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Crunch pointYou call this reality? August 18 No Country for Old MenThis is a transcipt of a conversation a bunch of us had about the movie, back in March. My handle here is After4ever. I edited this down quite a bit from the original (http://www.ratebeer.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=87570&whichpage=3). We'd been debating whether the ending was a strong point or a weak point for the film, and then this conversation started:
MrRomero
I had to "rewind" after the credits started rolling and still don’t understand the end. Can someone explain it to me?
Naven
x3.
Ernest
Well, I’ve never read the book nor any critical reviews so don’t have a deeper understanding than my own perception allows.
But the whole movie seems to illustrate how much more depraved and extreme the evil element in humans has become (and Bardem’s character is the embodiment of the pinnacle of that evil). The older generation (Jones’ character and the cop he talks to in the coffee shop after Brolin gets killed) can hardly even fathom it...hence the title of the movie. I think the end is a bleak and pessimistic painting of the future, in both that (A) Bardem gets away (i.e., the evil will go on), and (B) Jones has grown weary and sees relief only in death (his dead father building a fire for him, i.e. the afterlife).
It’s a very similar message that Fargo left me with. As you’ll recall, McDormand sat there with Stormare in her prowler at the end asking why on earth he would do such awful things (for money)...she just can’t wrap her mind around how people can be so evil.
So, both seem to be a kind of a lament on how badly humans have devolved, how sick/desperate/uncaring we’ve become.
At least that’s what these left me with...there’s probably more to it than that, which muzzle or cath could probably talk to more eloquently.
DocLock
My take is that the car crash scene near the end was a way of showing that Chuguhr was not superhuman; he was indeed harmable, so that scene reinforced the scene where he performed surgery on himself. I think the kids on the bikes were intended to provide contrast to the scene where Tommy Lee Jones talks about his retirement and his getting old and his dream of his father.
But the Tommy Lee Jones old age angle leads me to the thing that really pissed me off about this movie. Law enforcement personnel were portrayed as idiotic rubes, and I found it completely unbelievable that Chuguhr could have gotten away with everything he did with even halfway competent police personnel. Also, why didn’t Llewelyn’s wife and the Woody Harrelson character try to run or scream or do anything to try to save their lives, other than just sit there and be shot? If Woody Harrelson had scremed and run down the steps of his hotel, I don’t find it credible that Chuguhr still would have shot him.
Naven
I think the end, intentionally, was somewhat left to the viewers perception. I have read and read online different ideas of how people have viewed the ending, most of which center on the idea (and story name) that the world has become too violent and Tommy Lee Jones character simply cannot stand it. I have also read that people perceive the coin toss as an intregal part of the story (i.e. life is series of risks - a coin flip). I guess my issue with the ending is not so much that a lot was left to interpretation, but that the rest of the movie flowed so well and made perfect sense. If it’s a movie to make you think, great. But, I think they could have made the ending a little less jumbled and more in line with what was happening before it. Also, did none of these towns have ANY police? There was an all out shootout outside the one hotel, which seemed to last a looong time, and not one cop?
after4ever
I found the ending a bit more hopeful than that. It’s been months since I’ve seen it, but I’ll try to explain why.
I thought when TLJ went out to speak out to his uncle, he was saying at first that he felt like the world had gotten to be too much for him. What he heard back was that the world has never been an easy place, whether he noticed it or not before. And that any personal reaction he might have about whether he could handle it was just vanity--and, by extension, would be just frustration in vain.
The fact that he’s resolutely against evil, and disgusted and troubled by it (just like Margie in Fargo) points up that there’s both good and evil in this world. And good essentially outnumbers evil because elected officials (sheriffs are generally not appointed or hired) are resolutely good in both cases--good won the vote.
TLJ is happy in retirement. His wife chides him somehow at breakfast, reminding him that she, as usual, wants to see a good mood out of him that day. Can’t remember what she says, but the implication is that he’s come to some kind of peace in the unspecified time that’s passed since the Chiguhr case and his retirement from law enforcement.
In his placid golden days, he realizes that he’s content to feel the end of his life approaching, and that he’ll get to see his dad on the other side, and that it’ll feel familiar from what he’s seen on earth.
Ultimately, Chigurh rattled him at a fundamental level. How could he not? But he ended up having to accept that life is worth living happily despite the presence of such evil in the world.
One of the most realistic happy endings I’ve seen in a while.
DocLock
I think this is a valid assessment, but I see the ending as a cop out for the TLJ character. Near the beginning of the movie, when TLJ is loading up the horse, his wife asks a series of questions, ending with, "Promise me you won’t hurt anyone", and he replies something like, "Oh, you know I can’t promise you that." So, to me, his retirement at the end seems a bit like he’s pussying out because he’s scared of Chiguhr. The ending could also be viewed as an indictment of the entire US war on drugs, especially in the southwestern US against Latin America; a war we are still losing.
after4ever
Originally posted by DocLock: I see the ending as a cop out for the TLJ character.
Cop out? Why? Was he too young to retire? He looks 65. You can work past 65 in law enforcement, but your pension kicks in strong, and cops’ wives are famous for hustling them out of uniform at the earliest possible date so they can quit worrying. They end up making him the hero. Why would they sell him out by making him spineless? He’s the emotional heart of every scene he’s in, and they seem to really admire and have affection for him. I think all signs point to a planned retirement. They definitely show a lot of willingness to update the Old West symbolism that they scatter through the movie, and I don’t think the lawman who goes down fighting is something they want to reflexively include just because they’re making a 1980s western. So letting him retire and get an honorable discharge (so to speak) feels like part of the plan.
He never backs down from any confrontation with Chigurh, either. Chigurh eludes him. He’s grounded (and underfunded) enough to be realistic about chasing him across multiple jurisdictions. He’s not a hard-on like the federal agent characters are sometimes in these movies (not to mention real life).
DocLock
A fair assessment, I’d say, but one scene still affects me about the TLJ/Chiguhr relationship. When TLJ enters Llewelynn’s trailer and sees the lock bolt has been knocked clean off and thrown into the wood wall so hard as to make a circular mark, I think he realizes then that he wants nothing to do with Chiguhr, and I don’t see any situation where Chiguhr wouldn’t kick his ass. Personally, I think the ending would have been better if TLJ WAS wounded by Chiguhr OR if TLJ wounded Chiguhr and Chiguhr escaped. I’ve also heard theories that the Chiguhr character is a figment of TLJ’s imagination, manifested to ease and rationalize his transition to retirement.
Ernest
Originally posted by after4ever: I thought when TLJ went out to speak out to his uncle, he was saying at first that he felt like the world had gotten to be too much for him. What he heard back was that the world has never been an easy place, whether he noticed it or not before. And that any personal reaction he might have about whether he could handle it was just vanity--and, by extension, would be just frustration in vain.
I guess I saw that scene as only adding to TLJ’s hopelessness in dealing with the evil in the world, but on reflection I think you’re right. And somehow I hadn’t drawn from the ending that TLJ had in fact *already* retired during the closing dialog (since it appeared right after the car crash)...so I felt like he was still wrestling with the prospect of continuing the fight or not. But your reading makes a lot more sense if he was indeed retired already. His wife did say something that implied he now had too much time on his hands, didn’t she? Ernest
Originally posted by DocLock: Personally, I think the ending would have been better if TLJ WAS wounded by Chiguhr OR if TLJ wounded Chiguhr and Chiguhr escaped.
