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Hair + Can = Movie Magic
Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
April 30, 2007 - 35mm/AMC Lincoln Square
Josh Brolin plays Llewlyn Moss. One day, on a rather unsuccessful hunt in the pristine wild of West Texas, Llewlyn happens upon the aftermath of a botched heroin deal. Bloodied, rotting bodies of both men and dogs have been shot full of holes. It’s a mess, but it is beautiful. The site is brimming with a history of the not too distant past. The loud gunfight lives on only in this painting, a still sculpture of bloodshed. Llewlyn methodically observes the carnage as though wandering through a museum or diorama. Every bit of motion on the hush landscape is startling. Following a trail of blood, which may as well have been gingerbread, he finds the body of a man who almost got away, and with him, a satchel full of cash. How much cash? Who cares. A lot. The concern is not how much cash is in the satchel, but whom the money now belongs to. Finders keepers. Llewlyn Moss takes the money. There’s no turning back, and the wonderful thing about No Country for Old Men is, Llewlyn Moss doesn’t turn back. He takes things as the come. It’s not fate. It’s more complicated than fate. It’s survival.
For every hero (Llewlyn Moss), there’s an equally capable villain (Anton Chigurh). Chigurh is a movie baddie for the history books. Javier Bardem embodies his charms, looks and creative murderous zeal with expert precision. He wields a can of super-compressed air (the sort used on the kill-floor of the slaughterhouse) and turns it on humanity. It is a quiet way to take a life, and the nonchalance with which Chigurh executes his victims is matched by how death and violence is portrayed in the movie. There is a startling, magnificent degree of matter-of-factness to the entire thing. There is little to no screaming in No Country for Old Men and practically no music in aid of tension or action. The violence is allowed to exist. Death is enough. Death, as a matter-of-fact, is serious. It speaks for itself, though it would be a mistake to call this “hands-off” moviemaking, as the deliberately paced action sequences are gasp-worthy because of the stillness and silence contained within the expertly designed landscape, both physical and emotional.
The carnage and straight-laced in-the-moment chaos of the Llewlyn/Chigurh young man’s hunt is juxtaposed with Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s tempered reflections on life’s past. No Country for Old Men takes place in 1980, but more importantly it is set in the present tense. The present is a difficult place for Ed Tom to be. Played by Tommy Lee Jones, Ed Tom is an old man, and suffice it to say, this is no country for him. Whilst providing the greatest amount of comic relief in his dealings with the young deputy (chameleon Garret Dillahunt), Ed Tom also carries the brunt of the burden all of life and death on his sad shoulders. His hefty words bookend this tale nearly devoid of foreshadowing, catharsis and climax.
No Country for Old Men is a marvelous movie, steadily surprising and thrilling both emotionally and intellectually, with performances, wit, set pieces and visuals that are a glory to behold. Every location is lived in. Every hotel room needs a dusting. Every home seemingly decorated by its occupants. The astounding and ravishing Scottish actress, Kelly Macdonald, plays Llewlyn’s wife and not for a moment can you consider her not a West Texas native. Writer/Directors Joel and Ethan Coen have successfully captured the spirit of the present, forever moment (as provided by Cormac McCarthy) in both personality and texture, fashioning an eternal motion picture classic.
Moviemakers and storytellers have been deconstructing the mythos of the “Old West” for generations. There is timelessness and urgency in this exploration, worthy not only of the brain, but also of the soul and to the very essence of being natural people of this country and of this earth.
"Buster, if they click the title above our picture, they can watch the entire movie."
"Don't make me laugh, Beckett."
Jeff Larson, NEW YORK CITYFebruary 5th, 2007 - World Wide Web
In Samuel Beckett’s Endgame -- Cormac McCarthy fans take note: this is the precursor to The Road -- a character says to the others, “Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” And what a delightfully accurate summary of Beckett’s works it is. Samuel Beckett: the bromide solipsist, the shit satirist, the despair humorist, the maximum minimalist. The ultimate modernist.
Beckett’s works approach life as a purgatorio, as a tedious affair of rotting flesh, locked limbs, and failing bodily functions punctuated by flatulence and discomfort. For Beckett, death merely is an inconvenience, a release to undergo at the end of life, and while watching it draw near, his characters indulge in complex algorithms to stave off boredom with the hope that this sweet release will seem to arrive that much sooner. Yet, Beckett’s talent for conveying comedy darkly removes us from the tedium of their realities. In his novel Malloy, the titular character, who is starving and suffering from an increased inability to use his legs, focuses on sixteen “sucking stones” which he found at the seashore -- this will be long, but here we go:
I distributed them equally among my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone form the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it.
…
But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four.
