1243 No Country for Old Men

[Banana #3]

What is the release schedule for this film?

The marketing campaign feels like its taking a wider approach, but do they plan to extend it across the country into major theatre chains, or at least out of the specialty houses?

[Jeff]

What is the release schedule for this film?

The marketing campaign feels like its taking a wider approach, but do they plan to extend it across the country into major theatre chains, or at least out of the specialty houses?

It expanded to 860 screens on Wednesday, and that is probably as wide as it will go unless it does incredibly well at the box office. It has already made the transition from art house to multiplex in most markets. In Denver, for example, it went from six screens in three theaters a week ago to 17 screens in 14 theaters now. Only one of those would be considered an "art house" theater. If you live in a small town or rural area, keep your fingers crossed for a very successful week at the box office or it may not make it to your area. Here is IMDb's map of where the movie is playing, if that's of any use to you.

[Dylan]

For all the praise, there's something about this film that doesn't add up or function properly. Yes, it has lovely photography, and as expected, Javier Bardem is very good as the (more or less, conveniently) insane killer, but there seems to be something drab about the entire event. Granted, there are shades of ambiguous complexities that emerge as the film progresses but it was all happening to transparent, logically-challenged and motivational-free characters. There were innumerable instances throughout where I felt like yelling Why? or What? or Where the hell is the logic? or What were the writers thinking?

More personally, I also wasn't clear on whether the girl was Brolin's daughter or his wife until the second to last scene (which made the "Mama" character confusing, as I was considering the possibility that "Mama" was his wife and it was a quirky Coen thing thrown in there). For me, that part of the film was seriously lacking clarity. And although I understood it was 1980, I seriously wonder how many other people caught onto Bardem's 1958 plus 22 years? I also felt it kept ending, and ending, so many times that I was expecting more 'endings' after the final denouncement.

Throughout the film one gets the vague impression that there's something kind of interesting going on (the opening is strong), but when it finishes and I really gave the film a lengthy reflection, so much of what the characters do just doesn't make any damn sense to me (emotional or motivational or otherwise), and in the end the film just fizzles out with absolutely no momentum.

I don't understand why even the negative reviews are calling this film "immaculate" and "perfectly constructed" or "executed with great skill." For me, this film is like a house without a roof. Pretty weak stuff.

[jbeall]

For all the praise, there's something about this film that doesn't add up or function properly. Yes, it has lovely photography, and as expected, Javier Bardem is very good as the (more or less, conveniently) insane killer, but there seems to be something drab about the entire event...

More personally, I also wasn't clear on whether the girl was Brolin's daughter or his wife until the second to last scene (which made the "Mama" character confusing, as I was considering the possibility that "Mama" was his wife and it was a quirky Coen thing thrown in there)

I'm a little exhausted (too much gluttony in the last couple of days), so I'll only respond to two points:

Chigurh isn't *insane*; he adheres to a strict code that most of us find unsettling (myself included), but he's quite rational by the logic of his own worldview.

Also, it should be pretty clear that the girl is Moss's wife early in the film when he (jokingly) threatens to take her to the bedroom and screw her. In the film (as in the novel), she's significantly younger than he is and was probably a teenager when they married, but I don't think she's young enough to be his daughter.

[Cold Bishop]

Also, it should be pretty clear that the girl is Moss's wife early in the film when he (jokingly) threatens to take her to the bedroom and screw her. In the film (as in the novel), she's significantly younger than he is and was probably a teenager when they married, but I don't think she's young enough to be his daughter.

Or when they're in bed together..

[Dylan]

I was seriously still able to take their relationship two different ways: first, what both of you described, and second, the possibility that he was seriously joking with his daughter about 'screwing' to get her goat and that due to their living conditions they only have one bed. I know it sounds nitpicky, but this was my honest reaction to the presentation of these characters.

[Oedipax]

No, But We Saw the Movie

[Dylan]

No, But We Saw the Movie

Good stuff. It makes the film seem kind of worse, actually, as it may seriously bring some of the filmmakers' intentions to light. If No Country For Old Men was really going for a Passenger-style level of ambiguity it totally failed to engage me on those levels, and I simply don't accept any of its potential "transcending" who was that? or was it really him? or whatever. With Antonioni, enigmatic or not, everything that needs to be there usually is and it speaks volumes without me having to ask any questions of logic or story direction. That was as far from my experience with this film as possible. By the time the guy was buying tents with poles to make an instrument to get the suitcase out of the vent it had lost all sense of dramatic function and logic for me. The humor, for me, is also out of place and ultimately pointless, as was Woody's character (or every scene with these secondary characters) and many (all?) of the 'shock' scenes, which add up to nothing but a body count. If it was somehow using some of this to ask big Taxi Driver-esque moral questions I totally didn't get that from the material, either. The more I think about this film, the more none of it adds up.

