James Hynes

In my dream, I'm walking the streets of New York with a guy I used to know with whom I was never particularly close. We're not talking, and it's rather cold and grey, and the streets are empty except for us. Not empty in the manner of a last-man-on-Earth movie, not even empty in a dawn-on-Sunday-morning-on-Wall-Street way, but empty in the surreal manner of a movie musical shot on location, like that big number in the film version of Sweet Charity, where Shirley MacLaine in a drum major's outfit is dancing with a brass band in various empty locales in New York. The guy and I aren't dancing, we're just walking and not even talking, but in my head, in the dream, I'm imagining that I'm dancing along the same streets with a beautiful young woman and I'm singing the Bobby Darin arrangement of "I'm Beginning to See the Light." I continue to imagine that as we enter narrower, darker streets that start to fill up with guys in coveralls pushing carts and racks of food, like Convent Garden used to be in London, before it became a shopping center for  tourists; the guy I'm with speaks to me for the first time to warn me away from stepping in some rotten food below a loading dock. Then the guy and I are suddenly in a crowded department store, on a floor that has been specifically redesigned for children—bright, colorful, scaled down—where crowds of kids are filing through in an energetic and orderly fashion, almost like well-drilled children in a musical. Suddenly the guy, who in real life has kids (I don't), warms up (he's been mostly silent and sullen to this point) and starts interacting with the children in a cheerful and affectionate way, helping them up stairs, answering questions, and so on. Out of a genuine and unmalicious curiosity, I ask him, "Do you miss your kids?" And he takes it the wrong way, giving me an angry, hurt look and saying, "Of course I miss my kids." Then I ask him, "Is Times Square near here?" and he points off to the right and says, very snidely, "But you don't want to go there." And I say, defensively, "But maybe I do," realizing at the same moment that we're actually nowhere near Times Square, which is blocks and blocks away, but very close to Union Square, where there's a Barnes and Noble. That's when I wake up.

For a different take on No Country for Old Men, from a native Texan and a considerable novelist in his own right, read my buddy John Marks over at the Purple State of John. (I'll let him explain the title of that blog.) John and I got to be friends during the long hot summers in Iowa City in the late 80s, when we were at the Writers' Workshop together. We were the only horror movie fans in Iowa City, apparently, because we were often the only two people in the Astro Theater during screenings of 976-Evil and Hellraiser. Hellraiser I, that is, though I believe we subsequently saw II, III, and IV, together, too. Not like it's anything to be proud of. If you've ever read any of our books—and you should—this obsession with low-rent horror explains a lot.

Another shared obsession is (god help us both) The Lord of the Rings. Lately, I've been working toward finishing a novel that is rather more serious, and even a little grimmer, than what I usually write, and perhaps for that reason, I've been reading and watching a lot of fairly grim stuff, from both ends of the -brow spectrum (high to low, in other words), and all points in between. Along with the aforementioned No Country for Old Men, I also recently read McCarthy's The Road, which makes his previous grim masterpiece, Blood Meridian, play like Singin' in the Rain. (Oprah, what were you thinking?) In between violent and melancholy Cormac McCarthy novels, I've been reading my way through the first volume of the Library of America edition of the novels of Dawn Powell, on the recommendation of another Iowa pal, the novelist Kate Christensen. (You can read Kate on Powell here). I've read the first two so far, Dance Night (which is like Dreiser with all the excess boiled away, and with much better prose) and Come Back to Sorrento, which is gorgeously written but merciless. I love these books, and maybe will write something here about Powell when I've read a couple more, but they are, minus the violent psychopaths and cannibalism, almost as dark about human nature as McCarthy's books are. Top that off with the apocalyptic horror films I've seen lately, 30 Days of Night and The Mist, which I saw late Thanksgiving night, and I was just about ready to slit my wrists.

Which brings me back at last (whew!) to Lord of the Rings. By the Friday after Thanksgiving, having lost much of a night's sleep to the viciously ironic ending of The Mist, I needed something that traveled through darkness but came out into the light again at the end. So I took the phone off the hook, gave the cats extra food, and settled in to watch all three LOTR films in their extended versions, straight through. Took me a day and a half—The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers on Friday and then The Return of the King on Saturday. Which was glorious and redemptive and thrilling and heartbreaking, and led me finally to take down and start reading Tom Shippey's J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Academics who study Tolkien (like novelists who admit to admiring him) are rather outside the mainstream, and Shippey comes across as a little defensive in his forward. And even I'd admit that, while I really do think Tolkien is an important author of the 20th century, he's not the most important. (In case you're wondering, I don't think anybody is; it's a silly and pointless argument to enter into.) But if you can get past that minor point of tendentiousness, Shippey really knows his literary history, his Tolkien, and his Anglo-Saxon, and I'm learning a lot. His account of The Hobbit, which is as far as I've gotten, is wonderfully shrewd, and has added greatly to my appreciation of the book. More on Shippey, perhaps, after I've finished the book.

