James Hynes

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.