No Accounting for Old Taste

At the end of his survey of the Coen brothers' films in the New Yorker this week, David Denby expresses some reservations about No Country for Old Men that are fairly similar to the problem I see in the movie, and since he's an actual prominent critic he writes about it much less fumblingly than I do. So I figured I'd just clip out a big section of it and then hide behind it:

Civilization, it seems, has come to an end, petering out in the yellow-brown fields of West Texas. But does the story support the sheriff’s metaphysical dyspepsia? And have the Coens found, in Anton Chigurh, a correlative for their malign view of life? Who is Chigurh? What is he? He slaughters twelve people, and yet somehow manages to be seen by no one. He kills a cop, yet the authorities never get their act together and track him down. The plot, when you parse it from scene to scene, doesn’t hang together as a crime story.

Some people have said that you cannot read the movie literally. Chigurh is Death, they say, a supernatural figure, a vengeful ghost. But what do you do with the realistic body of the movie if you read this one element supernaturally? Chigurh, despite Bardem’s gravid tones and elocutionary precision, is not Death but a stalking psycho killer out of a grade-C horror movie. You keep wondering when he’ll return, like Freddy Krueger. He’s a trashy element in the book, too, but McCarthy gave him a shade more reality. . . . He murders people, but he wants to continue working in the trade; he’s not quite the ineffable spirit of Evil.

The spooky-chic way the Coens use Bardem has excited audiences with a tingling sense of the uncanny. But, in the end, the movie’s despair is unearned—it’s far too dependent on an arbitrarily manipulated plot and some very old-fashioned junk mechanics. “No Country” is the Coens’ most accomplished achievement in craft, with many stunning sequences, but there are absences in it that hollow out the movie’s attempt at greatness.

So, yeah, what he said. I'm a There Will Be Blood man, naturally, in terms of rooting for Best Picture, but I'm not going to watch the telecast since the Yale Percussion Group is up against it this year (just like last year!) and they've got So Percussion with them.

Also in the New Yorker this week, Elizabeth Kolbert reviews books on behavioral economics, a subject I always find fascinating; one of those books is available from the old friendly neighborhood university press, though I personally had nothing in particular to do with it. (I think I may have done a very early round of manuscript cleanup on it.) Anyway, interesting reading.

Saturday's typically mild-mannered agenda: haircut; gymnasium; food shopping; [and shortly to come] cooking a chicken curry; watching the university kids put on Carmina Burana.