Going to a movie is one thing. Reading a book is another. For many years I’ve been an avid reader of Cormac McCarthy. I’ve made it a point, in fact, to read everything by him at least twice. McCarthy’s style is heavy on landscape and theme, with plot somewhat de-emphasized. There is plot, and sometimes lots of it — though I’d be hard pressed to explain in simple terms the plot of something like Blood Meridian — but the true beauty of his writing is in the poetry of his vocabulary and sentence structure, and on the rich way in which his describes landscapes.
His later novels are set in the southwest, lands of vast distances populated by men who have little to say. They’re stories filled with long silences:
——-
“It was a good hard climb to the top of the ridge and it was close to noon by the time he got there Far off to the north he could see the shape of a tractor-trailer moving across the shimmering landscape. Ten miles. Maybe fifteen. Highway 90. He sat and swept the new country with the glasses. Then he stopped.
At the foot of a rockslide on the edge of the bajada was a small piece of something blue. He watched it for a long time through the binoculars. Nothing moved. He studied the country about. Then he watched it some more. It was the better part of an hour before he rose and started down.”
—-
If you wanted to write a scene in such a way as to foil the best intentions of any movie-maker this would be a way to do it. A man climbs a hill and sits, motionless, watching a desert through binoculars for close to an hour. Then climbs back down.
This is from the beginning of the novel, and in fact “No Country For Old Men” is probably McCarthy’s most plot-driven novel. He garnered a fair amount of criticism from the faithful when it came out for being a mere genre novel. Of course it’s much more than some potboiler, being a novel about the theme of fate and destiny much like Moby Dick is a novel about vengeance.
Now study the pacing of those paragraphs and compare them to the opening scenes of the Coen Brother’s film adaptation. I read about the production with a fair amount of trepidation, but was I ever wrong. This is one of the best movies I have ever seen. The Brothers hit every note perfectly.
The cinematography is amazing, capturing the essence of the landscape. And the pacing captures perfectly the long spaces and vast distances (oh, and without ever being boring).
The casting was superb. Tommy Lee Jones (who if I remember correctly originally bought the film rights) is spot-on as Sheriff Bell. He takes just the right spot in the movie, not as a protagonist or antagonist but as a front-row observer. Javier Bardem portrays a villain as frightening as anything in film history. My daughter — a lover of the “Saw,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and other slasher/horror franchises, starting covering her face with her jacket whenever he appeared on screen. One critic called him “an emanation of pure evil,” and that’s about right. Jut to hear the way he says “an ATM” can make your blood freeze up.
Josh Brolin plays the hapless Llewellyn Moss, the man who was “just dumb enough to think he was smart enough” to get away with the satchel full of cash. He plays him with the right air of quiet bravado (if there is such a thing). And Woody Harrelson, as you’ll know if you read the book, is the only choice for Wells.
As in most adaptations, a lot of dialog has to be cut. In this case, largely because so much of it is in McCarthy’s own literary voice and people simply don’t talk that way. But enough of the best survives, particularly in Chiguhr’s monologues and Sheriff Bell’s voice-over narration and dream story at the end.
But that’s OK — read the book. It’s a different thing anyway.
I’m going to go out on a limb and give this five stars. I may choose to revise that later on, but not by much. My sense is that it’s the kind of thing that will reward repeated viewings — one definition of a classic.