There Will Be Old Men

Those of you who have the good fortune to know Michelle well might be wondering why she was still awake at 10:30 last night, let alone letting a computer screen overstimulate her eyeballs so proximal to bedtime.

The answer, more or less, is that I wasn't home to make her go to bed, and that upstairs bedroom is cold enough even when she has me to warm her up. In general she's the one who wants to go to bed earlier, but when I'm not there she tends to procrastinate.

So where was I? Ah, that's what I was coming to. This month I've been seized with the irrational urge to see a few of the Oscar contenders before next week's ceremony. So the previous Saturday it was out to see No Country For Old Men and then last night was There Will Be Blood. And now you get to hear what I thought because I never miss a chance to comment on a movie, especially if I see it while it's still at all relevant.

First of all, There Will Be Blood was a little short of what I was hoping for. Daniel Day Lewis is brilliant, Oscar-worthy as he always is. The trailer gave me the impression that this film might be contrasting a character who "serves money" against a character who "serves God" à la Matthew 6:24. In fact, it doesn't quite aspire to that. The preacher (played exquisitely by Paul Dano), isn't exactly above reproach as an example of a servant of God, and the oil man isn't quite all about money either. The movie proceeds slowly through swaths of their lives, and we see layers being peeled off of their complex identities until the final scene of the movie lays them both utterly bare. The whole film is nicely done and very captivating, but I honestly don't think anything here is going to stick with you for long.

Then there's No Country For Old Men. This is a piece of work. It's either brilliant or stupid. It's either a tremendous deconstruction of Hollywood's entire notion of good guys and bad guys, or it's a sad and misguided attempt to be pointlessly inscrutable.

Of course you know what I'm going to say. The more I think through this movie, the more I love it. It's so original and inventive, it makes movies that are amazingly original look formulaic. It makes Adaptation look like Adventures In Babysitting. It makes American Beauty look like American Pie. It makes, uh, O Brother Where Art Thou look like The Brothers Grimm.

Okay, I'm done.

No, far from done. No Country For Old Men is so full of delicious dialog. Slow, measured speeches about man's eternal struggle with something and the painful emptiness of something else and the inevitable conflict of two other things. Haunting soliloquies and stabbing one-liners delivered by masterful performers at their absolute best: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin, primarily, and enjoyable appearances by Woody Harrelson and Kathy McDonald. Oh, and Stephen Root. He's always fun.

So much great dialog, you have a wide variety of choices of what you'd like this film to be about. Me, I'm coming around to thinking it's about principles, about the kind of lives people choose to lead, the kind of people they choose to be. Not just when they're doing their jobs or killing people, but every moment of every day. This film examines very closely what its characters are doing when they're not doing what they do. It also gives you little windows into who they used to be and who they thought they were but turned out not to be, and who they wanted to be like but could never measure up to. But I'm just scratching the surface. There's so much here, just pick one scene of the movie and try to decide what it actually meant. You'll never know for sure.

That's what the Coen brothers have done for us for quite a while now, but never like this. They've broken so many Hollywood rules here, they've even broken their own rules about breaking the rules. I'll just warn you; this is a violent movie. Gory. Unsettling. And not in the way where the bad guy does bad things and then the good guy saves the day. That's just not going to happen in this world. This is the Coen world, and you can visit if you want, stay as long as you like, but you aren't going to understand it. Not a chance.

Me, I still love it.