That would have changed TLJ from an observer into a participant, though...TLJ is effectively the narrator/commentator. I also think there’s a great deal more tension in the fact that TLJ is always a step away from the abyss but never directly looks into it. I know I sure didn’t want him to actually confront Bardem/Chigurh in that hotel room at night...a close call (and knowing how close you were) is sometimes more horrific than actual tragedy.
after4ever
Originally posted by DocLock: one scene still affects me about the TLJ/Chiguhr relationship. When TLJ enters Llewelynn’s trailer and sees the lock bolt has been knocked clean off and thrown into the wood wall so hard as to make a circular mark, I think he realizes then that he wants nothing to do with Chiguhr
I definitely didn’t take that much from TLJ’s reaction to the dent from the bolt. I think that was there to do a couple things:
I think TLJ knows he couldn’t hope to *imprison* Chiguhr. He has to take him out. Taking people out is easy, especially for people who can be heavily and armored quite conspicuously in public. Like cops. Building evidence, making a case, and winning a trial are harder. Defending against an inquest for shooting a suspect is also somewhat tricky, though in this particular case that’s the least of their worries. But he never got a clean shot at him. Never even saw him, IIRC.
And this is why his wife wants him to promise not to hurt anyone. He can’t, as a professional lawman, promise that. But in his heart, as a man, he knows he doesn’t want to. Because killing another human being, even with moral and ethical justification intact (and then some), his conscience would never completely recover. Ask my grandfather (if you could) about shooting down Germans in WW2. You never get over taking a life. Never ever ever.
Maybe TLJ’s had to kill someone else in the past, and it weighs on him. Certainly as a sheriff of such long standing he’s had to draw down multiple times, and confronted the possibility. His wife would know what it does to him, even if he never spoke a syllable of it. She doesn’t want him to get hurt, doesn’t want him in danger--and doesn’t want him suffering under the burden of conscience that killing anyone, even Chiguhr, would saddle him with.
That’s why he has a good man. Maybe the best a man can be. He’s morally capable of realizing that Chiguhr has to be killed: Chiguhr transcends even the capacity of the courts and the prisons to protect us from evil. (OT-M: Given my views on capital punishment, this is going some.) And he not only has the courage to draw down and squeeze the trigger to eradicate that evil, but the shrewdness to tactically outwit Chiguhr, presumably, and put himself in a position, safely, for the killshot.
It’s been years since I’ve walked out of a movie in utter shock at how good it is. But this one did it.
after4ever
Originally posted by Ernest: That would have changed TLJ from an observer into a participant, though...TLJ is effectively the narrator/commentator.
This also keeps it from turning into a Final Showdown Between Good and Evil, and shows that these people are just men, bound by circumstance. Chiguhr may or may not be the Purest Embodiment of Evil; he may just be a psycho. But I loved how what got him was totally random--a car wreck that just kinda happened. Reminds you that not everything is planned, in a movie or a life.
BlackForestCO
I’ve enjoyed reading the conversation on the movie so far and agree with a lot of what has been said. You guys seem insightful, so I figured I would throw a question out there for you guys that I have been wondering myself.
What is the significance of Woody Harrelson’s character in the film?
When we are first introduced to him he presents himself as confident and the right man to perform the job, but aside from that we see very little evidence to back up his claims or demeanor.
Is he inserted to provide an obstacle for Chigurh, and when seeing how handily he is disposed of by Chirguh, supposed to confirm the viewers belief that Chirugh is almost non-human? Or is he there just to be another mouthpiece for the films commentary?
after4ever
For me, off the top of my head, Woody does a few important things:
All that said, I don’t know that we would have seen Woody’s character in this movie if there wasn’t such a tradition of hired guns in old Westerns.
And I don’t know whether he was in the book, but I assume he was, ’cause the movie was so faithful to it, from what they say.
Bhops
Besides the functional aspects of his role, he was unprincipled evil, in my opinion, and got squeezed out pretty quick. He has little to no survivability in this fatalistic world. He was kind of the counterpoint, in my opinion to Lewlyn, who was unprincipled good, and at least had a fighting chance. And of course, Tommy Lee Jones and Chigur were principled good and evil. Not that cut and dried perhaps, but those were some parallels I saw. TLJ and Chigurs principles allowed them to at least survive, but not without major damage.
Ernest
Originally posted by after4ever: 1). Echoes the old private bounty hunter theme of the great hollywood westerns (one of many themes resurrected/modernized subtly by this flick).
Yup, which Coens used in Raising Arizona too. I can also see a humor angle to Harrelson’s character (this is the Coen brothers, after all, there WILL be some humor involved), much as was done in The Shining with Scatman’s character...here you have a guy you’re sorta rooting for to sorta help save the day, and WHAM he’s taken out before he even has a chance. I always thought Scatman’s death was funny because Kubrick set it up soooooooo painstakingly...the flight to Denver, the long snowcat ride in the storm. And then it’s all over in a few seconds. When Bardem quietly follows Harrelson up the stairs, I was laughing out loud...you knew it was all over for Woody.
Schroppfy
Originally posted by after4ever: Maybe TLJ’s had to kill someone else in the past, and it weighs on him. Certainly as a sheriff of such long standing he’s had to draw down multiple times, and confronted the possibility.
I only saw the movie once, in the theatre, but I thought there was some extended scene near the beginning where TLJ’s character is talking about not using a gun, and not having to use it...I forget that exposition, but I think it contradicts your thought here - TLJ may actually have never used his gun, although I’m not sure. Does anyone else recall that narration. after4ever
Originally posted by Schroppfy: I thought there was some extended scene near the beginning where TLJ’s character is talking about not using a gun, and not having to use it...I forget that exposition, but I think it contradicts your thought here - TLJ may actually have never used his gun, although I’m not sure. Does anyone else recall that narration?
This sounds familiar. But...even if he’d managed to serve as sheriff all those years without so much as drawing down, he had been packing for all, or much, of that time. Seeing that holster on the utility belt on the coat rack every night would have weighed morally on him and on his wife.
They had to be aware of the moral burden of life or death decisions, no matter how skillfully he had mooted them through good police work all those years.
ryan
Originally posted by Schroppfy: TLJ may actually have never used his gun, although I’m not sure. Does anyone else recall that narration.
You mean this?
after4ever
Originally posted by Bhops: not that cut and dried perhaps, but those were some parallels I saw. TLJ and Chigurs principles allowed them to at least survive, but not without major damage.
I don’t know that I’d call them "principles" so much as a well-reasoned decision to enter the lifestyle before entering it. At least for three of them--Harrelson presumably put forethought into his decision to "enter the field," but I got the impression from one line of dialogue that he had gone from being Special Forces or something to being a gun for hire. So he may have been impulsive about what he was doing. Which I think breaks down to the same denominator you’re proposing: that you don’t take a side at the core of the conflict between good and evil without meaning to. Not if you want to survive it.
bhops
agreed as to your last statement (and that’s a good way of putting it), although by the term "principles" I was borrowing from the terminology used in the movie which describes Chigur as "principled" in his evil... resulting in his killing Llewlyn’s wife at the end, when he didn’t have to, based on a promise to Llwelyn that he would. I look at Llewlyn as essentially a good man that makes some bad decisions (he debated whether or not to take the money, and whether or not to return to the desert to give the dude some water), and Woody’s character as a bad man that makes some good decisions (essentially offered Llewlyn help out of his mess, even offered to give him some money). Because they were not principled, they got run over pretty quickly, but the other two survived, at least they acted consistently with the fatalistic forces the controlled the action in the movie.
after4ever
Shocking bit of trivia from IMDB:
after4ever
So it’s not violence, but innocence, that makes a place inhospitable for old men. They’ve seen too much.
This poem really comes back to what Ed Tom (TLJ) is left with at the end of the movie, and why the ending is so incredibly reassuring and positive. It’s West Texas, or it’s modern times, or it’s all of human life that is unbearable for old men who have seen too much--take your pick. Whichever, Ed Tom is confronting the end of his days. He may yet be 10 or 20 years away, but he knows they’re coming.
