The Ladykillers (1955) vs. The Ladykillers (2004)

For my latest Re-Make/Re-Model piece for Spectrum Culture, I compare the blisteringly funny, darkly funny Ealing Studios classic The Ladykillers with the Coens' 2004 remake. The latter is my least favorite of the brothers' work, so I had hoped to see something of value on a second watch. Sadly, watching the two films back to back only made its failings that much more apparent, and all the (very Coenesque) charm of the original is lost on weak irony, puerile scatology and offensive caricatures. It is everything Coen haters accuse the brothers of being but otherwise never are, and I shall continue to put it out of sight and mind when evaluating their incredible body of work.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

True Grit (2010)

Mine eyes have seen the glory. The Coen brothers, smartass, shaggy-dog moralists, have stripped away even the bluff of their cynicism for their most straightforward, un-ironic film. Somehow, they ended up making one of their most meditative. Their update of True Grit continues their heightened commitment to moral reckoning of late, but the evocative (and deeply misunderstood) rumination of No Country for Old Men has given way to a message that is destined to be even more overlooked, precisely because it is hidden in plain sight, uncovered by the removal of irony.

Just as the filmmaking duo put Cormac McCarthy's anti-thriller on the screen with remarkable fealty, they adapt Charles Portis' novel faithfully, more faithfully than the 1969 film starring John Wayne. Portis' book is a light read, enjoyable but sprinkled with contradictions it never addresses. In sticking to the letter of the novel, the Coens transpose those issues and undermine them without turning the material against itself.

A revenge story, True Grit opens with an aural framing device as a middle-aged Mattie Ross remembers her father's death, the image filtering into clarity from a haze like an old but vivid memory being tapped. As the image sharpens, we see a man, Mattie's father, lying in a heap at the foot of his home as his murderer, a hired hand named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), rides away. The young Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) heads to town to retrieve her father's body and setlle his affairs, and from the onset she comes across as shrewd beyond her 14 years. A trader uses her dad's demise as an excuse to make a quick buck, but she manages to sell back the final items her father bought from the man as well as some extra material of dubious ownership in a way that weakens the man as much as his malaria.

But her hardness carries a darker edge. Tracking the sheriff to inquire about Chaney's location, she witnesses a hanging and is unmoved by the sight of three men dropping until their necks snap. When the sheriff tells her that Chaney is out of his jurisdiction and that the U.S. Marshals will have to deal with him now, Mattie asks which Marshal she could hire. Of the ones mentioned, she settles on Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), whom the sheriff pointedly does not describe as the best man for the job but the meanest. Her drive impresses the washed-up drunk, as well as a Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf a.k.a. "La Beef" (Matt Damon), who pursues Chaney for the murder of a state senator back in his home state. Mattie insists that Chaney be hanged for killing her father and not some mere senator, a sly political statement but also one that reveals the myopic fury of her thirst for revenge.

Jeff Bridges, who received his "sorry we didn't get this to you sooner" Oscar earlier in the year for his performance in Crazy Heart, is still so alive and visceral that the joy of seeing him at last rewarded -- even with something as meaningless as an Academy Award -- is tempered by the fact that it symbolizes an atonement rather than a recognition that he still does magnificent work. I joked with friends that, as much as I've come to admire John Wayne, Bridges represented a significant upgrade. Yet it is in his desire to move away from Wayne's performance that Bridges does one of his few "acting" jobs, where you can actually catch him at the tricks he normally pulls off without ever trying. Bridges' take on Cogburn is nearly unintelligible, not only from his intoxicated mumble but in the not-all-there look in his one good eye. Wayne may not have been half the actor Bridges is, but he oozed charisma, and Bridges tries his damnedest to make the audience root for him while still undermining his own charm at every turn. It's a taxing job, but one he pulls off, as ever, brilliantly.

