressed by Bell in the book that were conveyed in the film?  I think you're off on that point.

Bell was a more prominent figure in the book. His story shaped much more of the beginning 2/3 of the story than it does in the film. It speaks to tone of the film and purpose of characterization. These are important elements. This isn't just about what is missing or what the Coens change. They prove, at the end, that they can relate to him well. It's just a greater presence of his character is meaningful in relating the themes to the audience.

also, I think you're wrong about Moss being "just a dumb guy" in the book.  I'm pretty sure he was just as clever and his motivations were just the same as in the film.

Alright, I'll say he isn't "just a dumb guy", but he certainly is a misguided one who is driven by both greed and fear. The film paints him to be grit only. Squints low balled my argument by saying my basic point is that the acting wasn't as good as it was in the novel. That's not the case it all. It has everything to do with interpretation. It is a major element of any filmmaker adapting an original piece.

The Coen Brothers read the book and likely saw a chance to make another ode to noir. It's not a secret their films play out to encompass other genres, but this is the first film they did that was a pretty straightforward adaptation of another work. They made the novel encompass their personality, but the question has to be asked, are they elevating the original work by allowing it to play out as an elaborate thriller? I'm not someone strictly against stylization, but I am someone who believes the style choices the Coen brothers make are low grade ideas. They never seem to elevate the stories at all.

[MacGuffin]

Cinematographer Roger Deakins puts the message in focus
The frequent Coen brothers collaborator is drawn to substance over spectacle.
By Cristy Lytal, Special to The Times

WHEN Roger Deakins applied to England's National Film and Television School for the first time, the man who has become one of the world's most respected cinematographers was informed that his stills weren't "filmic." Today, he sits in a sun-drenched beach cottage in Santa Monica and contemplates the concept.

"I had this big discussion with [the head of the school] the second time I applied," says Deakins, now 58 years old. "I said, 'The first time you said it wasn't filmic.' He said, 'That one's filmic.' It was a dog in midair that was blurred. I said, 'Why? That one's blurred, because it's got motion.' If that's filmic, I could have gone filmic!" 

Since then, he has done precisely that. This year alone, he reteamed with Joel and Ethan Coen in a ninth effort, the widely acclaimed "No Country for Old Men," and showed his range with the grainy desolation of "In the Valley of Elah" and the fire-lighted palette of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." It's rare for any director of photography to have three films released within weeks of one another, let alone three with this level of artistry.

The projects have put Deakins, a five-time Oscar nominee, in hot contention for yet another nod. He credits much of his success to a philosophical approach favoring meaning over empty spectacle, substance over bombast.

"I'm not attracted to a film just because it's going to have great visuals," Deakins says. "In fact, I find that kind of boring. There's a line from 'Moby-Dick': There's nothing so interesting as staring into the eyes of a human face. And I think that's true. I mean, the most interesting thing is filming somebody's face."

For Deakins, a native of a small fishing town in England called Torquay, cinematography wasn't the most obvious career choice, and he calls his decision to go to art school "probably the most rebellious thing to do at that time for me." His father, who owned a construction company, wanted him to take over the family business, but Deakins' heart belonged to painting and photography.

After graduation, Deakins found work as a documentary filmmaker, a career that called him to question what it means to film reality. "The last documentary, we shot a group of patients in a mental hospital," he recalls. "We went to film this lady one day on the top of this high-rise. She'd been out of hospital for a couple of weeks. This woman was like in a hell of a state, absolutely drunk and being sick and screaming. There was no way I was going to film her. It really felt like being so voyeuristic. We cleaned her up, and we cooked her a meal and sat her down, and then we filmed her. But now we're not showing what she was like. I just found that such a dilemma."

Paradoxically, Deakins was able to discover a new kind of truth working on fiction films such as "The Shawshank Redemption," "Dead Man Walking," "Kundun," "A Beautiful Mind" and his nine collaborations with the Coen brothers. "Filming Tommy Lee Jones in Ellis' [actor Barry Corbin] cabin at the end of 'No Country,' it's like you get tingles down your spine, because it's got beauty and reality to it," he says. "It's the same shiver I used to get when I was shooting documentaries. It's when you've got something, and you know you're the first person to see it."

Writer-director Paul Haggis actively sought a realistic, documentary-style look for "In the Valley of Elah," the story of a father trying to solve the mysterious disappearance of his son, a young veteran home from Iraq. "Roger isn't worried about it being beautiful or being lit beautifully; he's very much serving the story," says Haggis, who asked Deakins to film "Elah" like a John Ford classic to evoke Americana and then desaturate and gray the negatives.

