No Country for Miller's Crossing, Pt. 2

This is the second post on my weekend viewing of Miller's Crossing and No Country for Old Men.

Fast-forward to Sunday afternoon, I still had an itch to watch a decent film and I vaguely remembered Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was playing at the Brea Edwards. So I show I up, but BTDKYD wasn’t playing. In its stead was No Country for Old Men. Should I take the risk? As the old adage goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Shame on me.

I invited my buddy Brandon to come along and together we saw the trailer for Michael Haneke’s remake of his own film Funny Games. The trailer made Haneke out to be the next Kubrick with its parallels to the trailer for A Clockwork Orange. You can judge for yourself by watching this and this.

So the film begins with shots of the vast, barren West Texan landscape. In a voice-over, Tommy Lee Jones muses about the good old days when being a sheriff afforded more opportunities to be a hero and wonders what the sheriffs back then would do in the face of crime these days (the film takes place in the early 1980s).

I forgot to mention that the visuals also follow the process of the rising of the sun. The sun isn’t captured per se, but more light enters the landscape with each succeeding shot. The presence of a visual metaphor, especially one as poetic as this, in a Coen brother’s film is surprising to say the least. I think I’m in for a treat.

And I was.

"No Country for Old Men has done for the Coen brothers what Eastern Promises did for Dave Cronenberg, it heralded their claim to fame as legitimate filmmakers. With both filmmakers, there was a certain fetishizing of details that marred their previous works. As if they fell into the trap of not so much the joy of making a film, but instead the self-indulgence of it.

All that’s changed. Their attention to detail has now been appropriated for the sole purpose of telling the Truth. Not to say that these films are flawless, but that in a sense, they have become more pure in intent. I for one am looking forward to their next films, but a part of me still wonders if these recent successes were more products of good writing than directorial skill. Cormac McCarthy did win the Pulitzer Prize after all, but then again I need only think of the job Billy Bob Thornton did with All the Pretty Horses to lavish praise on the Coens.