Charlottesville Words

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but from what I understand, it follows the book quite closely. Here are two different reviews by two different movie critics, one literal-minded, the other literary-minded:

Stephen Hunter:

One argument could be made for the movie’s integrity by way of the arcane narrative theories it employs. I don’t buy it, but it could be made. It sets up a classic thriller situation, a particularly vivid hunter hunting a surprisingly capable man across a deadly landscape, used hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. It pauses time and again to emphasize the horror of the killer. By narrative convention then, the movie is building toward a confrontation between these two. We know it, we expect it, the rules of the thriller mandate its necessity. It represents the completion of the bargain the storyteller has made with us.

“No Country for Old Men” then vigorously subverts the convention. It’s meant to be “ironic,” with that big capital I. Instead it’s unsatisfying, with a capital U. Nobody goes to the movies for the irony. They go for the satisfaction.

Roger Ebert:

This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate. It is also, in the photography by Roger Deakins, the editing by the Coens and the music by Carter Burwell, startlingly beautiful, stark and lonely. As McCarthy does with the Judge, the hairless exterminator in his “Blood Meridian” (Ridley Scott‘s next film), and as in his “Suttree,” especially in the scene where the riverbank caves in, the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice. The movie also loves some of its characters, and pities them, and has an ear for dialog not as it is spoken but as it is dreamed.

Many of the scenes in “No Country for Old Men” are so flawlessly constructed that you want them to simply continue, and yet they create an emotional suction drawing you to the next scene. Another movie that made me feel that way was “Fargo.” To make one such film is a miracle. Here is another.

I have a hunch that Roger enjoys his job a lot more than Stephen enjoys his. Just a hunch.

Filed under: movies Tagged: | Coen brothers, Cormac McCarthy, film criticism, No Country for Old Men, Roger Ebert, Stephen Hunter