Right off the bat, I'm going to traffic in a cliche, or at least a bit of conventional wisdom, namely, that the Coen brothers are impeccable but soulless film technicians, magpie postmodernists who love to pick the bones of genre pictures and laugh at them at the same time. In their defense, their best movies—or the ones I like, anyway—are shaggy dog pictures like The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona that don't hew all that closely to a specific genre; the more overtly satirical they are, the more satisfactory the result. The one film of theirs that shows any dark passion is Barton Fink, and maybe that's because it's about filmmaking itself, in particular about its artistic and moral compromises. The most resonant moment (at least for me) in any Coen Brothers production, the only one I can think of that displays real terror on their part, is the climax of Barton Fink, as John Goodman charges down the flaming hotel hallway, bellowing "I'll give you the life of the mind!"

But then you've got a film like Fargo, which is one of their most skillfully made films and a lot of fun to watch, but I defy anyone to be moved by the moment when poor Bill Macy is dragged kicking and screaming to his doom. Whereas in the genre models they were working from, the old noir pictures where some poor sap like Burt Lancaster is lured to his doom by greed and Yvonne De Carlo (back, as they say, when Yvonne De Carlo was worth being lured to your doom by), you felt something—regret, pity—when Burt took the fall at the end. For Bill Macy, you only feel some queasy bemusement.

Which brings me to their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, whereby two brainy guys who are terminally cagey about what they really think about anything adapt a book by a writer of Old Testament sincerity. Say what you want about McCarthy, he's a man who says what thinks and means what he says; no pomo caginess here. I bought the book just a couple of weeks ago because, well, the sticker on the front told me to: “First read the book, then see the movie.” Okay, sez I, and after the first 50 pages I remember thinking, what’s the big deal here? It’s really good and really entertaining and (kind of a surprise for me, whose favorite McCarthy novel is the relentlessly grim Blood Meridian) really funny. But it basically felt like a Jim Thompson novel to me—a tough little West Texas noir with a greedy ordinary guy, a colorful psychopath, and a crusty small-town sheriff. It was tremendously entertaining, pure pleasure, in fact, but without the gravitas I associate with McCarthy’s best work. Then he did something that surprised me, and another thing that astounded me, and then a final thing that moved me to tears.

The surprise was that he completely elided the conventional climax. Whereas Jim Thompson or Elmore Leonard would have skillfully engineered a climax that brought all three main characters together, McCarthy skips it, and shows us only the aftermath. I'd almost be tempted to call it (ulp!) postmodern—talk about your subversion of expectations—but McCarthy avoids the climax because the book's not really about what happened in the thriller portion of the novel. Which leads to the astounding thing he did: after the thriller proper is over, he keeps going, and gives us a scene with the sheriff in which he reveals to an old friend that he feels guilty about an act of cowardice he committed 40 years before, in Europe during World War II. It has nothing to do with the plot, per se, but it’s one of those artistically risky moments that are breathtaking when they work, whereby something you learn late in the story completely changes what you think about everything you’ve read so far. Suddenly the sheriff’s longing for justice and his fear of the bleak future make perfect sense. The perfect coda to all this is the last chapter, which is a heartbreakingly beautiful evocation of the sheriff’s longing for solace, as he tells his wife a dream of his father. It moved me to tears, and I closed the book wondering, wow, how are the Brothers Coen going to handle that? Can they play it straight enough to evoke McCarthy’s sudden access of gravitas in the final pages of the book?