After what he’s seen, he knows he can’t live with a light heart and mind, as when he was younger. Every good young person he sees reminds him of this. Kelly Macdonald was so perfectly chosen for the young wife; she’s naive but not stupid. She just shimmers with natural joy in living (when she’s not burdened with fear as she is pretty much throughout the movie). She’s a perfect innocent. But eve with a heart burdened by experience, his dreams don’t haunt him. If he was troubled by the coming end of his days, he might be able to mask it a bit with his poker face, but he could never hide it from his subconscious--from his dreams. His dreams tell him that his father, who taught him much of what he knows of how to live, has found peace. He’s just on ahead up the trail a bit, waiting for him. This means that he’s certain he’ll find the comfort of the familiar when he enters the next life. What he and his father see around them will be the world they’re accustomed to--they’ll be on the same trail. They’ll have followed the same path they’ve chosen for themselves in this life. Heaven, to them, will take shape by the persistence of memory. What they know as the world will continue to be the world, even after passing on. But they’ll be free of the burden of moral responsibility, and painful experience, that they’ve accrued on earth. Ed Tom says "A man would have to put his soul at risk. I’d have to push my chips forward and say ’I’ll be part of this world.’" He’s talking about chasing Chiguhr specifically, but we can take larger meanings. Being part of this world means being scarred by the fight between good and evil. A mistake, let alone fighting for the wrong side, could scar your soul. You hear of at least some Catholic theologians saying that perhaps "heaven is an instant." Not sure how common this is; maybe other faiths say similar things. Perhaps the "infinite" afterlife is all a matter of believing we’ve found a blissful eternity. Certainly the promise of a blissful eternity in many religions is what’s earned by the kept promise of a well-lived life under this mortal coil. Ed Tom faces what’s probably the ultimate evil, at least tangentially, in pursuing Chiguhr. The worst in people for years has come out all the time right in front of him. He’s a cop. But in Chiguhr it’s hard to imagine it being worse--"a crime like this, you can’t take the measure of it." He knows he’s done things right in his handling of the Chiguhr case, though of course he’d like to have done more if he could have. When he accepts the fact that he can’t be the one to decide that the world has gone wrong (after visiting his uncle and heeding his advice), he can relax and be content that he has lived his life well. It’s then that he knows that he can leave this world peacefully and gracefully. With nothing left to worry that he should have done differently, and very likely no more chances to do anything wrong that would always haunt him, he knows that the moment of his death will find him a content man. Being able to accept death without lingering doubts, guilts, anxieties...he can think to himself "it’s time. I accept this." And being able to pass through that moment without struggle, even if there’s nothing on the other side, will give him the same profound calm as an eternity of bliss. Even in an instant, he’ll find his heaven. acrdz
Also, the Woody Harrelson character, what’s the point? The entire movie you’re given nothing about Chigurh, only what you see. Introducing a character that basically serves to provide details about Chigurh seemed cheap. You limit the background of the characters, you make that a central point of the film, but in walks an extra character 1/2 way through the movie and his only real purpose is to give some sort of insight to Chigurh? Was there more of a point to this character in the book? cquiroga
Yeah, I agree here too. I hate sloppy expository dialogue, but especially when it’s tacked on a character who could have been put to much greater thematic use.
cquiroga: Carson Wells might have thought there was more dignity in staring down his death. And the face-to-face confrontation/conversation leading up to his death was not problematic for me. The problem is how they GOT there-- Carson Wells, supposedly some badass hitman in his own right, let the other guy get over on him merely by walking up behind him on the stairs. If there were a more clever, more dramatic one-upmanship that led to Wells’s death, I probably wouldn’t have much problem with Wells’s presence in the film at all.
StFun
The one-upmanship is that Wells checked into the same hotel where the Chigur/Moss shootout had started; where Chigur had already killed the deskclerk just the night before (making the place still a crimescene, presumably with cops still around, and lots of people on alert), and Chigur walks right back into the place without a care to kill Wells. acrdz
Good point. I missed that. bhops
I think Carson fit perfectly within the themes of fatalism, free will and chance that run throughout the movie. He is a self-professed badass, yet for all his bravado, he has no chance of surviving against the fatalistic forces which guide Chigurh. And his death is anticlimatic.... he’s basically runover. Llewelyn’s death basically is the same type of thing.... for all his efforts to survive, he’s gunned down off camera. And that’s the point... none of us really have a chance. Or at least, our chance of survival is essentially a coin flip, regardless of our attempts to avoid our fate.
Even the expository dialogue doesn’t bother me too much... Carson’s description of the world and of events is as much for him as it is for us. He’s survived basically by playing along the currents of these fatalistic forces of good and evil, and he believes that he understands them in his mind. So he is happy to share his explanation of existence to Llewelyn and the audience. He thinks he has it figured out. Yet his knowledge is not enough to save him, and his explanation of things seems childish in hindsight, now that we know it really didn’t amount to shit. He is unprincipled evil, going back to my earlier posts... just as Lleweleyn is unprincipled good. Neither stand a chance, but at least they have some self-awareness of their struggle against fate.
cquiroga
Yeah, so let me clarify a little bit. . . It’s obvious that Wells serves as a counterpoint to Chigurh-- they’re both hitmen, both assigned to the same task, with wildly different styles and ideals that they muse about on their paths of destruction. I like your ideas along the lines of "unprincipled good/evil" and whatnot (although I’m not quite sure about the choice of words, because I think the movie suggests more about the *specific sets* of principles at work in each of these figures of good/evil, and not just the mere notion of whether or not they HAVE underlying principles), but mainly I felt like Wells never really got his due as a character to deserve a firm place in that discussion. It’s all about plausibility-- if he were really a badass, I wish we would have SEEN some evidence of it. If we were allowed to see him sniff out the trail or make a narrow escape or outwit someone else (in other words, do *SOMETHING* that actually illustrates or justifies the bravado and reputation that precedes him within the film world), I would have had a much easier time with his character’s presence. It just feels sloppy, rushed, and implausible without any evidence of his prowess (but obviously he’s not just a bag of hot air, or someone who is a delusionally "self-professed badass" with nothing at all to back it up-- or else he wouldn’t have reached his obvious high standing in his field or wouldn’t have been hired to take up Chigurh’s trail in the first place).
And if Wells were really given his due as an equal to Chigurh in terms of their aptitude as hitmen, the "random chance" encounter (/sucker move) with Chigurh on the staircase would have had a lot more resonance to suggest these themes you mentioned (of the dichotomy of good/evil, principled/unprincipled, and how the forces of nature or fatalism have their way with all of it). As it is, the moment feels like just a big "DUH" for Carson Wells, and really undermines the setup for him as an important figure. KAggie97
The ending was nothing as I expected, but I think it’s more relevant to real life. With that, I mean the good guys don’t always catch the bad guys. The bad guys aren’t superhuman. And life goes on outside of the circle of crime irregardless of how shocked we are when we experience evil or are affected by a news story detailing a heinous crime.
I really liked the movie. I was under the impression that Chigurh was a good guy (for some reason, the previews led me to believe that) but, obviously, I was wrong. Wonderful scenery. And props to the Cohen brothers for actually shooting a movie based in West Texas in West Texas- not a Saguaro to be found in the whole movie!
Bhops
I thought the ending was interesting as to Chigurh..... how not even he is immune to chance and nature, although he does survive. He was built up through the course of the movie as the hand of fate, and then bam, he gets knocked sideways. I wonder what the significance of the interaction with the kids and the shirt was....if anything.
