No Country For Old Men

The Coen Brothers have abandoned their usual satirical bent to depict a grim duel between a misanthpropic hardass and a sociopath, set against Cormac McCarthy’s unforgiving southwest. I haven’t read the book, but the boys have created an impressive work in its own right -- a tale told in grand fashion. Despite political and metaphysical inklings (a vision of Americans as venal and violent, and of fate as immutable) it's the kick-ass battle between the two principals that drives the film. While Javier Bardem has drawn particular notice for his performance as a murderous drug kingpin, Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn is the more  interesting character, a man who walks that fine line between admirable perseverance and disastrous hardheadedness. Or, one might say, a quintessential American. He's also a Texan. George W, anyone?

The film's structure, though, is what really leaves a mark. My father, a professional cinematographer who has digested thousands upon thousands of story lines, could not see any rationale for the plotting in No Country For Old Men. In particular, he objected to the off-screen resolution of the escalating battle between the two main characters, a conflict that had been expertly built by piling on layers of nuanced aggression. The demands of a conventional narrative arc should have produced a quarter-hour slam-bang mano-a-mano finale. But instead the film treats this critical event like a throwaway and switches focus to the tertiary, philosophizing Tommy Lee Jones character. For a voracious consumer of movie plots like my father, this does not compute. “Maybe a reel of film got destroyed and they had to rush this version out,” he speculated. Because for him, and many others, narrative build-up, as in sexual build-up, demands release, and the Coen Brothers facile dispatch of climax becomes tantamount to progessively heavier petting topped off by a handshake.

Tinkering with the entrenched rules of story structure is of course not new. Some of Robert Altman's earlier work comes immediately to mind. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Warren Beatty dies alone in the snow while his ostensible romantic lead, Julie Christie, sits out the climax, lost in an opium reverie. In California Split, a gambling film, George Segal wins it all only to lapse into depression. And in The Long Goodbye, Eliot Gould as Philip Marlowe can't find his cat let alone solve a murder. 

Of course, for Altman, toiling in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, old models in both form and content must have seemed particularly beside the point, even deleterious. In that era, deflating expectations was the name of the game. The ascent of Spielberg and Lucas, masters of new technology and old conventions, heralded the end of the golden age of the iconoclast. Create an inhumanly evil threat, charge an unlikely hero or two with battling it, and churn out a never-in-doubt triumph. Whether it’s a giant shark, a  black-masked inter-stellar psycopath, or a vicious tyrant, the formula’s not only simple, but tried and true. The box office doesn't lie.

The most recent and notorious practitioner of anti-plotting is David Chase of "The Sopranos." I first knew something was going on with this series' structure after the character of Doctor Melfie was raped and her assailant was released due to a legal technicality, at which point he disappeared from the show. This sub-plot then eschews any external resolution, turning its attention to Melfie's internal struggle with her desire -- since the legitimate system has failed her -- to approach Tony for justice. At the time, it seemed like a particularly unusual gambit, and it still does. Subsequent storylines raised all sorts of issues around the characters that are either resolved off-screen or never at all. (Meadow’s broken engagement with Finn and the famous Russian in-the-woods episode stand out.) The last episode notwithstanding, I can think of about 10 different ways I would have liked the series to wind down, all of which followed a more conventional start-to-finish route. There's no doubt the fundamental raise-a-point, resolve-a-point model is lodged deep within our narrative selves . Deviate from it, and a storyteller risks his boldness looking like a mistake – as my father assumed the fizzled duel in No Country for Old Men was.  I can’t say I enjoyed every deviation from form in "The Sopranos," but the question remains, is that because of the way I’ve been conditioned, or have the conventions so developed because of immutable rules of narrative effectiveness, borne out of the way we perceive our own experience? Personally, my entire past sometimes seems like a red herring; years of plot all leading to an unresolved present. Do I yearn for neatly unfolding fiction as a tonic to my own confusion? Imagine Citizen Kane ending without the last close-up of the sleigh. Is that a better film or worse? Perhaps we all need a last-minute Rosebud to weave meaning out of previous strands.

Linkateria:

• More "No Country" reviews
• Coenesque - all things Coen Bros.
• Google Books: No Country for Old Men
• The Sopranos final scene (YouTube)
• Senses of Cinema: Robert Altman