This will be the first of two posts on my weekend viewing of the Coen brother's Miller's Crossing and No Country for Old Men.
In anticipation of the Coen brother’s newest offering, No Country For Old Men, I Netflixed their 1990 violent equivalent, Miller’s Crossing, last week. Maybe it was the image of a hat lying in the middle of a road that intrigued me most, but having already seen Fargo, MC seemed like the perfect precursor to NCFOM.
Boy was my mouth open. You got me Coen brothers, you got me. I forgot I didn’t like you. Here I was sitting down on a cloudy Saturday afternoon, ready for a thought-provoking genre piece, (something along the lines of The Killers or Touchez Pas Au Grisbi) but instead got this immature posturing heap of rubbish.
Now I remember why I don’t like the Coen brothers. They don’t know what they’re talking (er, filming) about. Theirs is a cinema of appearance, providing an illusion of the truth, but not the T-r-u-t-h itself. Sure they’ll put in certain idiosyncratic details, but to no end. To them a film is a checklist. They have no understanding of simple narrative causality.
Case in point, the film’s opening scene begins with a slow pull out from a close up of a glass being filled with ice and whiskey. The sound of the ice cracking was a nice touch; I’m ready for some hat in the road. Uh oh, what’s this? The camera pulls out to a cut? No new information? Why even pull out? What?
So there’s this fat, bald guy saying something about having ethics when fixing a fight, the camera's zooming in. You can assert that the whiskey shot wasn’t his perspective, yet why the zoom in? Okay, fine, so maybe we’re watching someone else’s perspective of this fat bald guy, maybe it’s even the same perspective that the whiskey shot belongs to. Spoke too soon, it’s yet another non sequitur.
This time it’s an old man calmly listening to the fat man’s tirade. Here comes the owner of the whiskey shot walking into the background. There’s this heated exchange about so-and-so not letting so-and-so get bigger than he wants, yadda-yadda-yadda. The fat bald man leaves. So I ask, what was the purpose of that scene?
Given the opening whiskey shot, I am to presume that the film will be told from the guy pouring the drink’s perspective, which is the henchman to the calm old man. What relevance did the scene have to the henchman or the henchman to the scene? None. The Coen brothers didn’t even bother to shoot his reaction to what was going on. Why put that scene in the film?
As if to save the scene or probably just to connect it to the next, there’s this exchange between the calm old man and our protagonist where a gambling debt is alluded to and the old man offers to pay it off. Our hero declines, an obvious attempt by the Coens to instill some sort of nobility in him, but without any context who’s to say?
To tell you the truth, I slept through the rest of the film. I’m sure maybe there was some mild foreshadowing going on, that the fat bald guy was to have some role in the plot and I think I stayed awake long enough to see that our hero was sleeping with the boss’s lady, but that still doesn’t say much.
A film is not a checklist. You cannot drop plot details like you’re scattering seed, just hoping something will stick and grow in the minds of the audience. People can tell when you don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe you can fool the philistines with your appearance of a film with all its genre conventions wrapped neatly in a bow, but anyone who knows knows that film is medium of emotion, not a game of guess what the film’s doing.
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