BeerVirgin72
I kind of looked at that whole shirt sequence of just another example of how "Normal" he COULD be. Sharp contrast to what we already know of him at that point. Perhaps the directors way of saying "Hey, I can be any guy you want me to be..." or, another example of how HE (Chigurh) adapts to any situation, and therefore, is the triumphant one here...
Bhops
and also maybe the fact that he treated the kids fairly (gave them money for the shirt) and did no harm to them, shows that he was principled evil, and didn’t just kill for killing’s sake. He acted on principles, albeit evil ones. That’s why he had to kill the wifey.
after4ever
I agree with all the above--he seems like a normal guy if you’re not part of his world and doesn’t decide to make you part of it. Chance takes him down (yeah, they could have cooked up the crash scene a little more freshly), just like chance takes down so many other people in the movie. Ed Tom’s uncle is still so mentally sharp but he’s physically hindered pretty badly, to the point that he lives in a hovel. The guy in the gas station lives--by chance. Llewellyn gets into the whole mess by chance (and by ignoring his common sense). Even Ed Tom wouldn’t have been involved if the county line were drawn differently.
So Chigurh goes down (at least with injury, if not fatally) by a random car wreck...but that randomness doesn’t extend to his harming the kids. They can’t serve him any purpose by dying at his hand, though we sure sit there wondering if they will. They can help him, though, by helping him blend in to his surroundings again.
Carla Jean pleads with Chiguhr. She’s the innocent in the film, I think. She’s not dumb, but she’s untainted by painful experience--naive. At least up until Llewellyn’s leaving, she’s untainted. She says "the coin ain’t got no say. It’s just you." Chiguhr chides her: "the coin got here the same way I did." Poor kid. She thinks random happenstance won’t hurt you, or kill you, because she hasn’t really been an adult part of this world long enough to know that it can. And does.
after4ever
Originally posted by cquiroga: It’s all about plausibility-- if he were really a badass, I wish we would have SEEN some evidence of it.
We talked about this earlier, actually. That would have taken a fair amount of time. Who might he have outwitted? Another, still-less-relevant character? Then you would have been troubled by THAT character’s irrelevance/inconsequentiality. We can take it on faith that he is about as good as he says he is, because important characters (the money man at the head of the syndicate) believe he is from having seen him in action. He’s a part of the world we’re witness to, a known quantity. Besides introducing us to the money man, thereby reassuring us that there is somebody at the head of all this crime (that it’s not all random), he also throws another wrinkle into the pursuit of Chiguhr and Llewellyn. Gives us two guys on each side, all chasing each other, and the money, and the truth. That in turn shows us that not all the bad guys think 100% ill of Llewellyn, which is a powerful message in its way (and goes back to BHops’ point).
Bhops
Originally posted by cquiroga: And if Wells were really given his due as an equal to Chigurh in terms of their aptitude as hitmen, the "random chance" encounter (/sucker move) with Chigurh on the staircase would have had a lot more resonance to suggest these themes you mentioned (of the dichotomy of good/evil, principled/unprincipled, and how the forces of nature or fatalism have their way with all of it). As it is, the moment feels like just a big "DUH" for Carson Wells, and really undermines the setup for him as an important figure.
I agree. Perhaps his character didn’t translate as well onto the screen as it did in the book, but I haven’t read the book so I can’t say for sure. McCarthy may have set up his character more a colorful description of the type of person he was, without much in the way of active examples of his prowess. The movie wasn’t very emotionally pleasing, but I think that was a little bit of the point. There’s no such thing as emotional justice, or justice at all, except for the justice that comes with fate and chance. It is taking me some time to come to terms with some of those issues, because I tend to be lazy and expect the emotional payoff. But I think your point is there was no emotional buildup or buildup of any kind with Wells... and it’s a valid point certainly.
Carson was pretty good at tracking lleweylen to the motel and stuff, and he did notice the briefcase full of money by the river, but those are hardly "badass" qualities...
damn I need to watch this movie again.
StFun
Not sure I agree on the principled evil. He doesn’t kill the kids, but does kill the man with a car and would have killed the gas station owner. Sure, the first guy had something he needs, and the second could have identified the car...but those things can also be said about the kids.
Bhops
I don’t think the concept of principled evil was mine... I think somebody says it in the movie. Principled not so much as in right and wrong, but principled in that he is true to the fatalistic forces of chance that drive and motivate him. He didn’t kill the store clerk on the basis of the coin flip, yet he was compelled to kill the wife because he promised he would.
Bhops
I agree. Perhaps his character didn’t translate as well onto the screen as it did in the book, but I haven’t read the book so I can’t say for sure. McCarthy may have set up his character more a colorful description of the type of person he was, without much in the way of active examples of his prowess. cquiroga
Yeah, I thought about this, but I haven’t read the book either. It seems a curious omission from a film storytelling standpoint, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this "flimsiness" were due to the change in medium. It kind of gets to an age-old adage about filmmaking-- a big, fundamental rule of thumb for directors is that you should try to *show* something happening rather than just *describe* it. The novel could have had a vivid physical description or psychological dissection of Wells that fit the bill just fine to build him up, and it was omitted in the adaptation because there was no ACTION to film. It then follows that the Coens would have had to depict a new action or add new dialogue to get the same point across (in many adaptations, expository passages from a book are transposed to dialogue for characters, which isn’t necessarily the most elegant way to do it, but could work).
And I think this also gets at why I don’t like just accepting that Carson Wells is badass because "important characters" say he is. It’s just not as effective as showing it somehow so we can get a feel for it first-hand. I don’t care who he outwits or whatever (and there are ways to demonstrate his might without any outwitting at all)-- just by showing SOME cleverness in one form or another, they would gain a lot of ground for me in terms of plausibility (or even if he outwitted an otherwise inconsequential character, I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with it, just as I didn’t have a problem with the man at the gas station, or the woman at the trailer park, or any number of other innocent bystanders who were merely there as background foliage and subtle counterpoints in those brief scenarios). But this is all just a small request from lil’ ol’ me. Still a damn good movie.
DYCSoccer17
I don’t need a movie to tell me that society and people are becoming more fucked up with each generation.
allendodd
A point made several times is that things aren’t worse now, most specifically in the conversation between tlj and the old ranger. Also the story told of the ranger being shot on his porch for no reason in ’09. The struggle most fully realized is in the individual’s confrontation with the reality that things have always been bad and getting old and wise to that reality. Evil isn’t just happening to you for the first time. To assume so is vanity and misses the nature of being. If you can find 4ever’s quote of Yeats’ poem that provided the title (somewhere in this thread I think) it says the same thing.
jmikolich
The only question i had/have is How did chugar/chigurh/sp? get picked up in the first place by who seemed like a "bumbling law man" of the old west? mwsf
From the book...
August 04 The Dark KnightBy this point, no matter where you are, it is no longer news to you that they have once again adapted a part of the Batman comic books for the big screen. It should no longer be news to anyone that comic books long ago gave up being satisfied with simplistic, serialized plots centered around one-dimensional heroes and villans with money, power, and damsels at stake. There was a golden age of comic books aimed at the young when the creators occasionally tried to beat that rap, but for the most part, settled for trying to excite the imagination as much as possible by feeding it a steady diet of adventure.
Or at least that was the stereotype of comic books when Frank Miller and others brought more psychological subtlety, disturbing layers of meaning, dimensional character traits, and recognizable humanity to the paned pages in the 80s. Tim Burton found himself motivated to kick off a series of Batman films that buffed everything to his usual high-gothic sheen, careered into a second installment, and then cratered under the campy pastiche of Joel Schumacher's two features. Burton knew he was working in a universe with a long pedigree. For all the resognizable elements of his visual style that felt like pure Burton, he knew he had to successfully land somewhere in the imaginations of millions of Batman fans or his best shot would fizzle. Schumacher swears to this day, evidently, that he's personally a huge Batman fan, but still chose to eroticize Batman and Robin and camp them up like a 60s tv serial. Granted, Batman WAS in fact a 60s tv serial at one point, but that would seem to make it even less likely that re-visiting that period would yield fresh ideas for a 90s Batman movie.
