No Country for Old Men (2007)

Written and directed by: Joel and Ethan Coen

Based on the Book by Cormac McCarthy

I didn’t go into No Country for Old Men knowing much about it. I hadn’t read the Cormac McCarthy novel upon which it is closely based. I didn’t know what it’s story was about or who most of its main actors were. I did know, however, that one of its big stars was Javier Bardem, and that his mop-haired, jean clad character wasn’t exactly a good guy. 

Having enjoyed films like Joker, Taxi Driver, and The Godfather trilogy, I figured it made sense for me to see another artful depiction of cold bloodedness. And having enjoyed films like Inside Llewyn Davis, O Brother Where Art Thou and Hail Caesar, I had high faith in the Coen brothers’ ability to entertain me.

What I saw, however, was a well shot, well acted movie that didn’t seem to go anywhere. The film failed to establish a main character. Was it Tommy Lee Jones’s increasingly heartbroken cop, Ed Bell? Was it Bardem’s Anton Chigurh? For much of the movie I assumed it was big-hearted opportunist Llewlyn Moss (Josh Brolin), but that notion was undermined in anti-climactic fashion.

No Country for Old Men felt literary to a fault. It is a story about how life is not a storybook. 

The film argues that there simply are no protagonists and antagonists in real life. Those who are blessed with great “beginnings” and “middles” may not end up with the most poetic of ends. This view is embodied in the character of Chigurh. While he generally aims to end the lives of all he runs into, on occasion he spares his victims because they wins a coin toss. While typical mythology may imply that we succeed through personal growth, Chigurh and No Country for Old Men scoff back that we succeed and die thanks to sheer chance.

No Country for Old Men thus undermines the degree to which it is engaging for the sake of being poignant. And that’s only half of why my viewing experience felt so stale. No Country for Old Men also threw me off due to just how psychopathic Chigurh was. 

Joker’s Arthur Fleck develops his dark side after years of suffering. And even after he acquires it, he is able to turn it off when he deems it morally appropriate. Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle is depressed and anti-social and eager to express himself with a gun, but is able to balance that part of his psyche against the part that strives for decency and valour. These characters are chaotic and act disproportionately, but they are not simple villains. Chigurh, by contrast is not given the idealism of these figures, nor is he given a humanizing social context like The Corleones. He is somewhat humanized through his vulnerability, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, but only minimally and in the film’s final moments.

The film psychopath who Chigurh most reminds me of is The Dark Knight version of the Joker. Like Chigurh, this Joker is not a complex and tragic figure, but a devoted villain who denies having an origin story; he “just wants to see the world burn.” Yet, when I saw The Dark Knight, my key takeaway was that the Nolan brothers managed to tell a story with a pure-evil villain, that somehow didn’t uphold a tough on crime narrative. How? 

Firstly, it includes a scene where a group of prisoners show moral courage under existential pressure. Secondly, Joker is not the film’s only villain. The film also depicts the fall of tough-on-crime prosecutor Harvey Dent into a villainy of his own. 

The cops in No Country for Old Men are not like Harvey Dent: they are neither valourized as he is, nor do they fall as he does. Ed Bell is presented as a proud, veteran doing his job: an old-school hero of sorts. Yet he is devastated by Chigurh, due to the latter’s unique evil. While, as a Western film, No Country for Old Men is far from anti-cop, it nonetheless foreshadows contemporary conversations. Police insist they exist to protect and serve, yet when it comes to a figure like Chigurh, from who the public objectively need protecting, the police prove useless. And this suggest that those people that cops can figure out how to lock up are not the Chigurhs of the world: but redeemable, three-dimensional people.

No Country for Old Men poetically expresses the violence of our world, and in that sense I see why it is a modern classic. Maybe there’s a place for such pessimism in philosophy and sociology. But when it comes to making entertaining art, it generally pays off to give your story an arc and make your characters three dimensional. 

Everybody Knows (2018)

Written and directed by: Asghar Farhadi

While doing some research after the fact on Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows, I was surprised to see it classified as a “thriller.” Granted, “Thriller” is a particularly amorphous film-category, but the label seems a particular misfit for Farhadi. In what I’ve seen of his works before, he writes realist scripts in which mild-mannered, diplomatic protagonists find themselves in the middle of emotionally intense disputes. Everybody Knows does not mark a huge tonal departure from this approach, so why is it called a thriller?

The answer, I imagine, lies in the fact that it is a film about a kidnapping. But as I’m sure you’re probably anticipating by now, it’s not really a film about a kidnapping. We don’t see much of what the kidnapee’s captivity is like, nor are we left with harrowing clues or much analysis of motive along the way. Instead Everybody Knows ends up being about the question of family and loyalty.