As much as Bridges' Cogburn is a murderous scoundrel, Mattie's support for him mirror's the audience's own, and she becomes the voice of the revenge-movie crowd. Cogburn instantly proves himself a lout, his slurred growl generating a host of laughs in the courtroom but also revealing a man who can casually kill a man under protection of the law. Mattie delights in his sadism, looking impressed when, stalking some bandits who might lead them to Chaney, Cogburn plans to plug one in the back with a rifle slug as a grim warning shot to the other gang members. Rooster is Western lawlessness, charismatic enough that he wins over the crowd, and Mattie, but so disgusting that whatever romanticism might have resided in the old, fat man's belly got vomited up during one of his many drinking spells. And still Mattie adores him, her loyalty only faltering when his alcoholism interferes with his violence. She literally cheers the spectacle of LaBoeuf and Cogburn killing others but, as with all action audiences inured to atrocity against humans, at last manages to spare emotion for the brief abuse of an animal.

The Coens never force this point, never turn True Grit into the explicit anti-Western styling of Dead Man. Playing it straight, they allow us to identify with Mattie -- a simple matter given the magnetic pull Steinfeld exerts on the audience -- and never pull the rug out from under us. Like an old Roadrunner cartoon, they simply wait for us to look down and realize we've run with Mattie right off a cliff, and that by looking down we suddenly let gravity kick back in. That they filter the voice of a primarily male audience through a young girl is but another facet of the subtlety with which they give the viewers enough rope to hang themselves.

That commitment to straight Western storytelling peppered with implication extends to the film's racial commentary: at the hanging Mattie attends at the start of the film, three man stand on the gallows. The middle sobs and begs for forgiveness for minutes, another does not repent but gets his say, but the Native American sentenced to die has a bag thrown over his head immediately, silencing him before he can orate. Cogburn never uses any slurs, but when he viciously kicks two Choctaw children off a trading post porch, Bridges puts the racism of John Wayne's West on display as clearly as it can be seen back in town where every black character is a servant to whom even Mattie lightly condescends. (I found it incredibly interesting that the audience burst into its loudest laughter at this child abuse.)

Roger Deakins' cinematography stresses earthen tones, highlighting the sickly yellow of fire and the brown of wooden structures. Deakins' immaculate deep focus certainly does not recall Robert Altman's hazy McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but the color palette sure does. The Coens tell a more straightforward Western than Altman did, but both movies undercut the sense of individuality of the West and the moral code of law by starkly showing the true results of revenge and duels, where people end up dead and not a whole lot else can be said on the matter. Furthermore, both do not actually occur in the classic West -- McCabe is up in the Pacific Northwest, True Grit back in the novel's setting of Arkansas -- allowing for chilling snow flurries that only emphasize the cold remove of all the surrounding space.

I've learned not to underestimate the Coen brothers, who have made their fourth film in a row that breaks ranks from the previous entries even as they all share a loose thematic core. The comedy in the screenplay leans more toward the outright aburdist farce of Burn After Reading than the glacial chuckles of spiritual and existential doubt in A Serious Man. They hinder Damon with a lisp after an accident leaves La Boeuf's tongue half-severed, sabotaging every dramatic moment the actor gets with the mild comedy of his thick pronunciation. The usual odd touches litter the cast, from a kindly but screwy dentist-cum-mountain man Cogburn and Mattie encounter to a gibbering loon who rides with Tom's posse. But even these broad types play into the directors' statements on the aborrent bloodlust of the Old West: that gentle and amicable dentist casually mentions how much he'd like it if Cogburn could kill a man for him. This is a society that would rather see any innocent man hanged than a guilty one go free, if not to ensure that all culpable shall face punishment then to simply ensure some entertainment to break up the monotony. I laughed as much during True Grit as I have the Coens' finest comedies, but as with A Serious Man, those chuckles occasionally caught in the throat.