So now we have Christopher Nolan building Batman movies for us. He'd done just a few movies before Batman Begins. He can't have been the only director since Schumacher interested in doing these movies. For some reason, though, his pitch was the one that got picked, and they gave him a hell of a lot of money to work with. All this background stuff is interesting because The Dark Knight is a uniquely successful movie for a few reasons, and those reasons may have a lot to do with the sensibilities of the people in charge.
Burton definitely seemed like a great choice because his imagination always creates entire worlds. Batman had gone through probably dozen evolutions in the comic books, graphic novels, and the tv effort up until that point. He'd been merchandised to the hilt already for at least one generation of kids. Gotham had shape-shifted through a myriad of flavors, each slightly different to the next. It must have seemed like a good idea in 1988 to choose someone who could recognize among those different Gothams (Gotha?) the representations that were worlds complete unto themselves. Burton could certainly do that, and then he'd set about staging an interesting story and the rest would be applause. When his movie arrived in 1989, most of us, if not all of us, thought he had done it. Bruce Wayne was burdened and uncertain; Batman was burdened and uncertain. But each of them had the best of everything available to him, and wanted to do the right thing. Vicki Vale was a little too good to be true, but that could be explained by the fact that she was Kim Basinger in, ahem, top form. Nicholson even seemed like a good choice as The Joker--loud, garish, larger than life. It all seemed big and spectacular. Not recognizably of a world anything like this one, but an acceptable alternate universe where we could go to be told a story we expected to enjoy.
So then they proceeded to tear that down as quickly as they could with the next 3 movies. They made quick work of it. Instead of choosing a mighty visualist to replace a mighty visualist when Burton left the team, they chose a dependable entertainer. Not a director whose work is dependably entertaining, a would-be entertainer whose employers could depend on him to do what they wanted. That would be Joel Schumacher. Each villain became more cartoonish and less dimensional than the last. With every ticket you bought, you moved farther and farther away from the ethical dilemmas (dilemmae?) Bruce Wayne fought through. And farther and farther away from the comment the books have always made about society. By the time it was done, George Clooney was smirking over an armored codpiece and a pair of rubber nipples.
Nolan arrived on the scene as neither a visualist nor an entertainer. His movies have traditionally been about obsession, horrid psychological predicaments, vigilantism, deception, murderers...any fool who'd read the comic books could see that those issues fascinated the creators of Batman, too. So finally they chose someone who wanted to look into the gritty "realities" of the Batman universe and see what there was to plunder for the silver screen. Finally, this thing is starting to work the way it was always supposed to. Those of us who loved Burton's "original" 20 years ago are now mystified as to how we could have been so easily taken in.
Batman Begins did a great job of setting the scene--Bruce Wayne has to purge himself of a lingering mighty rage and guilt before he can even hope to be an effective caped crusader. Christian Bale might or might not be perfect as Wayne and Batman. For my money he's both. But even if his performances could be bested by another actor's work, right from the start in BB he shows he understands so many things about the characters he's playing. Not just that his audience has very passionate and specific expectations about them, but that they have many intriguing paradoxes that he'll have to expose, convincingly, if they're to tell the whole story.
So Bale starts Act 1 by showing us a man who has never had to worry about money, never had to worry about anything that could be fixed by having every conceivable advantage in life. He shows a restrained, inquisitive disposition that suits the character perfectly. But, like all true Bruce Waynes through the years, he's isolated emotionally by his early orphaning, and blames both himself and the criminal underworld for his parents' deaths. Alfred does his best to reassure him this isn't true, of course, but to no avail, and no one else, even Rachel, is really in a position to speak to him about such things. Nolan decides to present Wayne as seeking ninja training, where he hears the memorable guidance that he must let go of the rage and guilt, lest his memory of his parents turn to poison within him. Not a new idea--not even new when it showed up in the comic books--but an early sign that we're in inquisitive hands with BB.
Nolan in many ways is like a Bruce Wayne for the way he landed this project. Not because he could even hope to pay for it as Wayne would have, but because he simply wants to make the world better even if it means tearing things down and alienating people in the process. Many people from the last 4 movies have to endure watching their work ripped out and replaced in a very public way. Nicholson has said he's angry about not even being approached to play The Joker in TDK. And Nolan, like Wayne, seems to feel free to ask only the really interesting questions. How would you really feel if you were a young man in Bruce Wayne's shoes, just past college age, still trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, still unprepared to let go of your fermented grief over your parents? It's clear that Nolan looked for an answer to that question, and that Bale wants it to come to life on screen.
That's what, ultimately, sets these last two movies apart from the earlier Batmans, and from all other superhero movies: Bruce Wayne really is just a man, after all, and that fact has to ring true to the audience. Watching Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger laugh about how ridiculous Bruce Wayne's dinner table was might have seemed like a good idea at the time. It had a light-hearted touch that made the crime-fighting scenes grittier and more interesting by comparison. But they were contrived enough to remind you that this was all just a story, and you were sitting there in the dark watching some stuff happen that was supposed to add up to something in the end.
When Nolan wants to show Bruce Wayne chuckling at the ridiculous opulence of Wayne Manor, he doesn't give us a scene where Wayne shakes his head at overdone furniture in a "room I don't think I've ever been in before." Pretty hacky setup, hacky dialogue, and not a good way to make your protagonist appear commanding or resourceful. When Nolan wants Wayne to establish his sense of detachment from material goods, he has him dispassionatly tell Alfred that he'll tear the place down. Part of his journey in BB is to discover the value in what his forebears have created, and to respect the symbolic nature of Wayne Manor's grandeur. The Manor has still not been rebuilt when we join the action in TDK, though. Bruce Wayne is still something of a homeless man--making do with a grand penthouse apartment, high above the city, and no larger than a football stadium.
BB offered us The Scarecrow. The Scarecrow is the usual mishmash of devious cunning and megalomania, aiming to inflict fear on the masses. The resulting panic and chaos, though, are really all he wants out of life, and that's what makes him different to most of the products cranked out of the Central Villain Services Department. His greatest ambition is to understand the depths of horror in the human mind and to manipulate them; he's very true to his portrayal in the comics this way. Cillian Murphy gives him a mask of glittering Hollywood prettiness that's just the right contrast to the evil deeds he commits. Forget outsized dining room tables. Just cast actors who either express troubling ambiguities in their performances or just by stepping in front of the camera, and you've got the battle half won already.
So Murphy's Scarecrow gives us a complex dilemma in easily digested bits, and accomplishes a fair list of things in the process. He's not really of this world; he's sadistic and nihilistic in ways that still feel like the extremes of imagination even after World War 2 and 9/11. He does have precedent; Hitler, Milosevic, Bin Laden, and countless others all certainly give a Batman writer food for thought at the very least. Bin Laden even parallels the Wayne story, growing up wealthy but choosing a violent, fugitive life because his views demand it. But The Scarecrow? He still seems beyond reality, because Murphy shows him to us up close. We don't have the luxury of Al-Jazeera or decades of history between us and the villain. He's right here in our faces, and, no matter how saddened we might be by the sorry state of peace, love, and understanding in the world today, it's still hard to believe that someone that sadistic could be real.
