Cormac McCarthy can stuff it

I have never read a Cormac McCarthy novel.

But from the films I've seen of his work, I'm tired of hearing people speak about him in such hushed and reverent tones.

He could be the most talented wordsmith to string phrases together since Mark Twain, but his stories leave me cold, and not in a way that nourishes me.

The first McCarthy adaptation I saw was the disastrous 2000 film All the Pretty Horses, starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton. I didn't know who McCarthy was at the time, though I do remember hearing his name discussed -- to me he was just some novelist I had never heard of. Even if I had been inclined to blame McCarthy for the failure of the movie, I probably wouldn't have. All the talk was that the version Thornton wanted to make was entirely butchered by the studio, leaving the final movie without crucial passages that would have contextualized key parts of the narrative. I just wrote it off as one of those movies that never stood a chance.

The first movie I was conscious of being an adaptation of his work was the 2007 best picture winner, No Country for Old Men. I was with the movie big time for its first half, when it was following the beats of a good Coen crime thriller, with just enough narrative eccentricity thrown in to make it interesting. But then the Coens began engaging in an intentional campaign to frustrate us, leaving key confrontations and plot developments to occur off-screen, and petering out into an unsatisfying non-ending. (Don't worry if you disagree; you would obviously not be alone.) When I learned that this was very faithful to the way things go down in McCarthy's novel, I began to grow skeptical of the man.

Next up was The Road in 2009, which remains my favorite movie based on McCarthy's work. But I have to qualify that pretty significantly. First, just as an aside, I'll say that I believe I confused this novel with another one, since I got it into my head that it took place just after the Civil War, not in an apocalyptic future like the movie. That of course turned out to be wrong. As this was director John Hillcoat's follow-up to The Proposition, which I liked very much, and as post-apocalypse movies have always interested me (and were not quite as plentiful six years ago), I was super excited to see The Road. The only way to describe my reaction to the movie, then, was disappointment. I recognize it as a good movie, but it was bad bleak (like The Rover) rather than good bleak (like Children of Men). The Rover would not have been an available reference to me at the time, but it is now.

Then last night I saw The Counselor. The Counselor is not based on a McCarthy novel. Instead, it's a McCarthy original screenplay. What that does that's particularly instructive is it prevents us from blaming any intermediary for mucking up McCarthy's vision. Yeah, Ridley Scott had some say in why The Counselor was so bad, but those are McCarthy's words, unmolested and unfettered. Indeed, The Counselor is a base, disquieting affair, but I hesitate to use those words to describe it, as they make it sound more interesting than it actually is. I love being disquieted by a movie, but as with bleakness (which is also on plentiful display here), there are good and bad ways of being disquieted. McCarthy's way involves exclusively unlikable characters passively navigating a simple plot that's difficult to follow (how's that for a contradiction) because it's so clumsily executed and because the dialogue is overwritten to the point of preventing you from following it. What's more, the things that were supposed to be shocking about this movie ended up boring me. (And were, in fact, the reasons I watched it in the first place, despite the negative reviews.) The story is so muddled, in fact, that I had to consult the plot synopsis on wikipedia twice while the movie was still running, just to give myself the hope of possibly getting something out of the parts I had not yet seen. No such luck.

With these four McCarthy cinematic works as my evidence, I have decided the man is a one-trick pony. His every work is devoted to the idea that people are evil to their core, and any exception to this is an aberration, not a cause for hope. Oh, there may be different degrees of evil. Some people may just make choices that are contradictory to their nature because they sense an opportunity to profit. Others are naturally venal, but not openly harmful to people. And then there are just the anarchists, who seem to enact the most extreme forms of violence against others for the pure pleasure of it, and show nary an ounce of mercy. They comprise a disturbingly large percentage of McCarthy characters.

But everyone is compromised in some way or another, and there's no chance they are going to come to good ends. I suppose there's a certain moral rectitude to the idea that bad people come to bad ends, but then there are all those bad people in McCarthy's films who never get punished for what they've done, or whose punishment comes in truly unrecognizable forms. Where's the optimism?

Maybe I like The Road the best because it does end with just a hint of hope for the future. If I recall correctly (SPOILER ALERT), the boy's father dies, but he takes up with new guardians who seem to give him the distant hope of a new and enduring family unit. Of course, some of that is speculation, and The Road isn't so rosy as to guarantee us a positive outlook for the character. But it does not end on the purely bleak note of his other films. Maybe it's just that if you are going to put the world through an apocalypse, you have already amply demonstrated your pessimism, and are obliged to give us some possible ray of sunshine at the end.

Conversely, The Counselor is probably his bleakest. But it comes by that distinction cheaply, as it doesn't develop any of its characters enough for us to appreciate what's happening to them or why it's happening. These characters are basically cyphers, which leaves their ultimate position in McCarthy's moral universe totally arbitrary.

