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.