Murphy, though, makes us think about the fact that each sadist, no matter how extreme, is still to some extent recognizable as human. Our first reaction when we look at sadists like this in the news is to say "no, never! Such things are done by monsters. That may be a person, but not a human being. I'm a human being." In a way it's good that we react this way. It may not be realistic, but it's healthful, if not healthy. Why would we want to accept the fact that someone with the same basic plumbing and parts that we have could exterminate millions, or order fuel-laden jets into the sides of occupied buildings, among all the other atrocities committed around us with such appalling regularity?
There's no practical reason why we should have to confront those possibilities within ourselves. We just won't be doing those things, and that answer is more than good enough for essentially any of us. Living in a world where horrid atrocities happen is our only choice if we want to live in a real world, and it's much easier to wake up in the morning and face the day if we can write off the despots, terrorists, and other megalomaniacs as singularly rare freakish by-products of some awful past we never experienced. It lessens the sickening feeling that it can, and will, happen again. We can't get upset about every mugging, because we know there will be another one, somewhere in the world, before we can get done yelling about the injustice of intimidation and taking things that don't belong to you. Pretty soon we realize we can't afford, emotionally, to get upset about every physical assault. Every rape. Every murder. Every terrorist slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians. Every tinpot dictator keeping his people down, every bloody uprising...every ethnic cleansing. We can't afford to cry for them all, because we know none of them is the last.
In a way, this reflexive desire to shield our sanity from reality is what Bob Kane set out to find his way under. 60 years ago he created a character who took it upon himself to rise above the rule of law, rather than subvert it, and through the force of his virtue and his ingenuity, to mete out justice in a way the justice system never could. 20 years ago, we still felt safe, unthreatened. We were attracted more to Bruce Wayne's ingenuity, to his adventures as Batman, than to the complex ethical problems he faced, or the burden he carried of being human under all the gadgets.
Now the world is sadder and wiser. This isn't why these Batman movies are blowing audiences away, and laying siege to history's all-time box-office records. They're just good movies, especially TDK, and more fun to watch. But Nolan has the freedom to embrace a sadism, a perversity, that no other Batman director ever touched. The grit of the tales is now on display for us all to reckon with. Now we know what stakes are on the table, finally. And it's all simultaneously creepier and less crackpot; in many ways both bigger and smaller than what other filmmakers have tried to capture.
In many ways we have Heath Ledger to thank for this. It's not news to anyone that Ledger hit the stratosphere with his work on this film. No serious actor can imagine touching this role for 25 years, minimum. Even if he had lived, what he's done here is far too dimensional and resonant for anyone with a realistic sense of his abilities as a thespian to hope to match. He's probably the best villain in the history of the movies. His Joker is written from the earliest Batman books, from the 40s, from way back when comic book villains didn't have to constantly outdo each other in order to make a name for themselves. Nolan has said repeatedly that they framed this Joker as an absolute, a pure and unmitigated evil with no clear human side or backstory. We never get a sense of who The Joker was before he went crazy, or even hear what his name in real life is. We know he's astonishingly clever, and possessed of the fearlessness that comes from genuinely not caring if you die.
It's to Ledger's eternal credit that he grasped completely the knowledge that these decisions allowed him to rein in The Joker. This is the greatest villain in the history of comic books, as voted by the fans, and he is written here as an absolute representation of evil. But Ledger humanized him, and, with the help of several absolutely perfectly chosen lines of dialogue, made The Joker a realistic madman. Charismatic, but not a demagogue. Cunning, but, like The Scarecrow, without anything a white collar or blue collar worker could ever recognize as ambition. As Alfred puts it, "some men just want to watch the world burn." Clearly, The Joker is profoundly mentally ill, but he has no intellectual deficits, and is high-functioning socially and interpersonally. Yes, of course, he has psychotic and anti-social tendencies in the furthest imaginable extreme, but he's still capable of luring henchmen, hatching plans, leading events on the day, and intelligently interacting with his adversaries. He's just chosen not to go into dictatorship for a living. He's a petty criminal who's capable of anything and fearless enough to try it, which makes him a super-villain in this universe.
Ledger gives him a darting tongue, shifty eyes, posture that follows no set personality or mood, a voice that switches from gurgle to sing-song to nasal to hiss (among other things), and an absolutely shockingly exact sense of timing. Just his pauses and interjections represent dozens of exceptionally precise choices in his performance, but the chromatic emotion he puts on display make it all come to life. He sometimes finds the same flat detachment Anthony Hopkins brought to Hannibal Lecter. He sometimes finds the same eerie, glittering charisma we expect from a Hollywood villain, but The Joker never really knows what he's going to do next. He might try and charm you, but only impulsively, by and large, and in the end he's not organized enough to always be sure of himself. Ledger knows The Joker is actually a little scared of what he's capable of, but doesn't quite understand why. At times, just the way he cocks his head to look at someone make you wince, because he's so all of a piece in this character that any little gesture makes you feel like he might be about to kill somebody.
Ultimately, for all the great work done by so many people in BB and TDK, it's Ledger's sensitivity to the paradoxes in The Joker's psyche that really brings the complexity of the story to life. Most of us can't even name the African dictators who've killed millions upon millions of people in the last 50 years. Most of us are only passingly familiar with the crimes of Milosevic and the other Balkan warlords who wiped out millions more. Most of us look at pictures of Hitler, Bin Laden, and others, fully realizing that we're staring at the heartbeat of evil. But we don't usually carry with that understand a sense that these men actually pulled the trigger very often. We don't picture them wrestling someone to the ground and stabbing them to death. We're conditioned to that behavior among lower-echelon troops; we're used to seeing good guys like James Bond do it. We like to think we're all capable of being warriors if called upon for the right reasons. But we know that "I was just following orders" won't get you aquitted at Nuremberg. We know, somehow, innately maybe, that killing for any reason is a complex proposition and will stack us for the rest of our lives with emotional fallout like nothing we have ever experienced in our lives.
What Batman's creators hope to succeed by doing is showing us villains capable of filling face to face, and capable of mayhem on a grand scale. They don't always explain why. BB and TDK happily accept the two villains who are the most truly nihilistic in the pantheon; The Scarecrow wants fear and chaos. The Joker wants the same thing, without being so preoccupied with the nature of fear. And Ledger not only humanizes a complex villain much beloved of tens of millions of comic book readers, he makes sure to humanize the murderous on both scales. Watching him menace someone with a knife gives you a pit in your stomach like it might be happening to you next. All filmmakers want their story to come to life onscreen, and this group took very seriously the responsibility of making a homicidal maniac appear to walk into the room where you're sitting munching popcorn.
When you see him, this Joker, you don't think "wow, that guy's a freak," the way you react when you see a real maniac in the news. Your mind doesn't instantly attach the label of "Other" (Other from human, that is) to The Joker for some reason, not the way it does to Bin Laden, Hitler, and their ilk. Everyone in the movie calls The Joker a freak. He's wearing makeup that makes him look like a sweaty circus clown on the verge of losing control of himself. And for all the irreality on display, your reaction falls a lot closer to thinking something like "wow, I'm glad that guy's not a part of my world." Maybe this is because you know you're just watching a story; maybe this is because you're watching the work of a singularly gifted group of storytellers. Or maybe this is because when your imagination is free to really confront the bits of good and evil inherent in each of us, it sees each of them as recognizably human, rather than reconciling evil urges to the trash heap of inhumanity.
At the very fundaments of the Batman story, this is what the power of the audience's imagination offers the storyteller that reality can never completely show us. And a well-told tale shows us human nature in a way that human nature on display just can't, because it takes us inside. Bruce Wayne is the most virtuous crime-fighter in the history of storytelling, certainly at the beginning he is. Most fans would argue that the point of Batman ultimately is that for every test of that virtue, it will be some other aspect of Wayne's resourcefulness (if only age and physical ability) that ultimately betray him, and us. But Wayne will most certainly be tested. For all his fervent devotion to abstract ideals, he has few things he cares about in his personal life. Of course, these being comic book stories, peril will find those things.