With respect to spoilers, all I will say about the ending of True Grit is that it elevates the Coens' penchant for anticlimactic endings into a direct commentary on the subject matter at hand. While the endings to other films may be frustratingly oblique and the Coens' joke on us, their carefully structuring here only reinforces the notion that revenge does not bring true satisfaction. The Mattie Ross who speaks to the audience in the framing device is a spinster, and the Coens use her aged voice to communicate from that start that, however this story plays out, it will not bring true closure; if it did, she would not feel the need to keep sharing it at age 40. The novel (and especially the 1969 film) support the quest for vengeance, but the Coens deconstruct that bloodlust by giving it to the audience, just as Quentin Tarantino savaged lingering fantasies of Jewish revenge by reveling in it for Inglourious Basterds. True Grit may be the most instantly enjoyable film the Coen brothers have made since, well, the last movie they made with Jeff Bridges, but hidden in that digestible entertainment is a devastating critique of most of the people lining up to see it.

A Serious Man

Throughout their careers, Joel and Ethan Coen have drawn heavily upon the work of grotesque moralist Flannery O'Connor. Black humor, bleak outlooks on humanity, many of the Coens' central themes can be traced back to O'Connor. Except, that is, O'Connor's spirituality: the Coen brothers have a decidedly anti-humanist streak and, barring the Hell imagery of Barton Fink, have never really dabbled in the spiritual side of things, perhaps because they find their characters so morally repulsive that they see no point.

A Serious Man seeks to rectify this, and the Coens' retelling and reworking of the Biblical story of Job brings their work closer to O'Connor's oeuvre than ever before. Opening with a made-up Yiddish folk tale about a man who may or may not have invited a dybbuk (a corpse possessed by a wandering spirit) into his home, A Serious Man wastes no time taking stock of and poking fun at the brothers' storytelling conceits. Once the story cuts to its present, in 1967 Minnesota, the film draws from the Coen brothers' own lives even as it develops its Biblical parallels.

Job's stand-in here is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a local university. He looks like he already has something nagging at him, but he has no idea what he's in for in the near future. He returns home to discover that his wife wants a divorce. "You knew this was coming," she hisses, though we can see from the bewilderment on his face that this is clearly not so (hilariously, his confusion only angers her more). She's fallen in love with Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed), a much older widower who treats Larry in far too friendly a fashion as he's stealing the man's wife. Larry's two teenage kids already seem to know, though the only attention they show their father is in demanding he fix the TV vane or simply stealing from his wallet.

As Larry worries over his private situation, work life begins to turn south as well. The question of his tenure hangs in the balance, just as a disgruntled Korean student attempts to bribe his way out of an F. Before Larry can officially report the boy, the student's father comes and threatens to sue for defamation of character if Larry exposes the bribe. But if Larry keeps the money and doesn't change the grade, Clive's father will out him for taking the money. I'm not accepting your son's bribe, Larry pleads. "That's defamation!" the father retorts, dooming Larry to carry the envelope filled with money around in a sort of limbo.

Interestingly, as the world comes crashing down on Larry piece by piece, A Serious Man contains little in the way of actual story. Characters have unexplained, impossible-yet-bizarrely-plausible quirks that get them in trouble, someone dies long before the climax and without reason (it's a Coen brothers film), but nothing that really moves a narrative happens. What the Coens accomplish instead is a thorough deconstruction of Jewish faith through its pop culture byproduct: Jewish humor. The brothers clearly took from childhood experiences growing up in late-'60s Minnesota as Jewish lads, but their efforts reach far beyond the merely autobiographical and instead into stereotypes and tradition. The stress of a Bar Mitzvah, harpy women, neurosis, phlegm, all are dismantled and reassembled by the Coens.

Even the overall structure of the film aids this; as life spirals out of control for Larry, he visits three rabbis to ask why God is punishing him. Re-arrange that sentence into, "So, this guy is having a lot of problems, so he visits these three rabbis..." and you've got a setup for a joke. Each of them has his own stereotypically Jewish response: one simply stammers that God can be mean sometimes, then tries to point to the bright side of life by looking out of the window, which only shows the synagogue parking lot. Another, with all the time in the world on his hands, has his secretary inform Larry that he's "busy." The second rabbi is the funniest and most Coenesque of all: he spins a long-winded fable about a dentist who discovered Hebrew engravings on a Gentile's teeth. He comes to the same rabbi to decipher why God would place those markings on the man's teeth...Oh, you want to know how that turned out? "Who cares?" the rabbi says with a smile.

