Lessons In Adaptation: No Country For Old Men

No Country For Old Men is earning more speculation than any other movie released this year - it's a return to form for the Coen Brothers of Blood Simple! It's a break in form for the (unwatchable) Coen Brothers of Intolerable Cruelty and O Brother Where Art Thou! It's Fargo but not at all funny! Many reviews are proclaiming, as Peter Travers did, that it's the best movie of the year, and in those already-plentiful early Oscar predictions, No Country is the movie to predict - Best Actor for Josh Brolin! Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones! Joel and Ethan Coen are finally sharing director credits which means that it'll be rather difficult to put caveats before their lock Best Director nomination - it'll be Joel's second and Ethan's first.

Like so much of this end of the year talk, it's the tail wagging the dog - positive praise that shapes the percpetion of the movie for anyone watching. Because so many people dread that ironic Coen Brothers form of late that produces disasters like Intolerable Cruelty, critics tend to over-praise moments of Coen sincerity, and one thing No Country certainly is is sincere - it's positively bashful, devoid of ostentation of any kind. The shots of its South Texas landscape are as spare as the Cormac McCarthy prose from which it came, full of mise-en-scene that draws you in in its geometry, symmetry, and design. Roger Deakins, long-time Coen Director of Photography with five Oscar nominations and no wins, is bound to wind up with an Oscar this year, if not for No Country, for that other stark Western he shot, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

But the spare images are not what i want to discuss, although they are terrific, and much should and will be written about them. It's the spare words that I care about. Having finished McCarthey's No Country For Old Men (a book I started due to catching the spare images in the No Country trailer, playing before a third Western released this year, 3:10 To Yuma) just two weeks before I saw the movie, I've had my perception as equally colored by those Coen junkies desperate for a third masterpiece by the duo (after Blood Simple and Fargo, that is). It's always said that you should not see the movie of a book you love, but I wonder if you can go further - it's never possible to make an honest assessment of any book you've read and know. I didn't love No Country For Old Men, but there's interest dervied in its construction, and how it's adjusted in the movie, which I also didn't love. Seeing the movie made me admire the Coens for their utter lack of ostentation, admire Deakins for his astonishing compositions, admire, even, Josh Brolin for the expressiveness of his eyes. The movie drew me into the incredible suspense built through the room tone, light, and shadows that define its central cat-and-mouse story. But it made me admire what McCarthy did in his novel even more.

No Country For Old Men the book is a vignette-structured book in which each chapter begins with a lengthy italic monologue by Sherrif Ed Tom Bell, played in the movie by Tommy Lee Jones before creating a section break and moving into the action of the chapter. A monologue of Bell's verbatim opens the movie, but those incongruous voiceovers don't return. Sometimes you see Jones's Bell talking to a fellow cop in a restaurant or coffee shop, and they're recognizably drawn from that same material of Bell's monologues, but they are not the same. There is a reason for this.

Cormac McCarthy's No Country is a three-man story, or, rather, it's a story in which Bell is the lead and the cat-and-mouse of Llewellyn Moss (Brolin) and psychopath assassin Anton Chigurh (Bardem) is the tense vehicle for which Bell addresses with pain and agita the true source of his concern - the country's end of morality, the sense that we've all gone to hell. For Bell, his obligation as sheriff is a call to protection of the citizens of his town, and as backwoods as it seems, that obligation is a potent force in the novel - so too is that sense of degradation, and I say that as a person who is totally incapable of hearing doddering old men rant about how things change.

The problem is that Bell in the Coen's No Country is a doddering old man ranting about how things change. The Coen's might be back to sincerity, but their scenes with Jones are shot with their usual medium-shot irony - his rants are suddenly made "funny," the source of crotchety whining without much context, turning him into this year's version of those funny Minnesota accents in Fargo. In a dramatic moment at the end of the book and movie, Bell talks about his need to retire. In the book, this scene is a moment of great weight, of failed obligation and pain. In the movie, this scene is just a bore - a fact emphasized by what's been chopped out of it, which is to say, the vast majority of its length. The Coens seem to know that we can't sit through it.

That's all because Bell is such a secondary character in the film version - and "secondary" is a polite way to put it. Truly, he's an irrelevant character - his police work is minimal, his obligation to Moss is not actually explored, and without truly feeling where his concerns on morality come from, his scenes serve only as dull, grim Greek chorus breaks to let time pass on the more interesting Moss-Chigurh story line. Because of that, when the third act shock resolution of that cat-and-mouse story is revealed, it doesn't make you empathize with Bell's obligation and share his pain at moral decay, it simply lets the air out of the movie - its main storyline turns into a cynical action story in which the bad guys win, but rather undramatically.

This change in Bell is, I think, the result of some pruning. I have ot imagine Bell's presence was more emphasized in an earlier draft of the script, but then was changed due to seeming too close to the novel. And No Country is very very close to the novel, which makes sense as reading No Country, it feels like a book written merely to be adapted later. That's a limitation for the book as well - McCarthy's stoic prose is wonderful for vertical stories in which you don't mind that nothing much happens, but this is all plot, and sometimes his poetic ruminations just get confusing on what's going on. And that confusion isn't cleared up in the movie.

While not following the book around Bell's character, the movie is rather stubborn about following the rest of the book. That only points out how implausible much of the book is. Sure, Chigurh, and, later, Carson Wells are master criminals, but seriously, how do they always track Moss down, even after he's lost his transponder? They just always seem to show up in the right spots. And who even hires Chigurh in the first place? How do they get ahold of him? The drug-running maguffin for this story is beyond convoluted - it doesn't exist. And that Carson Wells character (played in the movie by Woody Harrelson)? He's just as stupid as he is in the book - the most generic of slick, holier-than-thou criminal cliches.