One of the purest, most complex and exciting scenes (Spoiler Alert) in TDK is Batman's police station confrontation with The Joker. Batman bullies The Joker, edging closer and closer to the edge of control as he tries to find where his friends are held captive. The voice masking in the Batsuit makes his threatening mien seem even more diabolical. Finally, he throws The Joker against a wall, shouting questions at him. The Joker just laughs, smug in the satisfaction that he's gotten to Batman, and collapses, gasping and giggling: "There. Is. Nothing. You can threaten me with." Batman's burden of virtue comes dangerously close to falling away here, and The Joker's contentment at disrupting the natural order of things on even the tiniest scale shows us everything that makes the series so interesting, all in one microcosmic confrontation.
At that point, you've just seen one of the more powerful explosions of anger on screen in years; Bale's Batman is purposeful and certainly not happy-go-lucky, but we're constantly reminded that he's inside a suit worn by a man who generally wants to be liked, even when he's ensuring that he gets his way. Bruce Wayne and Batman both take pains, when they can, to make people feel comfortable around them, to be reasonable, and always to do what's right. Affability is something Bruce Wayne is genuinely concerned about, when he has the luxury of such details in his life. When he's driven finally to charge across the room and make us wonder whether he'll fail to uphold his hard and fast rule of never killing anyone, we certainly believe it, we certainly understand how he got pushed to that point. And we're shaken by it, and afterward, we end up appreciating all the more what a genuine obstacle virtue could be when you're asked to eradicate such malignance.
Across the frame from Batman, The Joker's cackling but oddly vulernable. It's certainly not a new idea, but the closest The Joker ever comes to really respecting anyone is when he faces Batman: no one else has travelled as far as he has down his respective road, even if they couldn't be any more opposed. In the face of Batman's rage, The Joker realizes he is vulnerable, and Ledger puts that in his voice. But he still finds that apathy, that nihilism, that makes The Joker who he is. Later, he begs, under his breath, for Batman to kill him. Batman's down the block and can't hear him. But even when they're face to face in the interrogation room and The Joker can't say anything he doesn't want Batman to hear, you can still plainly feel in Ledger's voice that he doesn't care how vulnerable he is. Because even though he's as suicidal as the next homicidal maniac, he's still committed enough to his principles that he can only be happy if Batman kills him--because Batman will never kill anyone, no matter how evil they are. This suicide by superhero (and under no other circumstances) makes The Joker a villain with a deeply perverted twist, and he even trots out the predictable line about the immovable object and the unstoppable force. But even that canned bit of language feels just right for the moment when it comes, and you realize that for these characters it's about more than winning the game when only one person is allowed to cheat, as with most superhero and cops and robbers movies.
Before he can make what he wants of the world, Batman will have to pull the temple down on his own head for a while. The world can't accept that he's trustworthy to always do the right thing, because they know nothing of him, other than the outcomes of his most famous deeds. Being unable to establish that trust is the price for operating outside the established justice system--and, as The Joker so gleefully points out, deviating from the plan makes people go crazy. Bruce Wayne sets aside most of the rules to become Batman; only human life is inviolable in the ethics behind the symbol he creates with Batman. Honoring the sanctity of human life earned him scorn and ridicule from his ninja masters in BB; it was all that separated him from The Joker in TDK. Next we'll surely see that it's not enough to satisfy the thirst for structure that the average citizen carries around everywhere.
Can we really trust anyone to do the right thing all the time if human life is all they care about? They say, after all, that madness is like gravity...all any of us really requires is a little push and we're sucked into it. Don't people need a guiding system of law in order to stay virtuous, to stay lawful, to stay respectful of the world around them? Isn't each and every one of us stained by the potential capacity to break any rule, even to take a life, if properly provoked?
When was the last time a comic book movie left you with these questions?
I'm gonna make this pencil...disappear. Ta-da! It's gone! December 09 JarheadJarhead isn't an easy movie to get a hold of. They have excellent source material in the form of Anthony Swofford's novel. He brings the events and the milieu of the common Marine soldier to life, and the filmmakers effectively put a camera in front of it all. There's a real feeling of truth to it, that this is how boot camp, and training, and deployment, and combat must be for at least some of the soldiers. Everything that happens feels like the kind of story you might hear later in the evening at a rowdy bar, and you'd hear it from someone who has the tattoos to prove he lived it. Swofford has more than the tattoos, but the movie doesn't have much more than the war stories.
So many war stories start with boot camp, and this is no exception. Boot camp feels strangely derivative and fresh in this film--the assembled recruits and the abuse feel infinitely familiar, but Jake Gyllenhaal seems perplexed by it in a way that somehow feels singular. Basic training, after this, feels new only because Jamie Foxx seems funny and intelligent and capable of being a staff sergeant; usually such a role is cast primarily for a bluff shrewdness alone. Foxx has it, but not only conveys the sense of a man with the job of preparing young men for danger, but a man who enjoys more than a sense of simple, unconsidered duty in his work.
What makes the most pleasant surprise of the film is the convincing emotional consequences of banal events in the lives of the soldiers. Dim witted fistfights that start over nothing feel like the hot-blooded outbursts common to late adolescence; the soldiers constantly test each other in the way very young adult men do. At times, it's actually difficult to follow the movie for all the times you think "if they only knew what they'll know after they've lived through their 20s, they wouldn't be letting themselves be bothered so much by these things about each other."
Ultimately, you have to decide how curious you are about what it must be like sitting around in wartime, agonizingly waiting 90% of the time for the other, horrifying 10% of the time to get over with already. All the sitting around seems to be a point the filmmakers want to get across; the film spends an age waiting for the brief final flourish of combat. The men serve under officers just as overbearing, sarcastic, and eager as they are, only more experienced and charged with greater authority. At times, the officers take pains to scare the soldiers out of their wits, to infuriate them at the enemy, and then to remind them of just how little control they have over their environment. The endless combination of punches--adrenaline and thwart--leave the men hanging in a state of mortal anticipation.
Naturally, the war comes, finally, and it's famously short, as we all remember from the news reports of the day. After months of stripping themselves down to their most animalistic impulses, the men are sent home after hardly any time at all. It's not either spoiling the movie to reveal that the war is short, of course. As the parallels unavoidably make plain, the long-term psychological horrors visited upon Viet Nam veterans await these newly minted combat veterans. Even with so much less time spent fighting and dying hand to hand, veterans of the first Gulf War were as systematically decivilized as any Viet Nam-era recruit. Reclaiming their civility (in all the senses of the word) will be as difficult for them. What awaits the veterans of the second Gulf War may be worse. Their ritual disintegration into killing machines happened for possibly even less of an objective than the war in Viet Nam. December 08 Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of AzkabanIt's been a few years since they really seemed to have their omnipresent way with us, but the Harry Potter books still represent a commercial juggernaut that's almost unique. Combined, the series' sales numbers are only three places behind the Bible. Ahead of the Koran!
Rowling has a lazy way of battering her way through action. Her brilliantly crafted characters find themselves in fantastic situations over and over again, but she gives us more psychological insights into their little tiffs than she does into the courage and forethought required of Harry, Hermione, and Ron to get through the perils they face. Somehow, it doesn't seem like she's doing this out of a desire to gently reassure us that the little day to day troubles we face are more important than defeating the greatest evil we can imagine. It seems like she's just not willing to roll the dice and examine the nature of courage and self-doubt for fear of looking like she doesn't know what she's talking about.
