No Country for Old Men was a better novel than The Road, in the humble opinion of this Crayon. It's a grim, cynical vision of the embodiment of evil (represented as an incarnation of the laws of chance and the nature of chaos: one hitman named Anton Chigurh) triumphing over two guys operating way out of their league—a hapless Vietnam vet who decides stealing money from drug smugglers is a good way to get out of the Texas shithole he's in, and a good ol' boy sheriff who just can't understand how the world has passed him by yet wants to save the vet and his wife from themselves.
Evil, of course, wins—as it usually does in Cormac McCarthy's USA and in the real one (see Falwell posts below). And the action freakin' rocks.
"So, what could be better than reading this wonderful little black hole of a novel," thought I back in 2005. "A movie would be good, but how could anyone make a film out of this thing? What if the Coen brothers (not the lackluster Coens of late but the glorious, black Coens of Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing) somehow returned to form and filmed it?"
Then I found out the Coens were making it, and, after cleaning myself up, I have been trembling with fear and desire lo these last years. Would the film be tight, nasty, and evil, like the book, or would they play it for laughs? Would they *shudder* cast George Clooney? Well, No Country for Old Men has premiered at Cannes and the results are in ...
...IT'S GOING TO BE THE BEST FILM OF THE YEAR.
I base this rather optimistic opinion on two pieces of evidence other than the obvious fact that this is a Coen brothers movie based on a Cormac McCarthy novel. 1) A guy saw it at a tiny preview screening in Pittsburgh with an audience of jocks. The jocks loved the action but were totally mystified by the ending. The guy wrote that it was brilliant and difficult, and that he wanted to see it again with an audience looking for more than just the Terminator-style action that punctuates much of the movie. All this told me that the Coens actually stuck to the novel and didn't weasel out on the bleak ending for market reasons. 2) The Hollywood Reporter said Javier Bardem is nearly perfect as McCarthy's perfect killing machine Chigurh. They also wrote they didn't like the film overall because it was "too faithful to the novel" and the ending suffered because it focused on "lost ideals" instead of offering a craptacular action finale à la Spider-Man 3. Well, I'm sold.
Oh God, I'm so happy to be alive. Only 186 days until November 21.
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