31.01.2008

Too enigmatic?

Mike Belbin reviews Joel and Ethan Coen's No country for old men - on general release

No country for old men is the latest film from the Coen brothers, the writer-producer-director team of Ethan and Joel. Having begun making movies in the 1980s, they may just qualify as part of American Independent Cinema.

This is the movement in the last 10 years which has largely taken over from European and international filmmakers as the main source for ‘art films’, the alternative to Hollywood. Yet, as with many ‘indies’, from Scorsese to Tarantino, the Coens are open to the question of just how ‘alternative’ their work is.

Based on a 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, the film opens with the desert vistas of Texan New Mexico in 1980. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a local trailer resident, comes across the remains of a massacre of drug dealers, remains that include a suitcase of money. Telling his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), to hide out with her mother, he takes to the road to escape whoever might want it back. The man hired to retrieve the fortune is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) whose pageboy haircut and much used cattle gun reveal him to be a law unto himself. He habitually spins a coin to decide whether the person in front of him should live or die.

Two figures in white Stetsons also join the trail: sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), on the verge of retirement, and later a bounty hunter, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), who knows Chigurh from a previous acquaintance. The grim, mop-topped tracker is relentless as well as ingenious - for example, working out Moss’s location by phone records. During the pursuit, people die in motels and hotels, highways and streets - often by Chigurh’s hand and mostly because they are in the way rather than a threat.

The movie has no music soundtrack but tingles with noise: metal shudders after a crash, the floor of a ventilation duct scratches as the fortune is hidden, dogs snarl and whelp. When a character makes a phone call and the other end simply continues to ring, this is an indication that not only the recipient is in trouble but the caller too is in danger. These sounds work as part of the suspense in an everyday landscape quietly charged with casual doom.

Is No country for old men then just another postmodern film noir from the edge of despair? Samuel Beckett with shoot-outs? The Wasteland with cattle gun? Philip French in The Observer comments that the suspense only lets up for reflections on “the changing nature of crime and civic morality from the frontier days to the new world of drug dealing and the permissive society”. So are the Coens hypocrites, making thrilling entertainment out of a morose ideology of western decline?

To start with, a quest is a familiar narrative form. From Agatha Christie to Clint Eastwood, we anticipate a climax of confrontation, a pay-off, in a revelation or a shoot-out, probably to the detriment of the villain but sometimes, as in more recent movies (eg, the thriller Seven), to the detriment of the hero.

The Coens though have always cut across genre expectations. They belong to a self-conscious generation of the Image. Born in Minnesota, they, like so many of us, were brought up on TV and movies. While Joel made films from age eight and went to film school in New York, Ethan wrote screenplays and studied philosophy at Princeton “for fun”. Their first major film Blood simple (1984) was also a tale of pursuit and shootings in Texas. As with their elder, Scorsese, and junior, Tarantino, their films often recall past movies: westerns, police dramas, gangster films. The Coens are particularly taken by the work of Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese falcon. Their film Miller’s crossing (1996) was based on Hammett’s The glass key, while The big Lebowski (1998) recalls the work of Hammett’s disciple, Raymond Chandler, with the movie’s slacker Dude forced into the PI role.

In his recently republished 1976 work Criticism and ideology, Terry Eagleton writes: “… the relation between [artistic] text and ideology, then, can be generally summarised as follows. Ideology presents itself to the text as a set of significations which are already articulated in a certain form or series of forms [that is, ideas]… Ideology also presents to the text a determinate series of specific modes and mechanisms of aesthetic production [that is, the forms of prose, verse, film, as well as images, sound, colour, narrative, characterisation, story genre, etc] …”

Artists start from particular felt problems, often the relevance or irrelevance of certain ideas. For example, whether in today’s society men and women can be friends, as in When Harry met Sally. The artists then desire to put this problem into a form, which often seems self-evident to them - say, a romantic comedy, an action movie, a chase. Then through the different formal tensions involved - the requirements of the genre, the need to achieve an ending, the working out of the ideological problem as a personal dilemma - the artist creates a work, especially in drama, which explores attitudes and approaches to the world that the problem calls up.

