The Coen Brothers are back to form with a great adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's spare, violent meditation on morality and mortality No Country for Old Men.
I've thought Joel and Ethan have been off their game a little to a lot for the past several years. Even O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I eventually came around to (largely because of the music), is still too knowing and pretentious for its own good. This latest one, however, is a worthy successor and maybe even equal of similarly themed Fargo and Blood Simple. It's definitely their most mature film.
I'd read McCarthy's book, so I was eager to see the Coen Brothers' first literary adaptation. It's just about exactly like the novel, which is a good thing. The dialogue is lifted verbatim for long passages/scenes at a stretch. The film's end (which elicited several groans and snorts in my theater) is directly as it is on the book's last page. It's not a Hollywood ending, as the saying goes, but it's the right rumination to end a genre picture that turns out to be a thoughtful treatise on the measure of men. (McCarthy's title comes from a Yeats poem, by the way.)
It's kind of movie that will stay with you days after you see it and quite some time after that. I highly recommend it.
2 comments:
Hey, don't you call my O Brother Where Art Thou pretentious! That movie is awesome because it manages to get *everything* about that historical period: the growth of mass media, the wide appeal of the new charismatic religions, the Klan... if only all film-makers understood things the way the Coens do.
What other Klan films are there? Besides Birth of a Nation and Legally Blonde, I mean.
When I saw him in concert last year, I actually had T-Bone Burnett autograph the "Are You A Dapper Dan Man?" ad in the CD soundtrack.
"I don't want 'Fop'..."
That's funny. George Clooney is pretty good in this movie, yeah.
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