[Banana #3]

But the film is so bare that it leaves little in the way of possibilities. This isn't Magnolia or Short Cuts, where there's ten main characters and twenty supporting and ten more locations.

I mean, this is a chase film. It can't be more simple than that. Except for maybe Secret Honor or something similar.

[Cold Bishop]

No, But We Saw the Movie

Good stuff. It makes the film seem kind of worse, actually, as it may seriously bring some of the filmmakers' intentions to light. If No Country For Old Men was really going for a Passenger-style level of ambiguity it totally failed to engage me on those levels, and I simply don't accept any of its potential "transcending" who was that? or was it really him? or whatever. With Antonioni, enigmatic or not, everything that needs to be there usually is and it speaks volumes without me having to ask any questions of logic or story direction. That was as far from my experience with this film as possible. By the time the guy was buying tents with poles to make an instrument to get the suitcase out of the vent it had lost all sense of dramatic function and logic for me. The humor, for me, is also out of place and ultimately pointless, as was Woody's character (or every scene with these secondary characters) and many (all?) of the 'shock' scenes, which add up to nothing but a body count. If it was somehow using some of this to ask big Taxi Driver-esque moral questions I totally didn't get that from the material, either. The more I think about this film, the more none of it adds up.

I don't really think it's going for a "transcending" Antonioni-like ambiguity, so much as sparesness. It's a thriller stripped of all the superfluousness that comes with the genre, and using the bare remains of what's left to really allow the capriciousness of fate and nature of human evil apparent in the story to come to the forefront.

I really don't quite understand how people are missing these things in the movie. Maybe having read the book helped me, but I honestly don't think I would have missed these things if I hadn't, and I'm not certainly not gonna go after the Coens if people are failing to put pieces together.

...And the book actually does say what happens to Llewellyn Moss

(He gets shot in the head by the mexicans while saving a runaway girl he picks up, who gets killed anyways. The Coens cut out the character, who we are to assume is now the girl in the pool.)

if anyone's really interested or feel it necessary to know.

[GringoTex]

The good:

The evocations of the West Texas landscape are superb. I grew up in the area and they nailed it. They also got the towns right.

Josh Brolin's characterization is dead-on. He gets everything right about a certain brand of West Texan.


The bad:

The Coen Bros just can't help themselves. Halfway through the movie I was marveling that they hadn't gotten snarky with a single redneck characterization. And then in the second half it all came busting out. It's as if they were scared to death to take the scenario seriously to the end.

How could they leave out the scene where Moss picks up the hitch-hiking girl? It's by far the most touching scene in the book, and his death is rendered almost nonsensical without it.

It's difficult to tell as I've read the book and thus read a lot into the movie, but from the comments here it appears the Coens didn't do a very good job getting across McCarthy's themes of fate, free will, and regeneration through violence.

[GringoTex]

No, But We Saw the Movie

That would have been a lot funnier if it actually got it right about what happened in the movie v. the book. As it is, the writer comes off as a bit of an idiot who can't follow pretty straight forward plot points.

[Cold Bishop]

How could they leave out the scene where Moss picks up the hitch-hiking girl? It's by far the most touching scene in the book, and his death is rendered almost nonsensical without it.

They do much more than cut out just a "scene", they cut out the entire section... And at first, I was unsettled by this. I do think that for people who've read the book, this is probably gonna be the most contentious aspect of the adaptation, expecially since all the talk of faithfulness going in is probably gonna have them expecting it. But, in the end, the Coens are gonna have to do there own thing. Are you missing something from the novel by taking the section out? Yes, but I don't think it removes from the movie and what it tries to do. And I wouldn't say his death is rendered nonsensical. He was killed by the drug dealers for taking the money. I almost feel as if it's just as equally apt for the Coens to have Moss die as bluntly and suddenly as they had him in the film, as the McCarthy did in the book, they just both took it in two different directions.

But certainly, this is a point of contention I can understand, although I don't necessarily agree with it.

[chaddoli]

Tex, I think this movie is all about fate. Tommy Lee Jones discusses almost nothing but. It is Brolin's line, however, that I think sums up the Coens' perspective on their characters, when he says "I'm about to do somethin' dumber than Hell but I'm goin' anyways." I love the idea that Brolin knows what he's doing is stupid, but is irrevocably compelled to go anyway. It's almost as if he knows what genre he's in, and what role he has to play - that he simply must go back to the desert because it is his destiny.