Art that is skilful appears convincing, which does not mean it cannot be discussed as a particular viewpoint, with all the limitations and inhibitions attached to this. To take an acclaimed literary example, hardly anyone treats DH Lawrence’s novel Women in love as simply a vividly written story about personal development. Whether you call it ‘felt life’ or just a good read, no one can ignore that it is quite plainly an assertion about industrial society and male-female relations in general.

On the other hand, many readers or viewers of a text may make slightly different interpretations of it. Authors do not often comment on the point of their work, That task, or privilege, is left to us. Sometimes disagreement may focus on differences of comprehension, about fact and detail, sometimes on matters of value and significance. For example, is sheriff Bell a good man? Are the Coens saying, ‘Shit just happens’? The task of criticism is, with all of this, to keep the appreciation of meaning and skill going in a productive fashion, setting the work in its immediate context as an experience, as well as its position in history, including the history of the makers’ other work. This can often entail saving the text from any pre-emptive interpretation that would seal its fate as conservative, a reinforcement of hegemonic conclusions.

Anyone familiar with the Coens’ previous work will know that conventional narrative beginnings do not always usher in satisfyingly conventional endings, with, say, heroes bonding and restoring order. In their most popular movie to date, Fargo (1995), another law officer, this time in Minnesota, investigates the kidnapping of a woman. This crime has actually been organised by the woman’s husband, who wants the money for a business deal.

Many, I think, chose to see the investigating officer, Marge Gunderson, as a symbol of sanity triumphant over evil. While Marge is painstakingly thorough, she still arrives too late to save both the kidnap victim and one of the kidnappers murdered by his colleague. It is a debatable point whether Marge even suspects the husband’s connection. While questioning the man at his car dealer business, she catches him out in a lie but is surprised when he takes off, exclaiming that he is “fleeing the interview”. Many viewers and critics, however, preferred to take the character as representing a good, sound attitude to the world rather than a portrait of well-off complacency.

If you chose to read No country as an allegory, the hunt for the money could be seen as a quest that appears serious and appropriate at the beginning, but turns out to be as counterproductive as the US invading Iraq to rid itself of opposition. The earlier Fargo’s money-hunt has something tragic as well as ridiculous about it. The husband initiates the disastrous chain of events in order to circumvent the bother of appealing to his bossy father-in-law for the money. No country, however, takes a stronger line, showing just how pointless chasing the money can be. There are cowboy ‘heroes’ all over the place, but bad luck, surprise and superior force sees most of them off. And could you guess where the bag ends up?

Before the end, Bell visits a long retired sheriff who reminds him, and us, that senseless killings are not new to New Mexico. The 19th century saw plenty of gunplay and robberies, outlaws and bounty hunters. It is just that now, as the Coens might agree, violence can no longer be so easily portrayed, as it is in most westerns, as a legend of bringing civilisation to the wilderness, otherwise known as snatching the land. Whether you choose to take the Coens as putting forward a judgment on the west, and the western, or yet another fashionable - and ‘green’ and ultimately lazy - dismissal of what people are like now is up to you. Some think that for all their artistic knowingness the Coens are too enigmatic for their own good: playing the auteur, the film ‘genius’ acclaimed for style and wisdom, but tickling at issues rather than confronting them.

Not long before the film ends, the assassin, Chigurh, meets Carla Jean, Llewelyn’s partner. She refuses to play his game of deciding life and death by a coin toss. For a moment, the relentless force seems stumped. The scene, however, is left unresolved, an act of artistic cowardice on the brothers’ part, I think. If she had taken him on, convinced or definitely defeated him, would that be too moralistic or sentimental a close? How can we avert the murderers hell-bent on just the money?

In the event, I was reminded of another film, a British one incidentally, Sexy beast. In this, you remember, another despicably destructive masculinity is left far from ‘unresolved’, but in fact is blasted through the heart by a marginalised woman. Quite a different kind of alternative and, in the circumstances, a revolutionary one.