KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. Last week in film was put off by 2 days of toy hunting in southern Ontario in honour of Lady Kent. Lets just say antique mall-ing has officially become more exciting than toy hunting. And now movies. Catching up on Coens and another spell with Nick and Nora.
This Week:
No Country for Old Men (2007, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - bluray)
Burn After Reading (2008, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - dvd)
Another Thin Man (1939, d. W.S. Van Dyke - dvd)
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One would like to think that after the lackluster performances of
The Ladykillers and
Intolerable Cruelty -- both critically and commercially -- the Coens intentionally regrouped for their biggest critical and awards success in adapting Cormac McCarthy's
No Country for Old Men, but in reality it never has seemed like the Coens were ever that concerned with making such calculated manoeuvers in their careers. I doubt they did a lot different in the process of bringing
No Country to screen than any of their other pictures.
No Country is definitely not an outlier in their career, that's for sure. It's almost a return to their roots with crime noir, probably the closest film in tone to their debut, Blood Simple, although showing the years of growth in skill in between. Despite hewing close to the source material (not that I would know, I ain't got much times for no book learnin'), it would be very hard to tell that they were not the originators of this story. It bears so many Coen-esque hallmarks, and in many ways feels like it's derived from their quasi-stream-of-consciousness plotting.
It's been some time since I last watched No Country, recalling it to be a bleak picture of the darkest side of humanity. A lot has changed in the world since 2007, and I have to tell you that a film that's merely dealing in the drug trade, and centering primarily around a psychopath who enjoys killing and toying with his prey...well, it's almost comforting. Just one lunatic clearly detached from anything approximating humanity, and only killing a few people who get in his way, well, it's so small potatoes next to the inhuman psychopaths who control all the wealth, industry, government and are dismantling every structure that benefits anyone who isn't them. Yes, I'd take 100 Anton Chigurhs running around over a whole think tank of old white men with enough wealth, resources and influence to seemingly change the entire direction of the planet. Point is, I found escapism in this rewatch of No Country for Old Men.
In the film Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a vietnam vet and hunter, comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. In the process of exploring the scene, he finds a big bag of money and thinks he's more than due this reward, and more than capable of hanging onto it knowing that assuredly dangers will be coming his way. Of course he wasn't banking on relentless, astute, killing machine Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) tracking him down. Their cat-and-mouse hide-and-seek game leaves a trail of death and destruction in their wake, and County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is two steps behind tracking it all.
No Country For Old Men is, in part, about facing a world one doesn't feel like they belong in, one they don't recognize. This point of view stems from Sheriff Bell, himself a WWII veteran, but already keenly aware that the nature of America has shifted from community into selfishness. He may not be acutely aware of it, but that's capitalism, baby, and Reaganomics is about to tear the country a new one.
Llewelyn is desperate to have his piece of the pie, to have the dream that was promised him. It hasn't come cheap, nor for free. He sees an opportunity, he takes it, knowing only somewhat what the actual toll may be. Chigurh is driven by compulsions and fixations, little else, but sometimes he acts like a Batman villain, simply because it entertains him to put people off their guard, to unsettle them, to disrupt them. Like a horror movie villain, he's also judging them and finding most of them wanting.
There are allusions one could make around Chigurh, whether he's a demon, or the actual devil, but the penultimate sequence of the film shows that he is just flesh and blood in a body that can be broken like anyone else's, but with a mind that doesn't care about fitting in. If anything he wants to disrupt societal norms, whether it's because he feels outside of them or just enjoys disrupting them he never says.
It is a gorgeous looking picture, which, at this point, is expected with Coens films with Roger Deakins as their cinematographer. The Texas landscapes, the arid feel, and the colour tone to the film feels almost an absence of darkness and shadow, though definitely not vibrant. It's the contrast of the world being awake and alive while nightmares still roam free. It's simultaneously chilling and warm. The Coen's frequent collaborator made the choice not to score the film, and by that I mean he advised the directors it didn't need a score. Instead it's a film of sounds, foley work an and whatnot, acting as a soundtrack.
