On No Country For Old Men
Finally watched No Country For Old Men after having the Netflix envelope sitting around for months. Wow. I read the book when it first came out and thought it was good but not great. It read like a screenplay treatment honestly, lots of action I figured was put in to help the more meditative stuff go down easily in film form. Blood Meridian is one of my favorite books though so I might be biased against McCarthy’s mainstream kind of work (although The Road was on frickin Oprah’s book club so what do I know about mainstream). Since I’ve been called on to interpret the movie more than once, being the one person I know that read the book, I wanted to say a little about it. Not that I’m an expert or a real critic or anything but some of the stuff I’ve read about the movie is crazy stuff written by people who were obviously asleep or texting and I hope I can do better than that.
Obviously this is going to be spoiler-ific if you haven’t seen the movie.
First, Moss getting killed off-screen. You had to know he was going to get killed, this is that kind of movie. But people get up-in-arms about it happening at all, and having it happen off-screen is way too much for your standard action/killer/western movie watcher to stomach. The problem with that is laid out in the scene where the sherrif visits his relative in the wheel-chair. The relative (I’m going to say cousin but I forget) tells Ed Tom he can’t make everything about himself, that’s just vanity. Expecting Moss to die in front of you in some heroic hail of gunfire is vanity on the part of the audience, like we “deserve” to see him go down. Nope, you see the Mexicans track him down through his mother-in-law, they kill him and that’s it.
Next, the sherrif is not a hero.The confusion with the character and the end parts of the movie I think comes from us being conditioned to believe the sherrif is the Good Guy, the Hero. This guy isn’t that. He tells his cousin he’s in over his head and the cousin tells him this stuff isn’t new, the old days weren’t any better. Like all old people complaining about “the kids these days”, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The guy is in a wheelchair from being shot on the job so he knows. The reason there’s no big finale shoot-out with Chigurh and Ed Tom is that Ed Tom gives up (or gives in) during the final scene in the motel room Moss died in. He knows Chigurh is in there, he mans up and goes in but there’s no Chigurh, he’s already gotten the money from the vent. I admit I’m not 100% confident about them showing Chigurh behind the door. I don’t recall that part of the book so I don’t know if he’s really there or it’s just in Ed Tom’s mind that he’s going in for a final confrontation. But when he sees the vent, he knows Chigurh has won and he gives up. He can’t hack it.
Finally, the end. This is one of those literary things where you see what you see. What I see is the first dream is about Ed Tom thinking he’s lost his heroic sherrif’s heart in the eyes of his father. He knows he’s given up, something you’re never supposed to do. The second dream is the one more up to interpretation. If you’re generous, it’s about Ed Tom’s father waiting for him in the afterlife. If you’re ungenerous, it’s about his father having to go ahead with the light since he’s failed and it’s up the old-timers to right things. In any case, these aren’t the dreams of a heroic sherrif, they’re the old man dreams of someone wondering about how he’ll be judged.
Overall, I really liked the movie. In fact I probably enjoyed it more than the book. I couldn’t help thinking the book was along the lines of Michael Crichton’s later books, made to be movies rather than books. But the movie obviously doesn’t suffer from this problem. I’ll see the movie again for sure (especially because it looks amazing on Blu-ray) but I don’t see myself rereading the book.
And for the record, There Will Be Blood is the better of the two.