[blindside8zao]

Regardless of anything, that last scene is gold. There's so much in those words and you can feel it coming through. If those were exact words by McCarthy then that was a miracle of adaptation.

[Dylan]

The novel sounds quite a lot better than the movie.

[DrewReiber]

The novel sounds quite a lot better than the movie.

Then read it.

[Cold Bishop]

The novel sounds quite a lot better than the movie.

It's a decent novel. It's not McCarthy's best, and that's probably why the Coens were able to one-up it. That, and so much of it feels like it should be told visually as opposed to written.

It feels like a nice little mean crime-novel on par with something by Elmore Leonard or Jim Thompson or James Cain, but McCarthy's attempt to push it into the area of Profoundness of Blood Meridian or Child of God doesn't quite always work in transcending the potboiler-trappings of the thriller-genre. When it works, its sparse and apocalyptic. When it doesn't, it does feel like McCarthy is trying to force the significance of this cycle of violence as 'the end of modern times" down our throats, telling us the message bluntly instead of showing. Not to mention that such verbosity betrays the stripped-down and sparse tone of the novel (which the film avoids having to do).

The ending especially works much better in the film. In the novel, the story just seems like it runs out of steam, which isn't nearly as effective. In the film, I really feel like the events have shaken and broken Bell. The movie feels like defeatism, where the novel feels like resignation. And certainly the monologue at the end is much more haunting and apocalyptic than in the novel.

Really, I feel the movie is better than the novel, but it's probably only so because the novel, as written by McCarthy, feels like a movie in prose. All the Coens had to do was film it, and once everything was visualized, and all the problems with McCarthey's prose and narrative were gone, it fell into place.

[Dylan]

The novel sounds quite a lot better than the movie.

Then read it.

What did you think of the film?

And ColdBishop, thank you for offering your perspective.

It also sounds to me like this film was going for a few similar things A History of Violence was, and that was another film I wasn't too crazy about.

[DrewReiber]

It also sounds to me like this film was going for a few similar things A History of Violence was, and that was another film I wasn't too crazy about.

I thought it was very well done, albeit for one or two over the top sequences (the business office, for instance). I can see why you would bring up A History of Violence, but I must say that I firmly feel that is one of the most poorly executed and hysterically cliched entries in this genre. This isn't a thread for that film or Cronenberg, so I'm not going to waste everyone's time going into that.

However, due to the nature of the book or not, I welcome No Country for Old Men as one of the more intentionally challenging and subtle films to discuss the nature of violence in "Hollywood" terms for some time. I've been staying out of voicing my own opinion because that isn't interesting to me and I would rather see the perspectives of others. I find it distressing, though, that this thread keeps degenerating into an irrelevant argument about the superiority of the written format, especially when the direction tends to lean towards putting the film down without an actual discussion.

[Poncho Punch]

I've been staying out of voicing my own opinion because that isn't interesting to me and I would rather see the perspectives of others. I find it distressing, though, that this thread keeps degenerating into an irrelevant argument about the superiority of the written format, especially when the direction tends to lean towards putting the film down without an actual discussion.

Your comments very succinctly, eloquently, and logically summarize literally everything I wanted to say with my rant on the previous page and subsequent refusal to elaborate upon it. For those of you who may still wonder what I was trying to say, that was it.

And the Yeats reference, while admittedly completely off-the-wall, was in the same room as the rest of this discussion, to continue Mr Sausage's metaphor, though admittedly removed a whole 'nother degree from the rest of this debacle, as the title of the book and film come from him.

[pemmican]

It is very, very difficult to be objective about a film experience if you've read the book on which its based, especially if the book SO lends itself to novelisation (as this does); anyone who reads it will have a "movie in their mind" to weigh the Coens' film against. It's pretty hard to detach oneself enough to NOT make that point of comparison.

I don't think I'd like it much even without having read the book, tho'.

P.

[DrewReiber]

It is very, very difficult to be objective about a film experience if you've read the book on which its based, especially if the book SO lends itself to novelisation (as this does); anyone who reads it will have a "movie in their mind" to weigh the Coens' film against. It's pretty hard to detach oneself enough to NOT make that point of comparison.

I don't think I'd like it much even without having read the book, tho'.

I was referring to those who hadn't even read the book or were simply going on tangents about how much better books are in general. See earlier posts.