No Country For Old Men won best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, and Bardem won best supporting actor at the Oscars. It broke both Bardem and Brolin into much more prominent players on the big screen, and the Coens brushed the dirt of previous flops off their shoulders silencing any prior doubt the critical community may have had. It was a real turning point in their careers that instantly called for a reassessment of everything they had done before.
And so, in a fashion that should not be unexpected for the Coens, they followed it up with Burn After Reading, a film that does a heel-turn pivot back into their penchant for subverting genres, dealing with idiots and crimes, their favourite subject....
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It's remarkable that
Burn After Reading has the biggest superstar cast of any of the Coens' films given what a sort of silly trifle it is. George Clooney, Francis McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, and Tilda Swinton are the A-listers up front, with J.K. Simmons and Richard Jenkins (with David Rashe) supporting. It's definitely the success of
No Country that gave them the opportunity to cast their films with such massive talent, when at least half of those roles in prior films would have gone to wonderful character actors that maybe weren't such recognizable faces.
The film opens with CIA Analyst Osborne Cox (Malkovich) getting demoted from his current position and quitting in protest. Cox is a pretentious Ivy-league alumnus who thinks himself high in station and status, and assumes he's smarter and more capable than everyone else. It's a role written specifically for Malkovich and it fits him like a glove. He simmers with rage anytime anyone he deems beneath him intellectually (which is everyone) dares to tell him anything that conflicts with his view of the world. He's a difficult personality who, in his unemployment, decides to write a memoir ("mem-wah").
He's married to Katie (Tilda Swinton), a pediatrician with the worst bedside manner, high status from family money, and is so totally done with Osborne. She doesn't respect him in the slightest. She's been sleeping around with U.S. Marshal Harry Pfarrer (Clooney) who is married to a children's novelist. Katie expects her impending divorce to be the impetus that Harry needs to leave his wife.
Harry, we learn, is a serial adulterer. I mean, he's a confident, charming, amiable, fast-talking good-humoured guy who is very handsome and fit (he has a lot of sex and goes for 5 mile runs afterwards)... so of course he's taking full advantage of it. He talks big about his secret service past and how he's never had to discharge his weapon, but when push comes to shove (and there's a lot of pushing and shoving of these characters in traditional Coen bros fashion) he's a big damn coward.
Carter Burwell's score leans in extra heavily on cliched spy and action movie sounds, with sweeping strings and pounding drums accentuating everything surrounding Osborne, Katie and Harry. Even though Malkovich is perfectly Malkovich in his excess, Swinton is so in the pocket of her entitled poshness, and Clooney is in peak "competent buffoon" form, the intensity of the Burwell score makes everything feel important despite being pretty damn silly. When the film cuts to its flipside cast, the crew at the gym Hardbodies, Burwell's score all but drops out and lets Pitt's upbeat idiot Chad, McDormand's wallowing in vanity Linda, and Jenkins' hapless, pining Ted hammer home their comedic dumbassery.
A CD is found in the locker room, and Chad is convinced it's top secret government shit. He convinces Linda that there's likely a healthy reward in returning the shit to its owner. Linda, desperately needing money for four cosmetic surgery operations to counteract the effects of being middle age, is more than eager to go along with the plan. It goes to such absurd lengths, even for a Coen brothers movie, and the major players start to intertwine like a Celtic knot.
The end of the second act and the end of the film both end with CIA Officer Smith (Rashe) explaining his understanding of what's actually happening in the film to Simmons' supervisor. Simmons' reactions are hilarious as he asks questions to which Smith has no answers (we the audience have the answers and we know they're absurd and unsatisfying) and his casual dismissal of all the players involved is effectively telling the audience that maybe they shouldn't really care either.