Complimenting the directors (as well as Roger Deakins, back with the duo after missing Burn After Reading) seems a waste of time, yet one has to note how their perfect depiction of '60s rambler home suburbia goes beyond simple period goes beyond simple recreation. As with Barton Fink, the compositions of shots can never fully be trusted: sometimes the camera pulls back to capture something huge like the absurd height of Larry's cluttered chalkboard, but mainly the walls close in, always compressing Larry as some new development only makes things worse for him. Aiding the visuals is Skip Lievsay's flawless sound design, which adds gags through barely audible noises (such as Larry's brother Arthur constantly yelling that he'll be out of the bathroom in a minute even when no one on-screen has asked him about it) and even total silence. Tying them together is some of "Roderick Jaynes'" finest editing to date: the editing in No Country For Old Men largely facilitated that movie's suspense, and the same is true here, but it also recalls the more madcap, for-laughs technique of Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski.

Stuhlbarg's performance is worthy of a nomination; we meet Larry just as the first domino tips, and never get to see him remotely happy. He stands at the epicenter of an increasingly turbulent nightmare, buckling under the pressure until he's ready to burst. Yet Stuhlbarg plays this chaos with hysterical deadpan passivity, reacting with bewildered looks and awkward smiles and tics but rarely losing his composure completely. You can believe that this man would come apart dealing with an ever-phoning bill collector from the Columbia Record Club, demanding payment for albums Larry never ordered. Surrounding are a host of unknowns (in stark contrast to last year's star vehicle Burn After Reading), all of whom are even more believable as their kooky characters for, as far as we know, these actors might simply be these people.

By the time we reach the end, the Coens have taken Judaism and Jewish humor and reconstituted them as one and the same. A Serious Man shows their greatest thematic range to date, covering topics such as faith, morality, family and suffering, but all with the devilish wit we're used to them using. The film opens with their idea of an old Yiddish parable and it ends as a whole new one in its own right: a version of Job in which man fails God's test. Its ending is sure to anger many viewers -- though how many times do people need to see a Coen brothers film to know that the ending will throw you? -- but it's perhaps the best example of their take on Jewish humor in the entire film: after all that Larry has suffered through, here at last come the real ordeals.

Crimewave

When Sam Raimi's no-budget horror debut The Evil Dead became an instant cult hit when it finally found a distributor, the studios naturally came calling. After all, if this guy could make such a splash with a $375,000 schlock movie, imagine what he could do with a real budget and wide distribution. So, Raimi received $3 million to make his proposed gangster comedy, Crimewave, a pastiche of Golden Age noir and Three Stooges gags. Enlisting the help of his old friends the Coen brothers, who were themselves fresh off their acclaimed debut Blood Simple, Raimi seemed poised to bring the indie ethos to Hollywood and possibly even change the system.

Then the filmmakers learned a hard lesson about studio involvement. Raimi, Bruce Campbell, Evil Dead co-producer Ron Talpert and the Coens worked in the independent film, particularly the Evil Dead people, who raised their money through dentists and vendors. Now someone was on-set, reminding them that their budget did not take into account union fees and that some scenes needed to look bigger. Sadly, this effectively castrated both Raimi and the Coens, making Crimewave seem more like a self-parody of both camps before they'd even established themselves.

The film concerns Victor Ajax (Reed Birney, forced on the filmmakers when the studio refused Campbell the part), a technician for the Trend-Odegard Security. He's on the way to the electric chair at the beginning for a crime he claims he didn't commit, and we then cut to flashbacks of his story.

The crimes in question -- a string of murders -- were committed by a group of hitmen posing as, appropriately enough, exterminators of "all sizes." Mr. Trend hires them to kill his partner when he catches Odegard planning to sell the company to an oily huckster named "Renaldo the Hell" (Bruce Campbell). In true Coens fashion, this simple crime goes terribly awry when they accidentally kill Trend as well and someone witnesses the murder. Victor doesn't know about all this, as he is too busy attempting to woo his perfect woman, Nancy (Sheree J. Wilson), who cares little for Vic but desires the dismissive Renaldo.