[Mr Sausage]

And the Yeats reference, while admittedly completely off-the-wall, was in the same room as the rest of this discussion, to continue Mr Sausage's metaphor, though admittedly removed a whole 'nother degree from the rest of this debacle, as the title of the book and film come from him.

Well I did only say "seemingly" the wrong room.

[Richard--W]

Spoilers Below:

Tex, I think this movie is all about fate. Tommy Lee Jones discusses almost nothing but. It is Brolin's line, however, that I think sums up the Coens' perspective on their characters, when he says "I'm about to do somethin' dumber than Hell but I'm goin' anyways." I love the idea that Brolin knows what he's doing is stupid, but is irrevocably compelled to go anyway. It's almost as if he knows what genre he's in, and what role he has to play - that he simply must go back to the desert because it is his destiny.

Right.
You nailed it.

With slight variations in emphasis and how some scenes play out, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is faithful to Cormac McCarthy's novel. It is widely regarded as a significant and important novel. This film is McCarthy's story, his plot, his themes and subtext, his characters and dialog. The Coens are especially adept at putting McCarthy's dialog and southwestern vernacular into the mouths of actors who make it sound natural and authentic ... which, as one who lives half the time where the story takes place, it is.

Like the novel, the film is about evil, luck, and fate. Take the third act for example. The transition into the third act comes when Sheriff Bell is driving toward the hotel. He hears the sound of automatic weapons fire in the distance and heads toward it, arriving at the same destination. He finds Llewellyn Moss dead, and sees the drug runners driving away in a pickup. Later, in a discussion with another peace officer, the idea is planted in his mind the Chigurh returned to the last scene of his crime. Knowing that Chigurh had been looking for the drug money that Moss was carrying, he returns to the hotel room where Llewellyn Moss has kept the drug money. Chigurh is there, waiting in the dark to see if Sheriff Bell will find him, but Sheriff Bell does not see him. If he takes one more step, or looks any further, one or the other will be killed. Tommy Lee Jones communicates his palpable fear of Chigurh in this scene. Chigurh unnerves him. Javier Bardem communicates his complete indifference to how things turn out. He'll kill if he has to or not if he doesn't. It's all the same to him. But he enjoys waiting to see how his fate will turn out.

Then Chirgurh keeps his promise to the late Llewellyn by going to kill his wife Carla Jean, a sweet innocent. We in the audience know, after she's buried her husband and now her mother, that Chigurh will be waiting for her in the dark, probably sitting in a chair, when she walks into that house. And he is. Carla Jean says she knew this was coming. Chirgurh offers her a toss of the coin to save her life. She refuses, and even challenges his reasoning on the coin toss.

Cut to Sheriff Bell. He retires from law enforcement. Instead of pursuing the killer and saving lives, he gives up. This is unsettling to us.

Chigurh exits the house. We don't see the murder, but when Chigurh checks the bottom of his shoes, it's clear that Carla Jean died horribly. As he drives away, he sees two boys on bicycles. This distraction is all it takes for him to cross an intersection and collide with another car. With the bone sticking out of his arm, Chigurh walks away. One of the boys offers him his shirt to tie up the arm. But Chigurh insists on paying for it. When the boy sees the $500 bill, he accepts, and agrees to say nothing to the police about where Chigurh went. Money corrupts everybody, even innocent boys and girls.

As the sirens draw closer, we go back to retired Sheriff Bell, who conveys a dream about his late father meeting him in the after life. This is no country for old men like his father and now Bell himself to be peace officers when crime has turned into such evil that an innocent sweet girl like Carla Jean can be murdered and her killer get away.

So what's happened? Throughout the story Chigurh tempts fate. He is lucky. We see him get lucky time and again. He knows he's lucky, he trusts in luck, and he respects luck. Woody Allen's oft-quoted observation that success depends on luck which implies a lack of control over our lives seems applicable here. In offering victims a coin toss, Chigurh is curious how their fate will turn out, but indifferent to the outcome. He kills because he can, and because it empowers him to take life away form everyone who pleads and begs with the same shallow words. But Carla Jean has perhaps jinxed him. In refusing to beg, in refusing to call heads or tails, she refuses to play by his rules, refuses to empower him , which in a sense is refusing to surrender to evil. She'd rather die than do that. Then Chirgurh gets into an accident. He escapes narrowly. From now on, we get the feeling that his luck is running out.

The thought occurs to me that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is essentially a film noir. From the inside out. The film operates entirely on subtext, like good dramatic theater, and in the best tradition of film noir.