It's not uncommon for the Coens to mistreat their protagonists, to really put them through the wringer or even unceremoniously kill them off, and there's plenty of that in this film. They do terrible things to their likeable idiots because it amuses them to do so. The last third of the film does feel more than a bit mean-spirited, even more so than pretty much any other Coens film, and yet, they attempt to rebound with some of the funniest bits in the film, and come so close to succeeding.
I spent the majority of the film with a big dumb smile on my face even when I wasn't laughing. This is a ridiculous film full of really great comedic performances, all in service of another Coens-style shaggy dog story. Nothing face front in this story really matters, but underneath it's really about reaching middle-age, feeling uncertain about the present, maybe too regretful or too wistful about the past, and perhaps desperate for a new path forward. I don't know that it really succeeds in exploring this subtext to any satisfying degree, but at least it feels a little like a purpose for the film which otherwise has none, besides entertainment.
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Oh my God, Nick and Nora have a baby. Might as well put them on the proverbial motorbike and have them jump the proverbial shark.
At least that's what I feared. Being a consumer of sitcoms from the 70's through the 90's, I learned that babies were introduced only to try and shake things up in the characters lives, and it was a signal that the situation from which the comedy derived had run out of ideas.
But very quickly in Another Thin Man (referencing that it's another in the series, and not alluding to the baby being another thin man) I could see what kind of parents Nick and Nora were, simply because they had people minding the baby, and they were very largely hands-off. This pleased me greatly, not because I want Nick and Nora to be horribly neglectful parents thus raising a child to grow into a white man of family wealth with parent issues that makes them emotionally detached and ruinous for the world. No, rather, it meant that parenting a baby wouldn't get in the way of all that drinking and murder-solving.
In this case, Nick and Nora, having just arrived back in New York City, are beckoned by their father's business partner -- the money and finances guy -- to come visit upstate. He's needs Nick, now in charge of Nora's family businesses, to do some paperwork or something. When they arrive, they find that the old man is tangled in some shady business, with a former fixer trying to blackmail him into giving him a big pile of money to keep his mouth shut and return to Cuba.
When the old man winds up dead, a reluctant Nick (and bored-mommy Nora) is wrangled into investigating, mostly because he sees how incompetent the police are at this whole thing.
Once again, Nick sidelines Nora once he actually decides to investigate, but Nora finds her own pathway into it and the story is the better for it. I was hoping that Nora finally getting in on the investigating would yield greater results than it actually does here, but it's still nice that once she comes in, Nick's reaction isn't as much chauvinistic as juvenile fuckery. Nick and Nora's relationship seems to be getting off on messing with the other, putting them into a bit of a fix with someone, and watching them try to squirm their way out. In the last movie, Nick managed to get Nora arrested because he was amused by it, and here Nora manages to implicate Nick as a possible suspect in the murder, because she is amused to do so.
William Powell seems so settled into playing Nick at this point, it's almost autopilot, but he's turned up the charm moreso than in the previous film. It still doesn't measure up to the every-line-a-gem dialogue of the original though. Myrna Loy's Nora does get the coup of finally participating in the investigation, but she's hamstrung in her own way by societal expectations where, as she's now a mother, she's expected to be sober (I did like that there's the inference she does seem to sneak some off screen).
The guest performers here are a hammy bunch. There's a lot of shifty-eye acting here... a lot! And it's ironically amusing, because it's so cliche and over the top. It's not something that's been incredibly present in the last two films, but so many of the character here do it.
The mystery, much like the last two, is a wild web that makes it almost impossible to solve as an audience member. These aren't murder mysteries that give enough clues to deduce the culprit, only enough to show that when Nick comes to the reveal, he's the smartest guy in the room and thus the only one able to solve it. It makes for a more engaging picture when you're just along for the ride and not distracted trying to figure it out. They're not interested in guiding you to an answer. It almost doesn't matter, really. It's all just a vehicle for Nick and Nora's quippy detective work. I'm still enjoying it and ready for more.