I don’t want to say that they can’t, but in the event, they didn’t. How they handle these three moments is revealing, to say the least. The first moment, the elision of the climax, they reproduce faithfully, because they are impeccable technicians, and no doubt part of what they admire about the book is McCarthy’s subversion of the predictable. The second moment, however, the sheriff's revelation about his experience in the war, which for my money is the moral and emotional heart of the book—the Coens cut it out. The scene is there, performed by two great Texas actors, Tommy Lee Jones and Barry Corbin, who are wonderful together, but the story is gone. The sheriff’s sense that things are getting worse in the world, that some new sort of evil has been unleashed in the 20th century and that, through his long-ago act of cowardice, he's somehow complicit in it, or at least powerless to stop it—which is a constant and heartfelt refrain throughout the book—is basically dismissed by Coens, who have Corbin's character say, basically, quit whining, things have always been bad. Which is a considerably different from what Cormac McCarthy has been saying in book after book (and which reaches its apotheosis in The Road). Finally, at the very end, Tommy Lee Jones tells the dream of his father to his wife in a simple scene at their kitchen table, but it has no emotional force, because you get the impression that the Coens don’t take his need for solace any more seriously than his feeling that things are getting worse. It’s just an odd little story to end the movie with, not a moment (as in the book) of overwhelming longing and regret.

My chief impression of the film is that the Coens were trying very hard to play it straight and sincere for once. There’s a good deal of humor in the film, some of it in the darkest places, but much of that is straight out of the novel. There’s hardly any music, and they rein in their film brat virtuosity, sticking to a rigorous classicism throughout. The performances are universally superb, and for once they don’t condescend to Josh Brolin's character (he plays the ordinary-guy-in-over-his-head) they way they condescended to Bill Macy's in Fargo. And it’s clear that, in the manner of brainy Yankees everywhere, they admire the hell out of the melancholy West Texas sheriff—but in the end, whether through a lack of nerve or out of their inherent caginess or because they just didn’t understand what McCarthy was doing in those final chapters, they left the heart out of the story. What you get is not sincerity, but a sincerely intended facsimile of sincerity.
 

Here's a phrase I never thought would pass my lips at a ticket booth: "Beowulf 3-D, please." (What's next—Piers Plowman in Sensurround?) I went to see it because I thought it would be good, campy fun, and it turned out to be  better than that. Not a masterpiece, mind, but smarter and more compelling than all the talk of Grendel's mother's high heels had led me to believe.

After the novelty wore off (which took about 20 minutes), the 3-D itself was more of a distraction than anything else. No matter how high tech and digital they make it, it's still a cheesy, unrealistic effect from the 50s, like looking through a Viewmaster for two hours. And while the animation works spectacularly well for action scenes, it still has a way to go before it can adequately express human emotion on faces. Some came off better than others—Anthony Hopkins looked appropriately weary and drunken as the king, but John Malkovich as his devious adviser looked like one of the Geico cavemen. On the whole, the male characters were better served—their faces had grain and texture—but the women, and not just Grendel's mother, all had the untextured epidermis of sex dolls. Given that the entire film looks like a really slick video game, the kind where you dismember monsters, and given that the demographic of the film is likely to be mainly players of those games along with a few curious English lit majors, perhaps real-looking women might be too much to ask.

All that said, the movie plays fair with its source material. The changes in the story are not arbitrary Hollywood bullshit, but actually rather inventive and not especially anachronistic. Screenwriters Gaiman and Avary don't turn Beowulf into a wise-cracking 21st century action hero; they give him all the unironic boastfulness of the original. There is some wit, but most of it seems appropriate to 8th century warriors (or at least appropriate to a modern screenwriter's idea of the wit of 8th century warriors—some of the secondary warriors are lusty and loud in the manner of Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings).

But mainly the writers have intuited that even an 8th century warrior/king would not necessarily be averse to cutting a deal with a powerful adversary, as opposed to  just killing her. Gaiman and Avary have thought through the various subtexts here, as have Zemeckis and his animators: when Grendel's mother seduces Beowulf, for example, she melts his sword, if you know what I mean. Another clever touch is the way they incorporate the story's cultural context—pagan oral tale written down by Christians—and work it into their version by dramatizing in passing the first hints of the new religion. And it's also to their credit that while Grendel is truly, and rather imaginatively, hideous, he's also poignant. I'm not sure that the original authors intended it, but I've always felt sorry for poor Grendel, and I don't think I'm alone in that (see John Gardner's wonderful little novel Grendel). In this film he's driven mad by the racket the Danes make in their mead hall every night, like some poor loser living across the street from a frat house, and it's a measure of how far we've come as a civilization that if Grendel had had access to noise abatement ordinances and a good dermatologist, there might never have been anything to write about.

And if you don't care for animated 3-D, it's not like there's a dearth of Beowulfs. I can think of four versions, including an equally clever, though much lower budget Canadian/Icelandic production called Beowulf and Grendel, with Gerard Butler playing Beowulf in an almost impenetrable Glaswegian accent. And there's also one of my guilty pleasure movies, The 13th Warrior, which is Michael Crichton's imagining of what the historical basis of Beowulf might have been.