Of course, truth and beauty are not always mutually exclusive. For the highly stylized meditation on celebrity "The Assassination of Jesse James," Deakins lighted much of the film with hand-held, old-fashioned lanterns that were rigged with halogen bulbs. At the encouragement of director Andrew Dominik, Deakins went especially dramatic in the scene where Jesse and his gang rob a train. "You've got one lamp, and all you see is what that's lighting: five feet," says Deakins. "I had actually got some lights ready to hit the trees a little bit, so you get a sense of distance when Jesse was waiting for the train. And then at the last minute, a few hours before, I said, 'I think we should really go for it.' I put a little bit of atmosphere in the air, so when the train light comes, it blooms in smoke. It's almost this kind of mythical appearance of light."

Newfound synergy on the set

ILLUMINATING big nighttime exteriors was also a challenge on "No Country for Old Men," but Joel Coen calls Deakins "one of the world's great DPs in terms of how he lights." The Coen brothers started their collaboration with Deakins after their previous cinematographer -- Barry Sonnenfeld -- decided to pursue a directing career. "With Barry, we were often working in very small depth of field, and he lights with hard fixtures," Joel Coen says. "Barry was a very interesting and talented DP, but working with Roger was liberating in terms of what we were able to do in terms of blocking and moving the camera. And Roger doesn't vomit on the set like Barry does. Barry shares to a fault. Roger, less so."

It's a good thing Deakins has a strong stomach, because he's booked for the foreseeable future with high-profile projects such as Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road" and John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt." And while Deakins' chief visual hallmark may be his versatility, the films he works on do tend to have at least one unifying trait.

"Frankly, I would love it if everything I ever worked on had some social relevance," he says. "That's what I think it's really about. If you don't have something in the frame that's worth shooting, then I don't know why you would want to do it, really. That's why I feel so lucky to have worked on these ones this year."

[MacGuffin]

'We've killed a lot of animals'
Joel and Ethan Coen have never shied away from death, and their latest film is one of their bloodiest - and best. They tell John Patterson about Texas, torture and a 'fantastic' haircut
Source: The Guardian
 
I'm framing up the Coen brothers as if they're appearing in one of their own movies. From where I'm seated, I can see Joel, the longer, skinnier, more languid of the pair, stretched out almost full-length in the foreground, his legs on a coffee table and his torso resting almost horizontal on a couch. He fills the lower half of my frame, looking vaguely reminiscent of Henry Fonda balancing on his chair outside the barbershop in My Darling Clementine. Brother Ethan meanwhile is more animated, providing a more compact, roving vertical in the middle distance to balance the supine Joel, and tittering where Joel is prone to drawl.

And yes, they do finish each other's sentences. Sort of. Like this, for instance, in answer to the question "How many animals have you killed in your movies?"

Joel: "Oh ... plenty."

Ethan: "Uh ... cows in O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Joel (pensively): "Couple of cows in that one. Blew up a rabbit and a lizard, another dog in this one ... "

Ethan (chuckling): "Yeah, we've killed a LOT of animals!"

In the next few weeks, expect to hear the phrase "return to form" used incessantly about the brothers Coen. Their searing adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's most approachable, albeit most pulpy, novel, No Country for Old Men, has earned admiration and mainstream attention in America of an intensity which hasn't come the Coens' way since the Oscar success of Fargo or the rapturous cult that has coalesced around The Big Lebowski.

After two comedies - Intolerable Cruelty and a remake of Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers - generally deemed the least interesting outings of their career, the Coens have delivered a manhunt-thriller of mesmerising violence and remarkable narrative leanness, an almost academically precise exercise in the building and maintenance of unbearable tension and anxiety in the audience, and superficially reminiscent of the Texas noir of their debut, Blood Simple. Shot under merciless southwestern skies by their usual cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and telling of the inexorable destruction of three men with utterly conflicting moral codes, it's the soberest movie they've yet made: arid, spare, and mercifully free of the self-defeating collegiate cynicism that sometimes mars even their best work. It has the starkness of Fargo (though it is yellow where Fargo was a symphony in white), the random viciousness of Miller's Crossing, and the ecstatic stylisation of The Man Who Wasn't There. No Country for Old Men proves that the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors.

