I am Kyle's self-indulgence

I finally got to see the Coen Brothers' latest offering last night. I had given up hope of catching it in the theater, but the Academy Award nominations popularized the film enough that it actually came to our little theater in Kirksville.

I've obviously been very anxious to see No Country For Old Men: Joel and Ethan Coen are my favorite filmmakers of all time, and for a graduate English class I even wrote a paper analyzing the depiction of American landscapes in their movies. As soon as I learned the premise of their newest offering I knew it would fit perfectly with the thesis I once spent a semester developing.

After finally getting to see movie, however, I had mixed feelings. Sure, it's a magnificent artistic achievement: brilliantly acted, directed, shot, and edited, No Country For Old Men certainly deserved all of the praise it's been given. The only things missing from it are those things that made me love the Coen Brothers: their snappy dialogue, their post-modern manipulation of film genre, and the element of the surreal or supernatural in their movies.

The movie in the Coens' body of work that No Country For Old Men most resembles is their debut, Blood Simple, which also featured a protagonist being pursued by a relentless killer in the midst of a barren Texas landscape. It similarly lacks the humorous dialogue of the Coens' other films, although if you look closely you can see the brothers begin to play a little with the film medium. In one scene the camera moves down the length of a bar and must move up and over a drunk man passed out across its path. The photographer of Blood Simple warned the Coen Brothers against this shot, saying it would draw the audience's attention to the existence of the camera. The Coens replied that this was the exact effect they desired.

Even such subtle playfulness with audience awareness is absent from No Country For Old Men. Many critics have claimed it is their best work because of this fact, but that playfulness is what made me love the Coen Brothers in the first place. With their three most recent films adapted from other people's stories, I would like to see them direct an original script more in the style on which they built their reputation.

Nevertheless, it's unfair to judge a movie against what I would like it to be, so I must acknowledge that in every way No Country For Old Men is an unqualified artistic success. The scene between Carla and Chigurh alone is worth the price of admission, and features the most inspired line I've heard spoken in a movie theater in a long time: "The coin has nothing to do with it. It's just you."

Post-script: After writing this I checked the Coen Brothers' filmography at Wikipedia, where I saw that one upcoming project is an adaptation of The Yiddish Policemen's Union. While I would love to see this, I still maintain my preference for original Coen Brothers stories (which we will apparently get in Burn After Reading).