There Will Also Be Blood in This One
I got around to watching No Country for Old Men today, and I'm not a fan. I understand that it's a well-made movie.
But you've got a movie that's basically two things: one one hand, a parable about moral depravity; and on the other hand, a suspense-driven chase movie with a lot of carnage. I think these two aspects are well matched. The problem, as I see it, is that No Country doesn't really have anything to say about moral depravity, so the fact that the movie's soaked in it (or at least that Javier Bardem is) just starts to feel manipulative after a while. The fact that you, the viewer, are disgusted by moral depravity becomes this button the movie pushes on in order to make the suspense-driven chase part more harrowing. I don't like that; it seems cheap.
That the movie is so well shot, acted, and otherwise executed just makes this uglier to me. The story doesn't make any realistic claim about the way the world really is; you've basically got a bad guy dialed up to 11 and set loose in an otherwise realistic setting. Why? Makes for a harrowing suspense-driven chase movie, that's why; and I think that's it, even if the movie maintains a blackly somber atmosphere and otherwise acts like it's maybe saying something. It's not really, it seems sick after a while, and I don't like it.
(I recognize, though, that a lot of this reaction comes from my personal disinclination to watch movies where characters are SPOILER ALERT constantly being shot in the head. I trace this sensitivity to onscreen violence back to the first scene of the original Transformers movie in 1986. But I didn't cry at No Country, I hasten to add.)
I guess the movie does have one thing to say about moral depravity: that it's enough to make an old small-town Texas sheriff look upon the world with pained and weary eyes. So it was a good idea to cast Tommy Lee Jones here. Other than that I think you're better off just watching Fargo again.
But you've got a movie that's basically two things: one one hand, a parable about moral depravity; and on the other hand, a suspense-driven chase movie with a lot of carnage. I think these two aspects are well matched. The problem, as I see it, is that No Country doesn't really have anything to say about moral depravity, so the fact that the movie's soaked in it (or at least that Javier Bardem is) just starts to feel manipulative after a while. The fact that you, the viewer, are disgusted by moral depravity becomes this button the movie pushes on in order to make the suspense-driven chase part more harrowing. I don't like that; it seems cheap.
That the movie is so well shot, acted, and otherwise executed just makes this uglier to me. The story doesn't make any realistic claim about the way the world really is; you've basically got a bad guy dialed up to 11 and set loose in an otherwise realistic setting. Why? Makes for a harrowing suspense-driven chase movie, that's why; and I think that's it, even if the movie maintains a blackly somber atmosphere and otherwise acts like it's maybe saying something. It's not really, it seems sick after a while, and I don't like it.
(I recognize, though, that a lot of this reaction comes from my personal disinclination to watch movies where characters are SPOILER ALERT constantly being shot in the head. I trace this sensitivity to onscreen violence back to the first scene of the original Transformers movie in 1986. But I didn't cry at No Country, I hasten to add.)
I guess the movie does have one thing to say about moral depravity: that it's enough to make an old small-town Texas sheriff look upon the world with pained and weary eyes. So it was a good idea to cast Tommy Lee Jones here. Other than that I think you're better off just watching Fargo again.
5 Comments:
Yeah, I'll go ahead and watch it on the assumption that nothing in it is as harrowing as what's in the first ten minutes of the old Transformers movie.
I don't care if that's on The Internet now. I'm not watching it again.
SPOILER ALERT
I would argue that the movie tries to say that the brutality present in its fictional 1980s Texas is no different from the depravity of any given human context - especially in the monologue that opens the film and the story Tommy Lee Jones's cousin (I think it was a cousin - the old dude in the wheelchair) tells.
Also, the movie does call bullshit on the logic of Bardem's character - in the scene with what's-his-names wife. So I don't think that it just goes along with the faux-rational depravity of that character. And I checked that scene against McCarthy's book - in the book she does call the coin flip and loses, so clearly, at least between the book (which I'm sure, in all its crime-pulp genre-ness, is super-depraved) and the screenplay, the Coen brothers appear to have attempted to editorialize at least to some extent. Further, although he survives his car-crash, his character is seen as being somehow weak (or I thought so) for insisting on paying for the boy's shirt, when the charity was there for the taking.
I think that what's interesting about the film - and I realize that this can be seen as a bad thing, but the execution I think is inarguably tight - is that, in the end, all of the violence etc. is really just present to defeat a single old man that actually does come out intact.
In terms of the it-goes-to-11 argument - I would simply argue that Bardem is iconic in his role in a way that is rarely matched, which is what elevates his character's existence from some kind of pulp B-movie manipulation to being a triumph of film making.
What I really want to know is if they used CGI to make Woody Harrelson look as young as he does in that movie (not that he looks young so much as fake-young).
So, Jack, you would be able to forgive the movie it's brutality if it had been poorly executed?
No, I wouldn't forgive the movie its brutality if it were less well executed. I guess what I meant was that a worse movie wouldn't have bothered me as much, since I could have rejected it outright.
Your first comment, about the movie trying to evoke a general brutality in the world, is where I see the sticking point. The movie acts like it's making this point, and that it's taking you along as it stares down this awfulness in the world; but actually it's just amping up the brutality to the point where it's just a morbid fairy tale. There is actual awfulness in the world, but this movie has nothing in particular to do with it.
I read it like I read Fargo, which is to say a morality tale about money. We never know why Josh Brolin's character insists on keeping the money, but we know the consequences. Like Fargo, the Coen Brothers have a deft sense of atmosphere and dark humor, and while this movie has better cinematography, I still prefer Fargo's blend of dark morality tales and whimsy. Still, I found it harrowing, on both the chase-movie level, but also on a deeper level with Tommy Lee Jones's character.
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