The Three Stooges have played an active role in Raimi's writing throughout his career, but never has it been so pronounced (or so poorly integrated). The director utilizes the tricks that made The Evil Dead so inventive -- the cheap rigs that allow doors to pop open and slam closed by themselves, zooming close-ups -- are on display, but they're made to emphasize a physical gag or beyond-hammy acting. The actors all laugh in overblown manners, and any time someone is hit or falls down it's accompanied by a silly sound effect. Not a single line passes without a sight gag, hammy dialogue or a pratfall, and it makes everything simply too referential and parodic and it robs the action scenes of any power. Occasionally it works, such as the scene where Mrs. Trend drops a potted plant to alert help, only for Faron to catch it, and then only for the pot to fall off the grasped plant, but for the most part it simply falls flat.

I realize that the dialogue is supposed to be cheesy and it's supposed to play up the stilted absurdity of so many noir pictures, but it just gets old after a while. Only Campbell pulls it off well, because the man was born to be ridiculous. He's not just hammy like everyone else; he calls to mind the acting style of the '30s and '40s. He's perfect for the role, which was heavily expanded when producers refused to let Campbell play the lead, and he makes you wish that someone in charge had the foresight to recognize his talent. Also worth mentioning is Paul L. Smith as Faron, who doesn't pull of the annoying laugh but makes up for it with a deep growl that actually inspires some chills here and there.

There's really not much to say about this film. Both Raimi and the Coens draw inspiration from classic trash, be it horror flicks (Raimi) or pulp noir (the Coen brothers), but here it's just too broad and too poorly married to the action. The two groups would collaborate again on the Coens' maligned The Hudsucker Proxy, which also worked as a pastiche of old noir but had the wit and acting talent behind it to make it work even if it isn't top-tier Coens. It's strange to watch this mostly unfunny film, one that contains only traces of the Coens' and Raimi's strength, and realize that the Coens would next make Raising Arizona and Raimi Evil Dead 2, two of the funniest movies of the last 25 years. All of this makes Crimewave a curiosity for Raimi and Coens die-hards over anything overly entertaining, and it ranks as one of the weakest efforts from either party.

-camera movement actually looks less refined that his debut

Burn After Reading

The Coen brothers have never been ones to take themselves seriously. The best part of the Oscars last year was seeing the uncomfortable looks on their faces as they had to collect award after award from their peers, like the kid who hides in the back of the class suddenly being asked to come to the board and do a problem. Whenever critics start to love them too much, they take a razor to the wrists of their careers, bleeding out any pretentiousness before it builds up and makes them cocky. Such is the case with “Burn After Reading,” the follow-up to possibly the best movie of the decade thus far, “No Country For Old Men.”

A subtle send-up of the spy thrillers by John le Carré, the film centers on four main characters: Linda (Frances McDormand), who wants plastic surgery so she can finally find the perfect man; her airheaded best friend Chad (Brad Pitt); Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), an alcoholic CIA agent who plans to write a scathing memoir after being forced to resign; and ex-Secret Service agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), who’s having an affair with Osborne’s wife (Tilda Swinton). While Cox’s wife files for divorce, Chad finds a CD full of CIA secrets at the gym in which he and Linda work. Seeing a way to pay for her elective surgeries, Linda (with Chad’s help) conspires to blackmail Cox in exchange for the disc.

From here on out it’s standard Coens’ fare: dumb people try to pull off something far beyond their limited grasp and understanding, and a lot of people die painful deaths. The brothers are clearly influenced by the work of Flannery O’Connor; “Fargo” or “Barton Fink” are grotesque morality plays just as complex, esoteric, horrifying and (often) darkly funny as O’Connor’s short stories. We don’t really get anyone to root for, save perhaps gym boss Ted (Richard Jenkins), who longs for Linda just the way she is. Everyone else is a self-absorbed monster.