The movie opens with the lead-up to a wedding, and Farhadi takes his time in showing viewers what the wedding looks like. This is an aesthetic decision, but it’s also one that sets up the film’s plot. Weddings are widely attended events, and amongst their attendees there are generally a dearth of relatives. Weddings, however, are a ritual. Family members participate in them because that’s how things are done: they are not a conscious iteration of family responsibility.

When the kidnapping happens, however, viewers are made to question what family responsibility really means: who cares for whom, and how should they express that care? I unfortunately can’t much more without spoiling the film, though part of me is cynical as to whether the main spoiler in the film is in a fact a spoiler: as the characters say “everybody knows.”

This film did not get the reviews Farhadi is used to, and I wonder if the “thriller” label has anything to do with that. I can certainly see why critics who went into the film anticipating a “thriller” would be disappointed, and even if they weren’t given that instruction, I can see how the film itself teases out that expectation. Everybody Knows is a somewhat lengthy-oeuvre where relatively little happens, and because of that I had to look up a synopsis of it after the fact to make sure I didn’t miss anything: I hadn’t it. But while the length may still be an issue, I think Everybody Knows can be better appreciated as a film if it’s understood as being about moral questions and not about its criminal and familial mysteries. Maybe in the eyes of some critics Everybody Knows is a thriller, but the truth is we sometimes need to stop seeking thrills and shocks, and instead ask ourselves how we can most empathetically respond to them when they come to be.

Mother! (2017)

Written and directed by: Darren Aronofsky

There are indie films that challenge you to take pleasure in raw sound effects, awkward human interactions and mundanely beautiful settings. There are big budget action films replete with explosions and chaos. Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is an overwhelming blend of both. The film has earned praise and scorn alike, yet if viewed in a vacuum one can appreciate it as a work that unites audiences: its subtlety and melodrama are so smoothly connected that viewers who come to see one level of intensity can leave having appreciated another.

 

Mother! admittedly did not win me over right away. The film makes use of handheld cameras, and “Mother” (Jennifer Lawrence)’s constant walks up spiral staircases can be dizzying. The initial appearance of Mother’s husband, “Him” (Javier Bardem) is also off-putting. The character seems under-acted: he is calm compared to the regularly anxious Mother, and normal compared to the quirky houseguests they soon come to deal with. Him does not come across as a mild-mannered person, but as someone out-of-step with the realism of the piece: like a rookie-actor reading lines. Bardem, of course, is no rookie. Without giving away too much, it should be said that his disconcerting performance is in fact praiseworthy, for his character indeed has a different relationship to realism than that of his fellow characters.

 

The indie-realist side of Mother! is essential to its disjointed, narrative structure. The film is slow to develop a clear plot trajectory. I ts story develops as, slowly at first, various strangers show up and decide to reside at Mother and Him’s house. The first guest (Ed Harris) is a somewhat peculiar, dying man. He is later joined by his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), who’s eccentricness is far more obnoxious and threatening than Harris’. Were the film to end after the seemingly final confrontation between Mother, Him and this couple, it would be a passable, stand alone work. Pfeiffer is a compelling antagonist, and her lack-of-boundaries in contrast to Mother’s decency foreshadows the drama that follows.

 

It is after Pfeiffer’s departure, however, that the film becomes truly compelling. Mother!’s story proceeds to explore issues from celebrity, to artistry, to late capitalism and borders, becoming more and more disturbing as it proceeds. While it is certainly not pleasant to watch, the film’s strength is that it never reaches a point where it runs out of ideas: there is always a new twist, always a new tragedy. Kristen Wiig, for example, is introduced as a striking recurring character as the film nears its conclusion, illustrating the film’s tireless plotline.

 

Mother!’s grandiosity has led some critics to write it off as pretentious and self-centred, with some claiming that it is Aronofsky’s arrogant attempt to portray the challenge of a writer (Bardem) working with his muse (Lawrence). This critique misses the obvious fact, that Mother! is, for the most part, Mother’s story, not Him’s. While Bardem’s character ultimately has power over Lawrence’s, it is of a god-like nature: he exists on a different level, and his morality operates on a different time scale. Him’s divine status is what shapes Bardem’s portrayal of him as a distant figure: sure he is powerful, but his power is precisely what means the story is not his, but that of his wife.

 

Mother! is an imaginative work, but is effective because it appeals to audiences on a baser level. I left the cinema mouth agape: how did it have the audacity to go in that direction, I asked myself? If gore and handheld cameras do not put you off, worry not about the pretentiousness and give Mother! a try.