And repeat ad infinitum: Malloy will, of course, go on. The world, for Beckett, contains only these most simple and devastating minutiae of humanity, completely unlike the overwhelmingly beautiful and complex stream of consciousness found in Joyce or Faulkner. This excerpt occurs 40 pages into an 80-page single paragraph which describes Malloy’s increasing inability to survive and his reluctance to do so, and by the end of his journey, he is reduced to slowly crawling forward at less than 14 yards a day. But even in the most tedious of passages, a hint of darkly tainted hilarity bleeds through the futility and insignificance of Malloy’s persistence. Beckett’s novels exclude such pedestrian foofaraws as plot, arc, and often, traditional treatments of character: in Beckett, the characters are always less than human. Whether they are suffering from failing limbs, going blind, or slowly suffocating, these figures often seem to embody mere faint shadows or whispers of the wind. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely these shortcomings that produce characters who so profoundly and uniquely display existence, and synchronously, all its failings. This singular combinational talent largely accounts for Beckett’s reputation as an extreme bore – Waiting for Godot was once summed up as a play where, “Nothing happens. Twice.” – and, in contrast, a practically knighted champion of literary experimentation.
Beckett, an Irishman and secretary to James Joyce, spent most of his life in France. His sole journey to the States was to enlist Buster Keaton to star in a short film he had written. (Charlie Chaplin, who echoes throughout Beckett’s works – it seems everyone wears a bowler, was his first choice.) In what would be Keaton’s last silent movie, Film opens with an overused, undergraduate shot of Buster Keaton’s eye opening and closing, and unfortunately, the duration of Film feels decidedly French (in the stereotypical sense e.g. self-referential, pandering etc.). However, since his novels and plays were often first published in French before English, his influence on French film – including its preoccupations, and hang-ups -- is deep: Godard reportedly even wanted to film an adaptation of Waiting for Godot, but Beckett balked. Later, we see Buster, 60 years old, nimbly running -- over piles of bricks and construction debris -- alongside a lower eastside New York wall, and nearly tackling a couple standing in his path. This disgusted couple then notices the camera – or, perhaps, Keaton’s pursuer -- and is shocked and dismayed. References of this sort are on par for Beckett, yet often we are to treat them as simple, yet devastatingly dire, jokes: in Endgame, a character, while searching for a living soul outside of his shack after an apocalypse, exclaims, upon turning towards the audience, “I see…. a multitude….in transports …. of joy. […] Well? Don’t we laugh?”
After a scene in which an elderly lady carrying flowers looks at the camera and dies, Keaton rushes into a bare room which contains a cat, a parakeet, a fish, and a dog – plus a mirror, a window, a photo of a statue, and a rocking chair. Over the course of the rest of Film, Keaton will cover up – with the multiple coats that he is wearing – destroy, or remove from the room each of these objects. All the while the camera floats, lazily behind his back and only at the very end do we see Keaton’s face. His goal, we soon realize, is to cease being perceived, for, here, being perceived is to exist. “What a folly! What a boring metaphor for film!” I hear you say. But, there is magic here, if only for the briefest of moments. Keaton is in his element: he has a profoundly difficult time removing the cat and dog -- whenever he throws one out of the room, the other runs back in – and when his coat falls to the floor, he dives to the ground a little too forcefully. And all we can do is laugh, for what a foolish endeavor it is to try to cease to exist and to try this hard. Unlike in Keaton’s other silent films, in this desolate place there is no one left to save, no goal to accomplish. Of course, his project fails, the camera can see him, we can see him, and it turns out he can see himself (in a twist, finally, Keaton observes his pursuer, who is not the camera, but himself).
Film is a spectacular failure, mostly because of its incessant pandering to the theory crowd; it ends with the shot of the eye from the opening sequence, for Christ’s sake. Yet, the dog and cat episode, the sickness-inducing camera movements, and Keaton’s efforts not to be seen are deliciously fun. We celebrate his refusal to live in the present tense, to take place in the here and now, because of his dedication to the cause. And because such blind dedication strikes the rest of us as foolish, the results, through Keaton’s anarchic grace, tremble a tinge of delight and sympathy deep within us. In short, these are complicated and contradictory themes being expressed here, both Keaton’s determined perseverance and his utter failure to accomplish any sort of sane outcome display an exhausting plea for human reality, however fantastic its manifestation may be.
Within this portrayal, Keaton’s determination not to exist contains a distinct odor of heroism – in the classic, and fantastic, sense. This sort of Heroism-through-dedication has its roots everywhere from Odysseus to Hamlet to John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. All are spectacular failures: Odysseus fails to return to his wrecked home for 19 years while cavorting with a sea nymph, Hamlet pines for the majority of the play only to kill his family and friends, and Ethan Edwards spends 5 years searching for his nemesis only to have the film’s fool find him. And so it is with Keaton, but no one is around to help this hapless hero. His doomed project is merely his own.
(For a more modern, and more successful, take on the themes expressed in Film, check out Matt Larson, directed and shot by the Shuffle’s own Kalen Egan. The similarity between them both is coincidental: we had no knowledge of Film when we made Matt Larson. For all of you out there who insist that the coincidence is too significant, and that we must have been aping, and conversing with, Film: why don’t you just take your salt-and-pepper beards and sweater vests and shove off?)
Hair + Can = Movie Magic