What really sets this apart from their previous screwball efforts is the acting. Swinton has a look of perennial exasperation, as if the totality of everyone’s idiocy is too much to bear. Malkovich brings all his snarling venom to the forefront as the misanthropic Cox; when he spits out to one character, “You’re in league with morons,” his words are so acidic they could burn through steel.

In the latest collaboration with the brothers, Clooney does a fine job of tearing down his leading-man persona for more character-driven work. A sex-obsessed, paranoid man, Harry generally stops panicking only long enough to run a few miles and bed yet another woman. Clooney has proven several times over his ability to carry a film, but it is when he takes a back seat that he really shines.

But the real stars are McDormand and Pitt. McDormand, in her best performance since 2005’s “North Country,” is the kind of person who thinks she’s humble and down to earth but is really elitist. She acknowledges (and greatly exaggerates) her own physical flaws but expects her soulmate to be perfect. Linda’s disposition is that of McDormand’s own Marge Gunderson (“Fargo”) mixed with a bitter edge brought on by age and loneliness.

Despite a host of great performances, Brad Pitt steals the show. He hops through the film with earbuds on, raucously dancing to music only he can hear, with facial expressions that look almost childish. His role is the smallest of the principal cast, but I can guarantee it’s the one you’ll be talking about the most.

“Burn After Reading” certainly won’t keep the attention of all the converts “No Country For Old Men” brought to these stylish cult directors, but people looking for another surreal, non-linear, brilliant mess in the style of “The Big Lebowski” should be quite pleased. At one point, a CIA superior (played by J.K. Simmons, who can always turn every piece of his dialogue into a one-liner) tells his subordinate to come back to him “when it all makes sense.” He’s in the wrong movie. A friend I saw it with said it dragged. I disagree; like all of the brothers’ films, it simply takes its time. Aided by director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (filling in for a busy Roger Deakins), the Coen brothers have offered up 2008's best-looking comedy, and one of its funniest.

Blood Simple

There's something about the rather low-key intro of the Coen brothers that forever etches it into my mind. It's just a static shot from the backseat of a car as the driver and his lover ride along a highway in pouring rain, but it left me somewhat unsettled the first time, and only more so on repeat viewings when I knew what would happen. Though the film as a whole bears more semblance to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films than the rest of the Coens' oeuvre (Joel Coen was Raimi's editing assistant at this time), it established them as the chief modern purveyors of homage-ridden yet wholly original film noir.

Centered on a love triangle between Abby (Frances McDormand), her husband Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) and Marty's employee Ray (John Getz), Blood Simple starts well into Ray and Abby's affair, after even Marty has become suspicious. One of the cars that passes Abby and Ray in the opening sequence belongs to a private detective hired by Marty (he's unnamed in the film but listed as Visser in the credits). Played by the magnificent character actor M. Emmet Walsh, Visser subverts what could have been yet another Double Indemnity ripoff by setting the events of the plot into motion.

Visser snaps photos of the illicit couple and brings them to his client, who naturally fires Ray and threatens him never to come back to Marty's bar. In a rage, Julian heads to Ray's house and catches his wife there and tries to choke her (spot the Raimi-cam shot!), but is beaten down by his wife and ultimately warned off the property by Ray. Marty calls Visser back to meet him, and we know what the man will ask of the detective before the words come out of his mouth. "As long as the pay's right, and it's legal, I'll do it," chirps Visser. "It ain't exactly legal." Not a moment's hesitation: "Well, as long as the pay's right, I'll do it."

But Visser has plans of his own, and soon he double crosses and crosses back once more, a complete unknown suddenly thrusting himself into this triangle seemingly without reason, to the point that Abby and Ray come to suspect one another. Why wouldn't they? Even covering your bases you're bound not to think of a random stranger making you his pet project.

Eventually Ray gets indirectly sucked into Visser's game and figures out a third party is watching them when Visser slips up a bit, and it leads to a bloody showdown in the shadows between Abby and Visser exemplifies the most terrifying aspects of film noir. It's not a particularly action-packed scene, but by the end of it blood is all over the place and you've been scared witless.

