No Movie for Normal People?

My Seattle friends, a good number of them, went to see No Country for Old Men in the theater, when it came out. One by one, they came back shaking their heads and wondering if violence in America had really come to this. They guessed it had, then went on with their lives.


Me, I went once with a friend (who saw nothing but the blood and never wants to see Javier Bardem in anything at all, ever)—and then I bought another four tickets to see the show by myself. I watched it three times in the U. District, and twice at the cheap theater in North Seattle. When it came out on DVD, I rented it another six or eight times. I downloaded (a version of) the screenplay. I bought the book—after the fact—and underlined passage after passage, and made notes in the margin like this:



"!!"

and this:

"WHERE is this, in the film?"

and this:

"This is war."

"He hasn't got long to live."

"Texasism."

"How does he get the briefcase, in the movie?"



I even found the place, on page 211 (which I marked, of course, with a "!!" and a pithy comment), where McCarthy connects his story to the Yeats poem, as if flicking a fountain pen at the careful reader.

But I digress.

The more times I watched the movie—I own it, now, of course—the less I found myself insisting that the Coen brothers “hadn't really done anything!!" The more I watched, the more respect I gained for the choices they’d made, through the lens, and the more times I hit 'pause' and sprinted for the bedroom to check one detail or another against McCarthy's authoritative written word, the more I trusted the men who brought this story to the screen: If you can stand the dark parts, or find a way to tune them out (I recommend whistling), No Country, The Film, turns out to be a great lesson in knowledge of craft and in respect for a great tale—over and above the numerous lessons that are in McCarthy’s book, to begin with.

I simply never get tired of No Country for Old Men. I do, I confess, skip over the violence as often as not, these days, just as I thumb through the much-loved book. I have cranked up the DVD player probably a hundred times in the past three months, to study this film, and only once or twice have I watched it through; I no longer need to. It plays in my head all the time, and informs my life. There are only five or six movies I can say this about, and I intend to discuss them all here, one after the other.

I’m not a movie buff. I just feel as though I stepped in a hole called ‘Ethan and Joel Coen’ and got stuck there, for awhile.



Five posts:

1. No Movie for Normal People?

2. Moral Violence?

3. Tommy Lee Jones’s Texas

4. Rurality

5. Dread Simple