Peckinpah is the director whose themes and concerns - masculinity and self-preservation among them - sit foremost in the mind when reading the McCarthy novel and when seeing the movie, which is a faithful, almost verbatim adaptation. The brothers are amenable to the comparison. Ethan: "We were aware of the basic link just by virtue of the setting, the south-west, and this very male aspect of the story. Hard men in the south-west shooting each other - that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing. We were aware of those similarities, certainly." Joel: "Especially in the section of the movie where Woody Harrelson makes an appearance. He reminded us of a Peckinpah character in a certain way." Ethan: "Yeah, you show a hard-on guy in a western-cut suit and it already looks like a Peckinpah movie. Same kind of shorthand."

No Country for Old Men, set in 1980, follows three men in the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, out in the hostile desert borderlands. A man named Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds $2m in cash among many corpses while out hunting antelope, and is subsequently pursued throughout the movie, across the border and back, by a terrifying freelance assassin named Anton Chigurh, whose literally unspeakable name is redolent of the evil he does - he murders two people in the first five minutes, garrotting the first with a pair of handcuffs, killing the second with a compressed-air slaughterhouse stun-gun. Chigurh is played by Javier Bardem in an extraordinary moptop haircut borrowed from ... well, Peter Tork maybe, or one of the Rutles. Meanwhile, local sheriff Tommy Lee Jones pursues them both, chastened by the killing he sees and realising that someone must save Moss from this incarnation of bottomless malevolence.

Is Tommy Lee Jones as scary as he looks, by the way? "Oh, he's a big pussycat!" laughs Ethan. But he sounds a little nervous. "He wants to pretend that he's scary," offers Joel, to which Ethan adds: "Let's just say he doesn't suffer fools gladly, but he's fine." But he's essential to the film's integrity, isn't he? "He grew up there. He's from San Saba, Texas, not far from where the movie takes place. He's the real thing regarding that region. There's a short list of people who could play that part at the basic level of the qualities you need: age, screen presence and the need to really inhabit that region and that landscape."

I have to ask about Bardem's hair, which manages to be simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous. "That bowl is fantastic," says Joel. "We saw that hair in a photograph of a guy in a bar in a Texas border town in 1979, and we just copied it." "Yeah," giggles Ethan, "Javier really embraced it enthusiastically!" Bardem himself spoke of the haircut to the LA Times: "You don't have to act the haircut; the haircut is acting by itself ... so you don't have to act weird if you have that weird haircut."

Rounding out the film's trio of protagonists is the relative newcomer Josh Brolin, who here steps into a new dimension, and one step closer to stardom. Ethan: "He came in late in the day, after Tommy and Javier. Since it's about three guys circling each other, what we were afraid of was two very compelling performers and then you cut to the dull guy. We were setting that bar kind of high."

"We were very unsatisfied with everyone we saw before he showed up," adds Joel. "We needed the same combination we had with Tommy: someone with equal weight who could authentically be part of that landscape. Those two things together ... we were surprised how difficult it was, and we weren't happy until he walked in. Without him the whole thing would have been out of whack."

This is not the first time the Coens have returned from an artistic impasse. There was speculation that they were tapped out when the exhaustingly zany The Hudsucker Proxy was poorly received a decade ago. Yet they soon sprang back with Fargo, their most famous movie, followed by Lebowski, their masterpiece.

But things in the early 2000s seemed a little more serious. For a start, the brothers were no longer directing scripts that had fermented and matured in the hothouse of their shared brain; they were adapting novels and rewriting other people's scripts. This seemed like a very bad sign. This more recent impasse started when a long-cherished project, an adaptation of To the White Sea by James "Deliverance" Dickey, fell apart. In retrospect, it seems like a signpost to No Country for Old Men. The White Sea project was about a American airman shot down in second world war Japan who witnesses the Tokyo firebombing and then, insanely, tries to make his way home to Alaska. It shares many things with No Country, particularly a fascination with processes, the mechanics of things, machismo, and lengthy sequences without dialogue or music.

"Yes," says Joel, "that's definitely true, something that we had both thought about to a certain extent. In fact we mentioned Dickey's book to Cormac a few times when we talked to him about anything relating to the book." "This one sort of displaced that project in a lot of ways," adds Ethan.

"Jeremy Thomas was producing it," Joel continues, "and Jeremy is the patron saint of lost causes in the cinema - he seems to make all these interesting movies that everyone thinks are impossible to get made. He got very close to getting the financing for it, which on the face of it is just an insane proposition - a movie with the firebombing of Tokyo in it that's very expensive and somewhat marginal. But he came close."

