I linked to this Matt Zoller Seitz essay on No Country For Old Men when it first appeared, but it seems worth doing so again, because I think Seitz is exactly right about the Coen Brothers and David Denby, who has a long piece in the latest New Yorker sounding the familiar complaint that the Coens are "masters of chaos" who are guilty of "rooting for it rather than against it," is exactly wrong.
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The Moral Vision of the Coen Brothers (II)
18 Feb 2008 09:42 am
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Comments (10)
second line should read "chaotic in their personal lives."
mea culpa.
Seitz sure can go on, but man is he shrewd and insightful. That's a great piece.
An idle thought: If No Country wins Best Picture, as expected, will it be the best movie to do so since the 1970s? I could see an argument for both Godfathers (obviously), as well as Annie Hall and The Deer Hunter. But since then... eh. I know some people like Schindler's List and Unforgiven a lot more than I do, but I would put No Country comfortably above both of those movies.
That Denby piece was much better than I expected. Yes, he's wrong about about "No Country," and, like many others who were frustrated by it, seems caught up far too much in the Llewellyn Moss character, who is, I think, depicted perfectly in the film.
But his movie-by-movie critique of the Coens is mostly accurate, I think. My main problem with the mostly excellent Matt Zoller Seitz is that he is too much the auteurist; he seems to see greatness in nearly every work produced by his favorites. But an uneven oeuvre like the Coens' (and that of nearly every other filmmaker, for that matter) warrants more discernment, and Denby mostly gets it right when it comes to the Coens: Fargo and The Big Lebowski are the peaks; O Brother is wildly uneven and not that good; Barton Fink is overly esoteric and self-indulgent.
No Country is their best movie yet, though.
Quick tip for ya: David Denby is always wrong, about everything. The only possible exceptions are independently verifiable facts: For example, he usually gets the casts of the movies he discusses right. But where interpretation is concerned, he's a moralizing schlub whose opinion should be almost as reflexively ignored as Armond White's.
No country is, together with Michael Clayton, the most overrated movie of the year. Denby is right about how contrived everything is, although if you really want to read the best assessment of the movie, read Anthony Lane's review. And I don't understand how people can find Bardem's character scary. To attribute it existential significance is beyond risible. And don’t get me started on the haircut. It is as if the Coens were embracing the ridiculousness of it all. After seeing him get rid of his second victim as one kills a fly, I was bored. Only the real is scary.
Interesting that Seitz can so casually dismiss the influence of Cormac McCarthy when discussing the motivation of the Coens as they adapt his work.
Only the real is scary? That flies in the face of quite a lot of cinematic history. Unless you think "Jaws" is real (or, alternatively, not scary-- I find it fake and terrifying).
Also, I don't think Seitz dismisses the influence of McCarthy. Here's what he says:
"I haven't read the Coens' source material (a novel by Cormac McCarthy), which means I'm not sure whether virtues I attribute to the Coens are partly attributable to the novelist; in any event, No Country is an unsettlingly effective movie, different from, yet consistent with, everything the brothers have made till now."
Seems pretty reasonable to me.
I agree with ray, though, that Michael Clayton is wildly overrated. But No Country is on a whole other level.
Life would be simpler if David Denby was "wrong about everything," but he gets it right once in a while. I can't think of anyone else who had much to say about "We Don't Live Here Anymore," for instance, which is a very good and under-rated movie (much better, in my opinion, than "In the Bedroom," which was also based on some of Andre Dubus's short fiction).
"I haven't read the Coens' source material (a novel by Cormac McCarthy), which means I'm not sure whether virtues I attribute to the Coens are partly attributable to the novelist; in any event, No Country is an unsettlingly effective movie, different from, yet consistent with, everything the brothers have made till now."
Seems pretty reasonable to me.
It's reasonable but I do think it ends up missing something. I thought the novel possessed many of the virtues people attribute to the movie--it's extraordinarily well-paced and tense while also providing some genuinely interesting and affecting insight into the futility of human action, the reality of evil, etc.
I was disappointed in the movie. I liked it. But I loved the book and had read great reviews of the movie for many months before I actually got a chance to see it. And, for me, it fell a bit flat. I think it's just because much of the tension and perspective was in the narration, since the bare bones of the plot is just a conventional chase. The voice-over didn't capture the total impact of the narration, and something in McCarthy's descriptions had more of an impact than the Cohen Brother's visual representations.
For example,
-------SPOILER-------
the book dispassionately states that the villain shoots Moss's wife, while the movie cuts away. It was a no-win for filmmakers. You couldn't convey the horror of it without showing it. But you couldn't convey the crushing inevitability of it by actually putting the deed onscreen, since it would be so shocking.
It's odd, because as I was reading it I was so caught up in the plotting, the dialogue and the descriptions that I kept thinking what a great movie it would make. But it turns out that it may be, at least in some sense, an un-filmable book.
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Frequently, it seems to me, Coen protagonists (the Dude, Ulysses Everett McGill), though themselves somewhat sloppy and eccentric -- that is, chaotic in their moral lives -- attempt to make moral sense, and take moral actions, in the midst of moral chaos which, despite its facade of social propriety (the Big Lebowski, the sherrif and race-baiting reformist poltician, e.g.), is actually far worse than anything the protagonist would endeavor to imagine or enact.
Posted by Daniel Shays | February 18, 2008 10:28 AM