I’m framing up the Coen brothers as if they’re appearing in one of their own movies. From where I’m seated, I can see Joel, the longer, skinnier, more languid of the pair, stretched out almost full-length in the foreground, his legs on a coffee table and his torso resting almost horizontal on a couch. He fills the lower half of my frame, looking vaguely reminiscent of Henry Fonda balancing on his chair outside the barbershop in My Darling Clementine. Brother Ethan meanwhile is more animated, providing a more compact, roving vertical in the middle distance to balance the supine Joel, and tittering where Joel is prone to drawl.
And yes, they do finish each other’s sentences. Sort of. Like this, for instance, in answer to the question “How many animals have you killed in your movies?”
Joel: “Oh ... plenty.”
Ethan: “Uh ... cows in O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
Joel (pensively): “Couple of cows in that one. Blew up a rabbit and a lizard, another dog in this one ... “
Ethan (chuckling): “Yeah, we’ve killed a LOT of animals!”
In the next few weeks, expect to hear the phrase “return to form” used incessantly about the brothers Coen. Their searing adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s most approachable, albeit most pulpy, novel, No Country for Old Men, has earned admiration and mainstream attention in America of an intensity which hasn’t come the Coens’ way since the Oscar success of Fargo or the rapturous cult that has coalesced around The Big Lebowski.
After two comedies — Intolerable Cruelty and a remake of Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers — generally deemed the least interesting outings of their career, the Coens have delivered a manhunt-thriller of mesmerizing violence and remarkable narrative leanness, an almost academically precise exercise in the building and maintenance of unbearable tension and anxiety in the audience, and superficially reminiscent of the Texas noir of their debut, Blood Simple.
Shot under merciless southwestern skies by their usual cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and telling of the inexorable destruction of three men with utterly conflicting moral codes, it’s the soberest movie they’ve yet made: arid, spare, and mercifully free of the self-defeating collegiate cynicism that sometimes mars even their best work. It has the starkness of Fargo (though it is yellow where Fargo was a symphony in white), the random viciousness of Miller’s Crossing, and the ecstatic stylization of The Man Who Wasn’t There. No Country for Old Men proves that the Coens’ technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors.
Peckinpah is the director whose themes and concerns — masculinity and self-preservation among them — sit foremost in the mind when reading the McCarthy novel and when seeing the movie, which is a faithful, almost verbatim adaptation. The brothers are amenable to the comparison. Ethan: “We were aware of the basic link just by virtue of the setting, the south-west, and this very male aspect of the story. Hard men in the south-west shooting each other — that’s definitely Sam Peckinpah’s thing. We were aware of those similarities, certainly.” Joel: “Especially in the section of the movie where Woody Harrelson makes an appearance. He reminded us of a Peckinpah character in a certain way.” Ethan: “Yeah, you show a hard-on guy in a western-cut suit and it already looks like a Peckinpah movie. Same kind of shorthand.”
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