The only thing worse than the point McCarthy is repeatedly trying to make is having no point at all.

What makes a satisfying story?

This is the fifth in my Second Chances series, which runs on Tuesdays. For other entries, please see the corresponding label on the right.

I can tell you the exact moment when No Country for Old Men switches from a satisfying story to an unsatisfying story.

It's when the recently introduced character played by Woody Harrelson is snooping around the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, near where the shootout occurred between Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Harrelson's character -- I'm not even going to name him, which is my comment on his narrative usefulness -- happens to walk out on the bridge leading up to the border, and happens to look down into the same grassy area where Moss tossed the case of money a night or two before. He immediately recognizes it for what it is, notes its location, and moves away, in order not to attract additional attention. Five minutes of screen time later, he's dead, and the money never makes an appearance in the movie again, as far as I could tell from my second viewing.

Huh?

This was my first indication that No Country was going south for me, and they just kept on piling up after that. I've always been a big believer in the idea that your script isn't tight enough unless everything happens for a reason. Harrelson's character is the perfect example of something that happens for no reason. He has one scene where he's hired to find Moss. He has another scene where he finds Moss and talks to him in his hospital bed. He has the scene described above, where he finds the money. And then he has the scene where he's held at gunpoint by Chigurh and ultimately executed.

Even after two viewings, I still can't figure out why his character even needed to be in the movie. He doesn't change the stakes for any character. He doesn't change the trajectory of the plot. He really only exists for a frustrating reason, which is to indicate that good detective work isn't even necessary to find what you're looking for -- sometimes you just stumble across it by dumb luck. Oh, and to provide yet more proof that Chigurh is a cold, heartless bastard, of which we already have ample evidence.

(Note: After finishing this piece I realized that without Harrelson's character, Chigurh and Moss would never get the chance to talk, because Moss calls the room where Harrelson's character is staying, and Chigurh picks up. In this conversation, Chigurh threatens Moss' wife, which has implications later on. However, I'm not sure if having Harrelson's character in the movie was the only way to accomplish these things.)

As you know, the story continues in this vein from there. Moss is killed off screen. Moss' mother-in-law is killed off screen. Moss' wife is killed off screen* (more on that later). Chigurh gets all effed up in a car accident that's so random and sudden that it's sort of like the opposite of a deus ex machina -- it's bad luck descended magically from the gods. And then the movie ends on Tommy Lee Jones talking about his foreboding dream.

Huh?

No Country for Old Men was never a thumbs down for me -- it was always a thumbs up with an asterisk. That asterisk was because the movie challenged our very idea of what makes a satisfying script. As does the Cormac McCarthy story on which it's based, No Country for Old Men leaves us feeling empty and unsatisfied if we are expecting clean, logical resolutions. The movie's motto, condensed to its most basic form, seems to be "Shit happens." And I don't find that to be a very good motto for a movie.

But is that my problem, or Joel and Ethan Coen's? Or McCarthy's? I'd like to think of myself as someone plenty capable of appreciating a non-traditional narrative. And I think there are numerous examples where I embrace such a narrative with open arms. Don't confuse this with me saying that there are certain people in each movie I think should live, and certain people I think should die, or else I won't be satisfied. That's not it either. I just need the explanations for their deaths to emerge logically from the story, and to be dramatized in some way.

What my second viewing of No Country gave me was a little more of an appreciation of what the Coens were trying to do. What I once thought was just messing around with us -- a theory that I considered confirmed when I witnessed the disdainful way they accepted their Oscars -- was, I'm pretty sure, an intentional artistic choice, not just anarchy.

Let's take Moss' death. It's what most people who don't love the film, including me, describe as its single most frustrating moment. Here you have the movie's protagonist, who you've been following almost from the start, through numerous smart decisions, some not-so-smart ones, and a handful of near misses. Then all the sudden he's just lying there, dead, in a doorway. And it wasn't even Chigurh who killed him. It was a truck of Mexican drug runners who were tipped off to Moss' location by his cranky and oblivious mother-in-law.

I now understand that this is the Coens trying to put us in the shoes of the film's real protagonist: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Just as Bell has been a few steps behind with everything else in the plot -- an investigatory deficit that has been good for his health -- he's a few steps behind catching up to Moss. We don't see the shootout that killed Moss because he didn't see it. And in fact, when you come right down to it, we don't see that shootout because it might disappoint us even more than not seeing it. Sometimes in life, the "hero" -- or in this case, the guy who happened across a bag of money, didn't report it, and decided not to give a dying man water in time to help him -- doesn't go down in a heroic gun battle, with the soundtrack swelling to emotionally manipulate us. He just gets gunned down in the doorway of a seedy motel.

The question I'm asking myself now is this: Understanding what the Coens were doing with the benefit of time and distance, do I "forgive" them? Do they even need to be forgiven?

