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November 15-21, 2007
buzz@boulderweekly.com
 The Coen brothers are looking at another Oscar
by Michael Phillips
Suicide has never been so funny
by Jessica Reaves
The Coen brothers are looking at another Oscar
by Michael Phillips
As pure craftsmanship, No Country for Old Men is as good as we’ve ever gotten from Joel and Ethan Coen. Only Fargo is more satisfying (it’s also a comedy, which this one isn’t), certainly among the brothers’ pictures driven by the evil that men do and all that can go wrong under the precepts of Murphy’s law.
It took me two viewings of the film, set in the early 1980s along the West Texas/Mexico border, to appreciate it fully for what it is, a viciously effective exercise in suspense, and worry less about what it isn’t (important, “meaningful,” a work of moral gravity). It helps to see No Country for Old Men with the right crowd. At its Cannes film festival premiere last May, audiences were so eager to embrace every little irony and black-hearted flourish, it turned into a yukfest. To be sure, the Coens love a good sick laugh, and they love their murderous sociopaths. But it has been a long time, and many films, since they worked out the relationship between the two so well.
Just how murderous is this tale’s particular sociopath, cooked up by novelist Cormac McCarthy? He kills using a slaughterhouse stun gun, also known as a captive bolt pistol. It’s the most unwieldy instrument of death one can imagine. Javier Bardem, who memorably inhabits Chigurh, makes the killing device an extension of his own tetched psyche. No less strange is the character’s Dutch boy haircut, weighing down on its owner like a bad joke.
We’re back in the geographical vicinity of Blood Simple, the 1985 Texas noir that put the Coens on the map. Adapting McCarthy’s 2005 novel, the script begins with the Tommy Lee Jones character, our lifeline in a sea of troubles, speaking in voice-over about his job as county sheriff, the changing times, the gathering storm clouds.
The title comes from a line in the Yeats poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” and the story pits a good man, the sheriff, against a very bad one, Chigurh. He is the hired gun bent on retrieving $2.4 million in drug money. The third point in the triangle is Llewelyn Moss, a largely silent but crucial character played by Josh Brolin, who at this point in his career has gotten interesting enough to do very little on screen and make it stick.
Moss is a working-class Vietnam veteran living in a trailer park with his wife (Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald, sharp as a tack and spot-on with the West Texas dialect). Out antelope hunting one day, Moss spies the aftermath of a drug deal gone haywire, evidenced by the corpses and the pickup full of drugs and the suitcase with the money.
The rest of the story is a chase film and a serial killer movie in one. Director Joel Coen (Ethan generally handles the writing chores) makes the most of such set pieces as Moss being pursued by an attack dog across a river leading to a confrontation on the other side.
It’s a marvel of a suspense sequence.
If there’s a small hole in the middle of No Country for Old Men, it’s where the cumulative cost of all the exotic slaughter of drug runners and innocent bystanders comes into play. The Coens may well be interested in the dramatic consequences of the violence. One gets the feeling, though, that they’re more interested in the precise mechanics and capabilities of the stun gun. There are some missteps, a few too many strokes of caricature. A key late scene between Jones and Barry Corbin doesn’t work, partly because the audience isn’t sure who Corbin’s character is. But on its own terms the script is a model of selectivity. We learn less about the sheriff’s life, especially his bruising experience in World War II, than the novel taught us, for instance, yet the movie is leaner as a result. The Coens also drop a subplot involving scenes between Moss and a teenage hitchhiker — again, for the better.
Is the movie saying anything about anything? In the end, I’m with Walter Kirn, who in his review of McCarthy’s book for The New York Times called it “sinister high hokum.” But nothing precludes a beautifully made genre exercise from being made out of such stuff.
–MCT
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 Suicide has never been so funny
by Jessica Reaves
If only the filmmakers behind Wristcutters: A Love Story had better timed the release of this oddball, quirky movie, they might have had a Valentine’s Day blockbuster on their hands. OK, maybe not a blockbuster, but likely a perennial cult favorite.
As you might expect from the title and shoestring production values, Wristcutters is quite a bit darker than most mainstream romantic comedies. As you might not expect, it’s also quite a bit more inventive and far wittier than most mainstream romantic comedies.
The film opens on Zia (Patrick Fugit, still working the floppy hair he pioneered seven years ago in Almost Famous), heartbroken and suicidal after being dumped by his girlfriend, Desiree (Leslie Bibb). He wakes up, takes stock and does what most of us would do in his place: He puts Tom Waits on the stereo and starts cleaning his apartment. Obsessive scrubbing complete, he heads for the bathroom, where things take a distinctly grim turn.
For a moment, that is, until Fugit’s voice-over — snarkily eloquent from beyond the grave — reminds us that we’re in the presence of dark comedy, not submerged in tragedy. And so we’re off on Zia’s afterlife adventures, in which he befriends failed musician Eugene (Shea Whigham), and Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), a woman convinced she’s the victim of a clerical error. The trio take to the road and wind up in the company of Kneller (Tom Waits himself), an oddball who’s running a sort of post-suicidal summer camp.
First-time feature director Goran Dukic’s vision of the suicidal hereafter is grim indeed, but hardly otherworldly. In fact, it looks very much like Central California — a sun-flattened, bleached-out landscape. And the locals aren’t having much fun either: Smiling is impossible, and every corner bar blasts Joy Division on a merciless loop.
Wristcutters succeeds because it refuses to take itself all that seriously. Sure, it’s a movie about death, but this is mortality in the vein of Woody Allen’s Love and Death, i.e., not particularly sinister and accompanied by silly music. And the script is quite funny. Every jab is delivered with a wink; based on a short story by Israeli literary star Etgar Keret, it is at once wistful and sardonic. (“What better punishment for suicide?” the newly deceased Zia muses. “Everything’s the same as in life — just a little bit worse.”)
Fugit, always a pleasure to watch, is in full command of this movie despite some scene-stealing work by Waits and Wigham.
Meanwhile, Will Arnett makes a brief and utterly deadpan appearance as a messianic cult leader with an inappropriate flair for the dramatic.
In the course of their wanderings, Zia and his friends discover that happiness isn’t so much contingent upon being alive but rather on being in good company. You can be dead, in other words, and have a more fulfilling social life than when you were breathing. Which is good news for those of us who haven’t quite found our milieu this time around.
–MCT
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