Texas Hold ‘Em with the Coen Brothers 

David Begelman

            Critics across the land are going ape over No Country For Old Men, a film adaptation of a novel by Cormac McCarthy. The writer was ushered into popularity in 1962 by his Random House editor, Albert Erskine, his literary guide and mentor for over forty years.

            The popular novelist of western macho sagas has unusual tastes; witness his dismissive attitude toward—of all things—such literary giants as Marcel Proust and Henry James, authors who, according to McCarthy, fall short of dealing with the “important issues of life and death.”

Huh? Is there nothing in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu and Portrait of A Lady that for him rivals the importance of the bloodletting that is the thematic backbone of his novels? Alas, so much the worse for geniuses who wouldn’t know a genuine Texan thing if they came face to face with it on some nameless mesa. Not that those writers knew anything about mesas, six-shooters, or the standard paraphernalia of real men, the hunks who hunker down amid the sagebrush and the cactuses.

If Joel and Ethan Coen imagine they have delivered an adaptation of McCarthy’s novel dealing importantly with the metaphysics of masculinity, stalking, or carnage they are—at least to my mind—sadly mistaken. For me, their film is nothing but a trussed up cops and robbers escapade beautified by a pair of fashionable directors who, in collusion with such allies in the media as PBS’s Charlie Rose, have managed to convince a vast audience they have something cinematically important to say.

Charlie hosted the Coen brothers, Josh Brolin (who plays Llewelyn Moss in the film) and Javier Bardem (who plays the relentless contract killer, Anton Chigurh). The two characters are studies in implausibility, whatever the frenetic aspect of their unending cat and mouse caper across the Texan landscape. And caper it is, from desolate desert wastes to creepy accommodations in out of the way motels with vents suitably designed to hide the two million dollar stash Llewelyn discovers among the detritus of a drug deal gone bad. It is a landscape for the morose away from home.   

Mr. Bardem, after deserved accolades in Pedro Almodevar films (and stunning portrayals as the father in The Dancer Upstairs and the bedridden patient in The Sea Inside), plays a serial killer too inattentive to personal grooming and the arsenal of weapons he hauls around to give heed to what would routinely mark anyone as jail bait in the eyes of a vigilant police force. He sports a kooky Prince Valiant haircut, dresses in somber clothes as gothic as any vampire’s, and in plain sight lugs around an arsenal of weapons that puts your average serial killer to shame. (Talk about showing one’s hand: The portfolio includes a rifle with a humongous silencer, and a cow-killing pneumatic device that blows locks off doors, scatters the brains of arbitrarily selected victims, and is backed up by an enormous cylinder of compressed air. The contrivance looks like it should be hooked up to a patient with terminal emphysema, hardly to a killer committed to getting a professional job done with as unobtrusive a technology as possible).

Mr. Bardem’s improbably accoutered loony wends his homicidal way undetected through Texas towns that would ordinarily terminate inconspicuous Darwinians on the spot. So how does Anton Chirgurh get away with it? Mysteriously, we are supposed to believe he is as undetectable as he is deadly. Any redneck, exquisitely attuned as he is to signs of deviation in the neighborhood, knows the assumption is flat wrong. You don’t carry on this way in Texas. Maybe in New Jersey.  But even there, only if you’re lucky.

Llewelyn Moss likewise stretches the imagination (although Josh Brolin as a rising Hollywood star has an eloquent, if somewhat highfalutin conception of his role, as evidenced by his remarks in the Charlie Rose interview). We are to believe that this dustbowl mechanic and occasional deer hunter, in fleeing from Anton, suddenly becomes adept at tactics that would put James Bond to shame were the Brit put to a similar challenge. Llewelyn gets popped indoors by Anton near the end of the film, but not before he shoots the killer in the leg from behind a car Anton has riddled with bullets.

Not to be outdone by minor setbacks like shattered viscera, Anton blows up a car outside a drug store, and while the pharmacists in it rush to the street to eyeball the conflagration, Anton raids their repository of drugs in order to obtain the necessary medicine for reparation. He then undertakes what any stone-faced psychotic would do in a heartbeat: perform surgery on his own wrecked appendage. An occasional dunderhead as a murderer, Anton is beyond reproach as part time physician. He even manages to fashion an arm sling for a compound fracture at the end of the film, after a broadside collision with another car. (The message here is that no one can dispatch the ghoul through calculated strategy; he has to be done in by a happenstance as fortuitous as what can happen to anyone who doesn’t keep his eye on a traffic light.)

However disrepaired, Anton doesn’t get his comeuppance at the end of the film. Far from being a model of invincibility, his escape from justice augurs nothing more serious than a cinematic sequel we can see coming a mile away. Shades of Hannibal Lecter, returned repeatedly to American audiences clamoring for more cannibalism. All of which goes to show you that when the public hankers for extreme sadism in its movie-going diet—while harboring residual guilt about the naughty emotion—confusing the meaner item with high art is the name of the undercover game.

Tommy Lee Jones plays the lugubrious Ed Tom Bell, last of a family of West Texas sheriffs. His contribution to No Country For Old Men is cracker-barrel wistfulness over the fact that the killer is not only always one step ahead of him, but leaves him in  sentimental reverie over the good old days, when life was less complicated. (Meaning that killers in the past weren’t as resourceful as the one that leaves this sheriff feeling continually unemployed.) Scenes with his wife and an old crony stuck in a wheel chair are plainly redundant narrative in the film, although they serve to remind us what a sore loser the sheriff is if he puts his mind to it.

Kelly MacDonald as Llewelyn’s wife, Carla Jean, bides her time patiently while the macho thing explodes all around her. Before Anton does Llewelyn in, he promises the latter he will also snuff out his wife. Whether or not this transpires is not exactly clear, because Anton has a habit of making his victims toss a coin to determine whether they live or die, and he is seen exiting the place in which he cornered Carla Jean before putting the question to her.

Carla Jean, in her encounter with the killer, says the most sensible thing in any of the tedious dialogue of the film: that the coin toss has nothing to do with shaping Anton’s decisions; it’s what’s in his head that counts. For that epiphany alone Carla Jean deserves to live (we doubt she does, since her remark catches Anton off guard for a moment so infinitesimally brief, you’d miss it if you blinked). Should the creep move on to cut himself an equally murderous career in any movie sequel, he will be a bit wiser for the instruction.

By the way, the title of the film and McCarthy’s novel is filched from a William Butler Yeats poem, Sailing to Byzantium. It has nothing to do with murder, drug busts, sheriffs, contract killers, all around mayhem, or intimations of Oscars in equally sordid rituals. And it’s ten to one there are movie enthusiasts out there who assume the greatest of modern English language poets was because of this incompletely educated. Monuments of unageing intellect they’re not.