Cool and smart, but not in a good way

Rating: 6/10 (31 October 2008)

Cool and smart, but not in a good way
The setting, or range of settings, in No Country for Old Men--the chilly, dry, silent southwestern desert--is wonderfully chosen and perfectly photographed. I'd always wanted to see it used in a movie, and pictured in just this way. I'd found it in fiction occasionally, e.g. in the Lew Archer novels, but not on film, that I can remember. And the story of this movie suits it: a story about a crook, a semi-crook, and a lawman driving across the miles of highways and desertscapes in pursuit of one another. I also can't remember another movie that points up the amount of long and tedious driving it takes to follow somebody.
But with all that, the feeling of the place is missed. The vast spaces are shown, but not how they strike the eye if you're staring across them; the light is caught exactly, but not how it hits the eye if you're using it to see by. The soul-replenishing, or soul-eroding, atmosphere--the chill, the dryness you feel in your throat, the lonely silences--never comes across on film. It's a place where you can hear your own breath, hear the motor of a distant car, see its headlights on the horizon, and wonder uneasily what it's doing out on the road at that time of night; a figure distantly silhouetted against that background takes on a crisp-edged ominousness. This movie pictures the figures, the edges, and the background, but doesn't convey the threat: not even when a murderer is looming up behind an unsuspecting victim.
Why not?
I think, for one reason, because the people in this movie, and the tools of harm they carry with them, have a way of arranging themselves into formal, academic compositions. The men move, rather than being moved; deliberately and without urgency, and with no deep-felt needs driving them: even a greedy man willing to be shot for some hidden money, even a man who has been shot and is begging for water. The movie is more conscious of its own wishes than those of its characters.
Indeed, I'd say self-consciousness is its most distinguishing quality. A writer on writing once advised that if a sentence seems unusually good to the author, he should remove it, because it's sure to be too clever and to call undue attention to itself. The same is true of movie-making. The characters in this movie are so busy moving into the right configuration for the shots that they never have a chance to stretch their legs; the movie is so busy being like a movie that it never has a chance to be born. Like several other recent Best Picture winners and nominees, it's an exercise to please the filmmakers more than a performance to entertain an audience.
I had trouble following it. I kept losing the thread, was never sure how the characters found the people they were looking for. Either that was not explained, or it was simply not interesting enough: not only because the characters' actions had no driving force behind them (in addition to being carried out at one-third the speed that might have held the attention) but also because the characters themselves--the main ones, at least--were blanks.
In this respect the movie reminded me of Wim Wenders's road pictures, where the subsidiary characters (usually women) whom the heroes meet and discard along the way are invariably more lively than the heroes themselves. The people in this movie who piqued my interest were the nobodies, such as the owner of the gas station and the manager of the trailer park. I'd rather have stayed with them, and watched them puttering around in their offices doing nothing in particular, than returned to the main action, because those people had lives, they were about something--something trivial, perhaps, but something. The men at the center of the movie seemed to be about nothing, even when killing or keeping from being killed. To me they were ciphers.
So the movie reminded me of something else as well: the presidential contest that followed shortly after, if it wasn't going on at the time. Here was contest between two men both of whose identities were mysterious; I had some idea of where they'd come from, but no idea where they were going: just like the men in this movie. And most observers didn't seem concerned to ask; seemed content to leave them to it and continue to observe, dispassionately and at a distance: just like the movie makers. So maybe they're on to a real trend in our society, after all.
The one movie of theirs I've liked was O Brother Where Art Thou? In that I thought I saw a genuine affection for the period, the place, and, above all, the music being depicted. I haven't seen all their other work, but what I've seen has put me off. It has all seemed too cool and too smart, as though always on the verge of a smirk. That's an attitude I don't take to, on screen any more than in life.