Though Blood Simple follows tried and true noir tropes, it never falls into any one pigeonhole. Abby is not a femme fatale, cheating on her husband because she's a heartless dame who wants to get a slice of dough out of a weak-willed accomplice, she's a woman trapped in an abusive relationship who turns to the nicest man in her life for comfort. Likewise, Ray presents himself as strong and knowing in stark contrast to the weak but violent Marty.

Aiding this inventive script and the excellent acting is the cinematography courtesy of Barry Sonnenfeld. These guys didn't have a lot of money and because of it the Coens--who displayed a visual mastery even this early on--were still reaching beyond their grasp, but Sonnenfeld really stepped up to plate and captured some chilling images that mixed high-concept German expressionism with the stark natural feel independent films rely on due to their budgets. While the two moods don't always mesh perfectly, Sonnenfeld elevates the material far beyond what it might have been.

The Coens took the title of the film from noir master Danshiell Hammet's novel Red Harvest, and it refers to a state of mania caused by overexposure to violence and horror that leads people to make bad mistakes. Visser mentions it to Marty when he starts to get lost in his quest for revenge, and we see it later in Ray when he realizes that someone is watching him. In a way, "blood simple" is the foundation for all of the Coen brothers' subsequent films: in their dramatic noirs intelligent people find themselves involved with crime and eventually get in over their heads, while the characters in their screwball comedies start there. As a statement of intent, Bood Simple is one of the most auspicious cinematic debuts ever produced, and a lasting classic of neo-noir.

No Country for Old Men

Though I'm not exactly going out on a limb taste-wise, it's prudent that I admit my biases: I love the Coen brothers. Out of 13 films from 1984's Blood Simple to last year's Burn After Reading, I've loved all but two, and only disliked one (The Ladykillers). I consider several to be classics if not masterpieces, and a number of them would easily end up on my list of favorite films. Yet one film stands above them all. No Country for Old Men, the Coens' adaptation of the brilliant author Cormac McCarthy's bestseller, is the finest film in the brothers' brilliant oeuvre, and quite possibly the greatest film of the decade.

Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Bell drawls over the opening shots of the beautifully desolate Texas landscape as he describes a child killer he sent to death row. "I don't know what to make of that," he wearily sighs, "I surely don't." This monologue, seemingly disconnected from the events about to unfold, forms the backbone of the film. Though we watch the killer Anton Chigurh chase Llewelyn Moss over West Texas, the real story is Bell's inability to cope with evil in this world, and his difficulty comprehending a creature as sadistic as Chigurh.

Chigurh wastes no time establishing himself as something to be feared. An officer arrests him at the start, brings him back to the station, and promptly gets strangled by Chigurh's handcuffs. Then he takes some sort of air cannon and heads back out onto the road. Javier Bardem plays Chigurh as an undefinable evil: his name connotes no nationality, nor his accent.

Meanwhile, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) goes hunting and stumbles upon a botched drug deal. He finds one barely alive Mexican and a satchel full of $2 million. He returns home to his wife, stashes the money, and goes to sleep. Then his conscience gets the better of him, and he grabs a jug of water to take to the dying man. A noble gesture, but a terrible mistake.

The result is a taut thriller, almost entirely unaided by music. Chigurh arrives at the site of the deal looking for his money, and sets about tracking down Moss. It's a deceptively simple story with a decidedly Coens bent. Apart from the three leads, we meet Moss' wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald, sporting an accent so authentic you'd swear she was born and raised in Texas), a sleazy businessman who has a stake in the drug deal (Stephen Root) and Carson Wells (woody Harrelson), a bounty hunter who knows all too well about Chigurh but apparently not enough to be genuinely afraid.

Most Coen brothers films involve money, and in most that money serves as a MacGuffin. No Country is no different; at one point Moss meets Wells, who offers protection from Chigurh. Wells tells him that he cannot make deals with Chigurh, because "he has a set of principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that." Chigurh is out for blood simply because he is.