Which is to say, there are some fundamental flaws in No Country For Old Men, but it's also accurate to say I may have never concluded such a thing without reading the book. I find it interesting the way the entire storytelling dynamics visually shift in the movie simply by decreasing our identification with the Bell character. And it's somewhat comforting that the moments I found confusing in the book are just as confusing in the movie - at least I wasn't missing something.

Some reasons why Peter Travers is my least favorite person alive

I owe a lot to Peter Travers, the long time film critic for Rolling Stone. In 1995, a long long essay he wrote about the year in movies (it began with the fairly typical, heavily punctuated first line "Hollywood screwed up this year. Big time.") essentially started my life-long obsession with film criticism. I remember a time, then I was 13 years old, when I read his list of the worst movies of the year over the phone to a friend - I thought he was hilarious, and, with all that cussing and vituperative bullying, clearly onto something the establishment was missing out on.

It didn't really take me long to notice, however, that Peter Travers seemed to never NOT do all that cussing and vituperative bullying. Sometimes it seemed that Peter Travers didn't even like the movies he liked (in 1997, I recall, baffled, that his praise for LA Confidential was "It lurks in Chinatown's shadow), or at least was willing to get amnesia about previous opinions - despite, in 1995, praising Sean Penn's devastating performance in Dead Man Walking, he said later that the performance wasn't worthy of its Oscar nomination. That goes double for Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas that year - a performance also, apparently, undeserving of an Oscar nomination, despite his end of the year piece stated was the best acting that year. Actually, that might be too positive a characterization of his writing - it read, "Some will tell you these performances are just for movie masochists. Bullshit."

Something happened the more I got involved in reading and obsessing over film criticism - I started to really really hate Peter Travers. It seemed, to me, that his reviews, truly, said nothing. He'd complain (of course) that the Hollywood establishment took his quotes out of context for movie posters, but then he'd seem to write exclusively in angry ranting, and movie-quotable nothingness. Today, I clicked on Rolling Stone's review of No Country For Old Men, and here is his first paragraph:

"Misguided souls will tell you that No Country for Old Men is out for blood, focused on vengeance and unconcerned with the larger world outside a standard-issue suspense plot. Those people, of course, are deaf, dumb and blind to anything that isn't spelled out between commercials on dying TV networks. Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best. Set in 1980 in West Texas, where the chase is on for stolen drug money, the film — a new career peak for the Coen brothers, who share writing and directing credits — is a literate meditation (scary words for the Transformers crowd) on America's bloodlust for the easy fix. It's also as entertaining as hell, which tends to rile up elitists. What do the criminal acts of losers in a flyover state have to do with the life of the mind? "

Wow. Who knew you could impugn Hollywood, television, indie movies, fans of Transformers, people who dislike violence, and people who dislike "literate meditations" in one fowl swoop.

Travers's writing is all movie-slogan cliche, portable jargon, and atrebillious crankiness aimed at whatever will fill column space. It seems to me as though the ways in which criticism can be itself an art should be manifest (read a review by Owen Gleiberman, or Roger Ebert, or A.O. Scott sometime), but Travers is worse than a bad critic, or even a bad writer - he's a flashy provocateur, but he's as substanceless as he is contentious. He says nothing, but manages to say too much of it, ruining the movie and annoying you - often within the same sentence! One rather vapid bit of praise for Tommy Lee Jones's performance:

" On the page, the sheriff is a tad too folksy, dishing out cracker-barrel wisdom to his good wife, Loretta (Tess Harper), with a twinkle written into his homespun truths. As you already know by now (and In the Valley of Elah categorically proves it), Mr. Jones does not do twinkle. He's a hard-ass. And when he chews into a good line, you can see the bite marks. "

Again, Travers' compliment is actually a dig on the Cormac McCarthy novel No Country For Old Men - except, of course, when it's obnoxious. A hard ass? Seriously? Bite marks?

My guess is that you do not see bite marks from Tommy Lee Jones, who is a terrific actor who I'm sure does his grizzled best with the best part from McCarthy's book. I don't know what twinkling, hard-asses, or chewing into lines looks like, but it isn't really what Jones does best- Tommy Lee Jones is a man of telling reserve, of eyes sunken behind fields of wrinkled, depressing skin, of a face for which his voice does the least of the talking. However, I believe he could give a (egads) hard-assed performance, though with Travers' description of that performance ending there, it's hard to say what one would look like.

Travers, I say without any evidentiary support, is still somewhat popular, listed amongst the critics whose word influences the marketability of certain movies. In a way, that makes sense - Travers doesn't make a lot of opinions of his own, and if popular support changes with a movie, he tends to change with it - for example, in 2001, he listed A Beautiful Mind as the #5 movie of the year. However, when popular sentiment soured on that movie as it became an Oscar favorite, so did he, trashing the movie in his Oscar report, neglecting to mention his own four-star review of the thing three months earlier. So, I'd have to assume a four-star review for No Country For Old Men is a good sign of what advance public word on the movie is, but I sorta already knew that.

I can say from experience that it's typically easier to write something punchy and evidentiary if you can create an argument with it rather than finding and elucidating strengths - especially a review of a new movie, in which your initial reaction might be as simple as "wow, that was upsetting." Maybe it's because he works for Rolling Stone and has to have a certain provocative edge to him. Maybe that's why Peter Travers's reviews are, ya know, terrible.