So. When the kids struggle to find a date or get over their self-consciousness around the opposite sex, we read pages and pages of interior monologue. We know everything they're thinking. When they duel their archnemeses, we learn about the interesting attributes of the nemeses, and then we're on to the action and the happy ending.
This is Rowling's biggest weakness. But all 6 books so far are worth reading. Simply put, they're the kind of thing publishers (and who knows who many others) always promise--fun for all ages. You just have to be in the mood to get swept away.
It's too bad for Rowling that her movie adaptations came along at the same as the Lord of the Rings films, which boast easily the most satisfying psychological insights of any fantasty series. Kids seem to start reading each series around the same age (late elementary school or middle school). But the LotR fan tends to grow up still a fan well into adulthood. If the HP fan is still a fan after a few years, it's usually a sheepish confession rather than a defining passion.
What the filmmakers have done with the adaptations of Rowling's books is every bit the commercial goliath that the books represent. Not unlike the LotR films. Films have to pass the same tests the books do to reach these heights of numerical success. Characters must be believable, the scenes have to play, the villains have to make a splash. The central conflicts have to make sense, and there can't be more than a handful of tiny lapses in believability throughout. The priorities of these goals are different here than they would be for a film with serious artistic goals, of course. But with such huge casts and daunting requirements of the special effects department, it's worth thinking about how far they filmmakers get when they put the HP books on the screen.
Without a doubt the best thing about each of these films is the cast. Rowling demands all-British casts for the primary roles, and there's a willing cohesiveness to the ensemble work that seems to require too much modesty from the leads to have an American peer. Without a doubt, there are many amazing ensemble casts in American film, but the heirarchical structure of the roles, given the stardom of so many of the actors, is amazingly precise.
Chris Columbus mainly puts the novels through their paces for the first two films. Chamber of Secrets stands out from the series mainly for its cleverly rendered CGI elf character, Dobby, who represents the wizard boarding school equivalent of Cassandra, except wracked with far deeper self-loathing. Everyone involved knows they can count on tens of millions of people who adore the characters to come and see the films, so setting up the events as they take place in the book and putting them through their paces seems to satisfy Columbus. The three friends have to pool their intellectual resources, as in the first novel/film, and they remain steadfast in their willingness to operate independently from the faculty.
Columbus steps aside for The Prisoner of Azkaban, though, and the series seems to grant that their audience may be growing older and wiser, despite still holding on to a PG rating. Alfonso Cuaron directed this film, and he's willing to make the visual style much scarier and more energetic than the prior two. His director of photography, Michael Seresin, gives the film a smoother flow, less predictable camera setups, and a much deeper sense of evil and instability afoot around the kids.
Cuaron is willing to leave the audience hanging when it's appropriate--often, Harry and the others aren't sure at first what's happening to them when they have to confront one evil force or another. Unlike Columbus, Cuaron leaves us for some stretches without any more footing than the characters have.
Not knowing what might happen next, and wondering whether it might turn out happily, is the rarest thing in adaptiations of hugely popular children's books. Everyone knows the stories, and everyone knows children's books end happily. How do you make them genuinely uncertain, let alone scary? Getting that done has to be one of the more difficult jobs in filmmaking.
The best of the film is the introduction of some truly unreliable adults. The first two films had some double-crossing villains, but that's standard serial-film cliffhanger fare. Azkaban has Gary Oldman, inspired by the chance to ride the ragged edge of sanity for fresh eyes. He's the prisoner of the title. He's been coming unhinged for a decade and a half at least; at times it wears out its welcome. But when he's at his best, as he has been countless times, he seems to have access to lunacy that's both troublingly familiar and comfortingly alien.
As the chances of his interacting with the kids grows higher, we get more and more nervous for them. As usual, he's at his best in manic confrontations, screaming at an old friend he thought he knew "I would have died! I would have died rather than betray my friends!" It's probably a line that's been said in half a dozen films, but Oldman makes it seem genuinely moving. He's instantly convincing in a state of anguished paranoia. It's hard to imagine whom else they might have thought about auditioning for the part.
As the series goes on, his character, Sirius Black, will come to represent more and more complex territory for Harry to navigate. He's the best thing about this film, which is easily the best of the three produced up to that point. Since it's a series of 7, gathering real momentum by the third film is probably a close call. But they made it. November 24 It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad WorldIt's hard to convey just how huge a waste of intelligence, star power, and effort this movie represents. The cast is unbelievable; even today you recognize a couple dozen people, and a close reading of the credits throws a bunch more familiar names at you. No one's safe, the bit players are famous in this movie, in a lot of cases.
But what a stupid mess. People did the same exact thing 100% better in Rat Race 40 years later. And it's not like Rat Race is a big classic. How did they let all this talent slide? It has to start with Stanley Kramer. He can't take the blame for writing it, but for heaven's sake why did he keep the takes he kept? There had to be funnier readings lying around. It sure doesn't seem like they were short of money, or time, or studio patience. Were they hoping they'd keep it spontanous by just keeping whatever blurted out of people's mouths the first time they rolled camera? They did shoot some scenes dozens of times--stunts and physical bits. Why is virtually every bit of comic dialogue staggeringly unfunny? They had all but a half dozen of the best comic actors who were alive at the time!
What seems to be the most common type of scene (in dialogue readings) is a pair (or more) of people arguing about what they should do next. Everyone's in a hurry; the entire cast is trying to cover ground to find a stash of $350,000. One person blusters away furiously about how he doesn't know why they're still standing around, and the other one responds with some variation on "What are you, some kind of a nut? Will you shut up for a second?" Evidently, this little breech of etiquette was good for howls back in the early 60s--or someone had great faith that it was. Just about everyone in the cast has to play something like those lines at least once.
It's hard to decide who's worst. Ethel Merman is set up as a titanically annoying mother in law; they give her the benefit of every cheap stereotype they can think of and she responds with the shrillest edges of her famous soprano. She gets probably the lion's share of screen time in the film, but she's a one-note character designed to alienate the others and cause conflict...she has the same effect on the audience, unfortunately.
Milton Berle tries for droll and ends up just withering onscreen every time he appears. Sid Caesar evidently wants to come across as loose-limbed and capable of making anything funny; he just plays as a typical nebbish with limited analytical skills and less personality. Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Johnathan Winters, Phil Silvers...all these top-billed names who you've always been told are comic geniuses of another era all come running out and all fall flat on their faces in the most contrived and predictable ways. The most annoying is Dick Shawn, who builds his character around the cheapest, most mean-spirited formulaic bits of beach bum stereotyping he can muster.
But the biggest waste is Spencer Tracy. He really has presence in this movie, but he seems completely ignorant of the fact that he's a talented actor. He just bumbles through his scenes, essentially convincing but adding nothing. His struggles and strife as a put-upon family man are the most embarassing of the many scenes depicting the "emasculation of the American man" at the hands of marriage and home life.
Out of nowhere near the end of the second act comes the lone jolt of energy the movie has to offer: Jim Backus--Jim Backus!--as an alcoholic layabout who obviously has more money than he can ever spend. He's essentially in the movie because someone has to own the flashiest airplane at a private airstrip, and he's been chosen. His Locust Valley Lockjaw line readings and flustered exasperation at Mickey Rooney's unwillingness to mix him an old-fashioned are the funniest parts of the movie by far. He's just doing a Thurston P. Howell riff, but he gives it real energy and seems to want it to stand on its own two legs. Unbelievably, he steals the movie in his two minutes of screen time.
It's a painful stretch to sit through to the end, watching them re-create gags that worked better for Warner Brothers and Bugs Bunny. They constantly stretch for the hammiest, zaniest buffoonery they can think of, and then overplay it after giving it the weakest, most transparent set-up imaginable. It's too bad, given the endless list of comics they had in front of the camera. |
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