No Country for Old Men (Miramax)
No Country For Old Men is, probably,
the single most critically lauded film of the Coen Brothers’ career.
It’s also a departure, especially in that it largely subjugates their
own exhibitionist hallmarks of style and characterization to those
established in the source material – in this case an expertly grim
genre potboiler by Cormac McCarthy. No Country gets great benefits
from the outstanding performances at its center – Javier Bardem’s
cold-blooded killer the kind of outsized stereotype that
self-identifies as a Coen creation, but paying dividends in
counterpoint to Josh Brolin’s quiet desperado and Tommy Lee Jones’s
mournful good-ol-boy sheriff. I was yanked out of the story when
vibe-busting reminders of the old-school Coen Brothers’ schtick
appeared on screen, especially the straight-out-of-central-casting
types who inhabit the film’s smaller speaking parts – the motel
clerk who woodenly insists Brolin select from a menu of room choices,
the mama who dodders through her scenes like a Spike Jonze Jackass
parody of the elderly, and even the gas-station proprietor whose
highly directed performance almost wrecks that crucial early,
mood-setting scene with Chigurh. In a broad comedy like the wonderful
paean to country folk and bluegrass O Brother Where Art Thou or the
bountiful ode to stoner lifestyles The Big Lebowski, they’d be
welcome, maybe even show-stealers. But juxtaposed with No Country‘s
sad-eyed hero performances, they feel forced, inauthentic, even
(here’s that accusation so often lobbed at the Coens) crudely
condescending. That’s not to say that the Coens’ style is a
liability; they make consistently smart decisions in condensing and
adapting McCarthy’s novel, especially when it comes to packing the
gist of Ed Tom Bell’s lengthy monologues from the printed page into
snatches of dialogue on screen. They work the story for suspense,
fully exploiting the conventions of crime drama in a narrative
(McCarthy’s) that, eventually, deliberately flouts genre convention
to terminate in a meditation on aging and mortality and maybe
nostalgia. And they invent a scene that has the sheriff and the
killer coming almost eyeball to eyeball across the portal of a
motel-room door with a blasted-out lock cylinder, their simultaneous
proximity and distance a necessarily cinematic expression that vaults
beyond the source material. But the irony remains: two of our
greatest cinema stylists have made the most critically lauded film of
their career by ruthlessly corseting their formidable drive and
vision into the literary strictures dictated by a great American
novel. Seeing it a second time, at home, the melancholy grandeur of
the film’s final cut to black became even more apparent —
reassurance that I wasn’t simply bowing to conventional wisdom by
placing it on my top-10 list. No Country For Old Men is a triumph for
sure. But for the Coens, it’s also something of a capitulation.
Buy it from Amazon.com: No Country for Old Men or No Country for Old Men [Blu-ray]
Into the Wild (Paramount Vantage)
I guess I like this more than No Country For Old Men partly because it’s markedly more personal in its execution. While No Country‘s exacting genre mechanics can feel overly mechanical, Into the Wild has a relaxed, freewheeling energy and a sensuousness that’s rare enough in contemporary Hollywood to seem noteworthy when it occurs. The performances are uniformly dedicated — sure, old guy Hal Holbrook deserved the end-of-year love he got, but not any more so than overlooked co-thesps Emile Hirsch, Catherine Keener, and even Vince Vaughn. The cinematography is a marvelous example of its type, and skillful editorial work helps Penn keep the momentum going throughout an expansive running time. Here’s what I wrote at the time: “As accomplished as the photography is, what’s even more glorious about Into the Wild is its essential messiness.” It’ll be reduced on a small screen, but undoubtedly worth the sit — maybe it’ll find the wide audience on DVD that eluded it in theaters.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Into the Wild or Into the Wild (Two-Disc Special Collector’s Edition)
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