The Coen Brothers' New Masterpiece

Almost everyone claims several times during his life that the book was better than the movie, but I have the rare privilege tonight of asserting that the movie is better than the book. The movie that I mean is "No Country for Old Men," Joel and Ethan Coen's screen adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name.

It may seem strange, to anyone who has read that novel and seen the movie, to assert that the movie is superior when it is, more or less, a literal adaptation. There are a few episodes which are abbreviated (I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if they appear on the DVD as "Deleted Scenes") and some of the characters' back-stories and musings have been left out of the final script. But, while there is some trimming and stream-lining, there are no significant additions. Most of the dialogue is lifted from the page.

Furthermore, the Coen brothers have not failed to exploit all of the story's cinematic potential (and it is certainly one of the most cinematic literary novels written in the past decade.) The story could not be more intriguing to a movie fan. "No Country" is, in a sense, a chase film catalyzed when the ostensible hero, Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin in an understated yet poignant performance) comes across a drug-deal gone sour . . . and a bag with two million dollars in it. Llewelyn does not make for a particularly charismatic hero; he has a conscience, though it is severely flawed, but the characteristic that is most striking to the audience is not his stupidity; it is his humanity. Tommy Lee Jones represents the film's voice of wisdom and reason as Sheriff Bell, whose declinist views remind one, in some ways, of the Prophet Jeremiah. But the performance (if not the character) who stays with you long after you have seen the film is Javier Bardem's Chigurh, the maniacal killer who is ambiguously hired to retrieve the suitcase but is more interested in taking lives. Mr. Bardem demonstrated to some degree that he was capable of intimidation in Michael Mann's excellent crime thriller "Collateral" (in which he played an unforgiving organized-crime boss), but in "No Country" he takes his place above--not among--the great villains in film history. Chigurh is by far more creepy than Anthony Hopkins or Brian Cox ever were playing Hannibal Lecter and just as evil.

Because of their phenomenal cast, the Coen brothers' accomplishment have no need to change the structure or the plot of McCarthy's novel, because they can animate them in ways that McCarthy's prose is incapable of matching. I don't mean to slight McCarthy, for he is, unquestionably, the greatest contemporary American novelist. But his prose is of a spirit better suited for the historical than the contemporary novel. Common tropes of his prose--short, clever dialogue; absence of apostrophes; extreme objectivity--conform to the mythological portraits which he has painted in revisionist works like "Blood Meridian" and apocalyptic novels like "the Road," but in a contemporary "No Country" (actually set around 1980) the dialogue has a tendency to be deadened because its surrealism does not match the realistic setting. For this reason, it is all the more to the Coen brothers' credit--and to the credit of their outstanding cast which includes a host of excellent supporting roles--that they are capable of transliterating McCarthy's dialogue while making it realistic. When Chigurh tells a gas-station attendant and potential victim that he might come back after dark, the disgruntled man responds by asking what the point is: "we'll be closed then." He's frightened, and the audience not only senses it but is frightened with him.

Apart from the wonderful cast though, the Coens never fail to deliver on the fearful or suspenseful elements of the story. Directors of horror should take note. In an age in which filmmakers increasingly confuse ketchup with suspense, the Coens (and their technicians, it should be noted) understand that less is more. The beeping of transponder in "No Country" recalls Ridley Scott's brilliant blip-on-the-computer-screen sequence in "Alien" twenty-eight years ago. The gunshots are loud, but it is the anticipation of them that grips the audience; there are shoot-outs in the streets, but it is the empty streets which seem the most threatening.

Beneath this veneer of violence and horror lies a more complex message consistent with the themes of McCarthy's novel. It is, in a sense, a tragedy, even though it is not the tragedy of a person but of a society, dissipating as its people begin to lose their sense of personal connection and charity. In a way, it is a tale about the conflict between the forces which try to bind and break society apart. The ending may seem pessimistic and abrupt, even unfinished. But perhaps this is part of McCarthy's and the Coens' point. "No Country" has no sequel, but the story continues, even today.