At the time I saw it, I was cursing the film's name on the drive home. Needless to say, I was expecting the resolutions of a film like their masterwork, Fargo, in which some people who didn't deserve to die ended up dying, but the film had a kind of bleak neatness to its resolution. When No Country didn't give me that, I considered it an act of sadism and spite by the writer-directors.

Now I'm not so sure. I still think some different choices in the film's last 30-45 minutes would have made it a stronger film. (Because, I think we can all agree, the first half of the film is near perfection.) But I no longer feel like they made mistakes, per se -- I just feel like their choices were not necessarily the ones I would have made. And even after the second viewing, I still would have done away with Woody Harrelson's character.

I said I'd get back to the death of Moss' wife, played by Kelly MacDonald. On this viewing, I've decided that I'm not 100% sure that Chigurh kills her. We see him leave her house, and we assume, based on the morality he's displayed to this point, that he does in fact kill her in cold blood. But now I'm not so sure. I kind of like that the Coens don't tell you for certain. You don't hear a telltale gunshot, and you don't hear anything about her again. She could have lived. Chigurh could have made some kind of 11th hour appeal to his own remaining shreds of humanity. I like films where certain aspects are left unresolved, for you the viewer to determine what happened.

This is already a long piece, but I can't leave behind my discussion of No Country without sharing a different observation I had during my second viewing.

When I wrote my piece ranking the Coens' movies (check it out here), a regular reader of mine commented regarding No Country: "I just felt like I had seen it all before." At the time I sort of embraced the comment, because it was a snide remark about a film that had bothered me (but bothers me less now). But I guess I didn't completely understand it, because a lack of originality was never a complaint I had about No Country. I thought it was the perfect blend of originality and homage to their own previous work. (Can you make an homage to yourself?)

Upon second viewing, I realized just how much No Country alludes to their own work -- and not even the work you'd think it would. Numerous critics observed that No Country reminded them of the Coens' first film, Blood Simple. And while that's true on a surface level, it actually has a lot more in common with ... Raising Arizona, my favorite Coen movie.

Don't believe me? I started taking notes, so check it out:

1) Anton Chigurh is basically another version of Leonard Smalls, the Harley-riding, cigar-chomping, heavily bearded, highly antisocial bounty hunter from Raising Arizona, played inimitably by Randall "Tex" Cobb. Both characters are highly lethal and operate by their own rules -- though because Arizona is a comedy, we don't see Smalls actually kill anyone. Both have an uneasy relationship with the person who hired them, proceeding to either act on their own agenda, or to appear ready to do so. But what tells me that the Coens intended the comparison is that each fires at innocent creatures by the side of the road while cruising by in their vehicle (a car for Chigurh, the aforementioned Harley for Smalls). This is where Smalls does Chigurh one better -- he blows up a rabbit with a grenade and sharp-shoots a lizard out of existence, whereas Chigurh just shoots at (but does not hit) a crow.

2) When visiting the abandoned Moss residence, Sheriff Bell squats down to investigate the hole that was left in the wall when Chigurh blasted the front door lock out of its casing. This is a visual echo of when Leonard Smalls squats down in the abandoned McDonough household to read the word "FART" written on the wall in crayon.

3) Just as Moss is undone by the tracking device in the bag of money, which leads Chigurh to him, so were Gale (John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe) undone by the blue paint bomb that blows up in the bag of money in Raising Arizona (and sends their car careening out of control).

4) One of the funniest throwaway moments in Raising Arizona is when Gale and Evelle are robbing a convenience store and ask the aged clerk if he has any balloons that make funny shapes ("Not unless round's funny.") There are several moments in No Country that echo this, notably the ominous coin flip scene with the aged gas station owner ("Friend-o"), the scene in which Moss comes to buy clothes in a hospital gown and asks the clerk if he often gets people coming in in his state ("No sir, it's unusual," is the response), and the scene in which Moss requests a second room from the perplexed motel owner ("That room's got two double beds!").

And then a couple similarities to other films:

1) Sheriff Bell and his slowish partner (Garret Dillahunt) have basically the same dynamic as Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and her slowish partner in Fargo.

2) In another Fargo similarity, the Coens pan past the dead hotel clerk that Chigurh killed before confronting Moss the same way they pan past the dead parking lot clerk that Steve Buscemi's character shoots in Fargo.

3) In numerous Coen films, the hotel room is a major point of reckoning in the criminal world (Blood Simple, Fargo) and even in the non-criminal world (Barton Fink). It's clear the Coens see hotels/motels as kind of a waystation where major life events occur. Moss stays in four different hotel/motel rooms here, the last of which is where he's killed.

Okay, I've taken up enough of your time.

Second Chance Verdict, No Country for Old Men: My thumb is still up, and the asterisk is still there, but the asterisk is much smaller. This film has a ton of excellent stylistic details, bold decisions, and ominous moods. But I still would have given best picture to There Will Be Blood that year.