It sounds like Slaughterhouse-Five, minus the sci-fi, married to John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific. "That's exactly right," says Joel. "Hell in the Pacific is a good example of the same sorts of things we have here in No Country: almost no dialogue, a bizarre score, and guys fighting and doing lots of stuff with their hands." That was your first adaptation? "We have written things for other people that haven't got made," says Joel. "Actually, the Dickey book was the first adapted thing that almost rose to the level of getting produced."

Much of the dialogue in No Country is taken from the book almost word for word. Joel: "Ethan once described the way we worked together as: one of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat. That's why there needs to be two of us - otherwise he's gotta type one-handed. That's how you 'collaborate' with someone else." Ethan: "Paperback novels just won't lie open properly! They flip shut."

One wonders what a sci-fi movie by the Coens - who have done noir, screwball, a kind of western, even a musical of sorts - would look like. "Neither of us is drawn to that kind of fiction," says Ethan of sci-fi. "There are movies that we both like. I don't know that that would ever happen, and I don't quite know why." Joel knows: "I don't think we could get our minds around the whole spacesuit thing."

Instead, they have a script of their own that they'd like to film. "We've written a western," says Joel, "with a lot of violence in it. There's scalping and hanging ... it's good. Indians torturing people with ants, cutting their eyelids off." Ethan: "It's a proper western, a real western, set in the 1870s. It's got a scene that no one will ever forget because of one particular chicken." And so, yet another innocent creature prepares to die for the Coen brothers' art.

[hedwig]

One wonders what a sci-fi movie by the Coens - who have done noir, screwball, a kind of western, even a musical of sorts - would look like.

The Man Who Wasn't There.

[modage]

Elvis Mitchell's The Treatment podcast.  28 min interview: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330616&s=143441&i=21470238

[OrHowILearnedTo]

This has got to be the strangest book to film adaption ever, it is extremely similar, yet extremely different. On one hand the main plot and most of the dialogue were the exac same in the book as it is in the film, but the Coens eliminate about half the novel by making Tommy lee Jones' sheriff almost a side character. Basically they take the main plot where Josh Brolin's character finds the cash, heroin, blah, blah, blah, then gets chased around by Javier Bardem and create one of the most effective thrillers in recent years. The problem is without the sheriff's commentary, the whole thing lacks substance, and the character itself doesn't really go anywhere. I'm still not 100% on my opinion yet, and it will probably end up on my top ten, but no higher than six. All the best director wins are fine i guess, but its a pile of bullshit whenever this wins adapted screenplay. This is still the best thriller of 2007 (probably).

Also, I was unimpressed with Javier Bardem. Maybe if every review didn't mention him as best supporting actor, i would have enjoyed him more, but i was very underwhelmed. For me Josh Brolin had the best performance in the film, and probably of his career.

[Pwaybloe]

MILD SPOILERS

Yeah, I thought Josh Brolin was the key character in this movie to keep it together.  Javier Bardem seemed to turn into the Terminator at the end, and it just got ridiculous (they even duplicated the "repair" scene from the movie).  Again, Brolin was fantastic and really carried the movie.  Javier Bardem got annoying.  Tommy Lee Jones was useless.  The message of "it ain't like it used to be" was repeated way too much.  It was just a big, big disappointment.

I'll review more later.

[MacGuffin]

'No Country for Old Men' Debate Available Online
Source: Cinematical

An eclectic group of online film notables, including former Times critic Elvis Mitchell, AICN's Harry Knowles, my colleague Glenn Kenny of Premiere.com, Roger Ebert's sidekick Jim Emerson and Jen Yamato of Rotten Tomatoes have gotten together to have a long, in-depth discussion about one of the year's top awards contenders, No Country for Old Men. A lot of topics are discussed during the free-floating talk, ranging from macro subjects like the film's much talked-about ending and the theme of old vs. young to minutiae like what happened to the coin that the gas station attendant won his life with and the significance of Javier Bardem's Prince Valiant haircut. There's also a lot of talk about the significance of feet in the film -- one character gets wounded in the foot and Bardem's character has a peculiar obsession with keeping his feet clean and there are lots of shots of walking feet in the film. What does it all mean?

It's the controversial ending that prompts the most debate, and Harry Knowles talks at one point about a screening of the film that took place in Austin with Josh Brolin in attendance: "A member of the audience stood up and [said] 'Why did they end it like that?!' and Brolin just looked at the guy and he looked angry." Kenny offers a unique interpretation of the last act, specifically referring to two events that happen in quick succession involving Bardem and another character. He believes Bergman's The Seventh Seal was an influence for the Coen Bros. on that. To hear the whole thing, just download the MP3 off the film's official website and enjoy.

http://www.nocountryforoldmen.com/podcast/