The dialogue of the brothers' films oscillates between sparse and loquacious, from the silent suffering of Billy Bob Thornton's Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn't There to the nonstop stream of profanities in The Big Lebowski. No Country belongs firmly in the former category; it may be the least dialogue they've ever written. Yet it still, in spots, runs over with their endlessly dark, Flannery O'Connor-influenced wit. The best example of this is the memorable scene in which Chigurh speaks with a gas station attendant who annoys him. It leads to a coin toss and a tense buildup in which both the attendant and the audience slowly come to realize that the man's life is at stake. Not only is it incredibly tense, but it rather slyly sets up Chigurh's total madness.

It's difficult to talk about the film without spoiling everything, so let me pull back and mention the actual craft of the film. As someone without even a semseter of "Introduction to Film Studies" under his belt, I confess I know precious little about the craft of film. Now, I can look at a film and tell you what it's trying to say, and I've pored over Expressionist and Expressionist-influenced cinema to look for symbolism, but the mis-en-scène still eludes me. Yet this film so positively overflows with technical brilliance that even a neophyte like myself must sit in awe.

Earlier I mentioned an almost total lack of music. Normally, thrillers rely on a tense score to help things along, but the Coens subvert the notion. Instead, they have to rely on the sheer power of editing. The Coens, who edit their films themselves under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes, manage to pace a series of bleak landscapes into a gradually mounting nail-biter. To fill the aural void, sound designer Craig Berkey and editor (and longtime collaborator) Skip Levsey pump up every noise in the film. Wind becomes the score, and silence is deafening. They use sound so expertly that you're always expecting something bad to happen, and the dull thud of Chigurh's cattlegun pierces the air like a thundercrack. It's so good that even now, after a half-dozen viewings of the film, I still jump when Chigurh blows the lock off a door.

But as much as the editing and sound make this a technical marvel, Roger Deakins' pristine cinematography pushes it over the top. Deakins is one of the few cinematographers that even film neophytes could name, and the man is certainly the best working in the business today. Of all his work however, No Country might be his best. While the lighting department surely deserves a lot of credit for this, Deakins' ability to capture gallery-worthy shots at every turn with the absolute perfect amount of light burns the film into your brain. After all, something's got to fill the gap between dialogue, and even those moments of chilling silence courtesy of Berkey and Livsey, and Deakins rises to the challenge magnificently. I have a hard time picking between this and The Assassination of Jesse James as his finest work, but who cares? The winner is all of us.

The film ends as it begins, with a monologue from Jones, which sums up the themes as much as the opening speech presented them: evil in this world cannot be defeated, and to even understand evil one would have to immerse himself into it. Yet it also runs deeper than that: as the title suggests, Sheriff Bell laments through his narrations and conversations with other characters that something fundamental has changed in society for the worst. Near the end of the film, as Bell plans to retire after the Chigurh case takes it toll, his uncle, wheelchair-bound as a result of a shooting, chastises Bell. He relates a story of one of their relatives who was shot in the head and left to slowly bleed to death at the turn of the century over 75 years ago, and the uncle's very existence proves that horrible violence has always existed. He passively derides the notion that things used to be grand until the teenagers started listening to the Clash. Bell still retires, but in his final speech, concerning a dream he had, he clearly demonstrates that he finally understands this: he tells his wife of dreaming of his father. "And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there." Here he's placing his father, along with his perception's of the simpler time his dad represents, on a pedestal. As he wanders this foul wilderness, he can see his father up ahead preparing a fire to light the way and to warm him when he gets there. Then Bell concludes, "And then I woke up." You can read into this a deep cynicism, even nihilism, but I interpret this as Bell's self-awareness at his foolishness. Yes, he realizes that his idealistic view of the past was a dream, but now he can accept that and perhaps come to cope with the world around him. It's not much cheerier, I'll grant, but it's a fascinating way to address contemporary concerns of the direction we've taken.

Many take issue to the ending as an anti-climax or hopeless, which makes me wonder where they've been for the past 20 years of the Coen brothers' careers. I won't waste words, especially in discussing such a brutally direct film as this: I think it's a perfect end to a perfect film. If you still haven't seen No Country for Old Men, go buy it now.