I am, of course, mightily pleased that my favorite movie of 2007, No Country For Old Men, won the big awards last night. For those just joining the conversation, or those who are wondering why No Country was actually the year's Best Picture, my thoughts on the movie can be found here: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4. If that is not enough Coen analysis for you, the whole kit and kaboodle of my thoughts on the Coens movies can be found here.

I know I'm getting old when the Oscars start making sense to me.

In which I chat about some of the things that occurred to me while watching the movie, in no particular order. Many spoilers within.

Two sides of the same coin?

Again, as this excellent movie is still in general release (and not in release at all in other parts of the world), I beseech the reader to see it before reading the below, where I discuss the personality of the movie's enigmatic bad guy, Anton Chigurh.

I repeat: this movie is quite excellent and I strongly recommend it. What's more, I strongly recommend you see it before reading the rest of this entry, where much will be spoiled. Besides which you probably won't be able know what I'm talking about for the most part.

If you are fan of analysis of The Big Lebowski (if you are reading this I assume you are) I advise you to get thee hence to The Big Lebowski, a new volume in the authoritative BFI Film Classics line, by J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters.

In addition to a comprehensive overview of Lebowski's place in the noir tradition, the essay by Tyree and Walters does an excellent job of rooting out and exposing some of the more baffling layers of meaning in the movie and includes thoughtful, revealing passages on the sexual politics of the Coens' movies (where men are always trying to "act like men," and failing, as women succeed by acting like women), Walter's fetish for strict adherence to rules (his military life gave him meaning, meaning he hasn't found since), the familial aspects of the Dude/Walter/Donny team, and the significance of Jesus's relationship to Walter (Jesus representing Christ, Walter representing the Pharisees, men who observe the trappings of Judaism while caring nothing about it), and much much more.

HOW'S THE MOVIE? Let me say right up front, No Country For Old Men is, by a wide margin, the Coen Bros' best movie so far. How good is it? This is how good it is: every movie they've done up until now, including startling masterworks like Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou, feel like student films in comparison. No Country For Old Men brings a brand new level of seriousness, a far subtler touch, an unexpected depth and a broad, expansive sense of humanity to the Coen universe. In adapting Cormac McCarthy's novel, they scaled their visual vocabulary way back to match his bare-bones prose. No Country has little of the visual kinetics of movies like Raising Arizona or The Hudsucker Proxy. It tells its dramatic, extraordinary story mostly in simple, uninflected shots and has sequences of a suffocating level of suspense that Hitchcock himself could not have executed better. It has more respect and compassion for its characters than any other Coen movie and successfully brings an eerie, weary vision of human frailty to the screen.

So, yeah, if you haven't seen it, I strongly suggest you go and see it. If you have seen it, feel free to peruse the following. I warn you: many key plot points, revelations and reversals are revealed within.

If you have seen No Country For Old Men, you know that it contains a virtual compendium of Coen moments -- it's practically a Coen's Greatest Hits album, quoting at least once from every one of their previous movies. For instance:

THE LITTLE MAN: Goldthwait Higginson Dorr is what you'd call a "character." He dresses a century out of fashion, wears Colonel Sanders (or Robert Altman?) facial hair, has crooked fake teeth and a weird, perverse giggle. He's a self-described "criminal mastermind" (although we hear nothing of his past escapades) and his goal in The Ladykillers is to steal a bunch of money from a riverboat casino.

The crew hired to back up this bizarre, only-in-the-movies protagonist had better be similarly detailed and idiosyncratic. Who do we have? We have Garth Pancake, an aging hippie explosives expert with a hidden capitalist streak, who seems interesting enough at first. We have The General, an ex-Vietcong tunneling expert who doesn't say much but can keep a lit cigarette in his mouth for indefinite periods of time.

Then we have Lump, who's a big dumb guy. How will the Coens, those most original, interesting writers, make Lump fresh and new? Well, they decide to make him bigger and dumber than humanly possible, a wheezing mouth-breather incapable of forming a sentence. Which isn't very interesting, but at least it's a solid choice.

THE LITTLE MAN: For the first and (so far) last time, the Coens have chosen to make a movie about a protagonist who is not seeking to improve his station in life. Rather, Miles Massey is a master of the universe, at the peak of his career, loaded with cash (he employs a man to "wax his jet"), loved by his underlings, feared and respected by his peers.

Because Miles has everything, the plot of Intolerable Cruelty must involve him losing everything in the pursuit of -- what's this? -- love.

This is, of course, the Coens first and (so far) only romantic comedy, and there are aspects of it that work very well indeed. Miles Massey is a swell creation and George Clooney plays the part in a way that not only recalls Cary Grant, but actually sustains the comparison. A movie star for the ages, this George Clooney fellow is, he's going places, mark my words.

( Marilyn -- you're exposed! )

Bogart with a beautiful woman, Barton with a mosquito -- sounds about right.

What says Christmas better than a dark, sweaty noir about a has-been Hollywood screenwriter who may or may not be a vicious killer?

I don't know what forces prevented me from watching Nicholas Ray's 1950 masterpiece of paranoia, heartache and broken dreams, but I'm glad I finally got around to it. And about two-thirds of the way through, it struck me that In a Lonely Place would make a smashing double feature with the Coen Bros' Barton Fink.

The parallels between the two movies are too many to be mere coincidence. In some cases, the Coens have kept elements of Ray's movie intact, in other cases they've ingeniously inverted them.

UPDATE: You know, I almost forgot -- The Man Who Wasn't There was shot on color stock which was then desaturated to achieve some of the most lustrous black-and-white photography in cinema history.  However, because of the demands of the marketplace, in some markets the movie was released in color.  For those who wonder what The Man Who Wasn't There looks like in color, the answer can be found here.
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So I'm reading the new biography of Charles Schulz. Schulz, like Bob Dylan and the Coen Bros, was from Minnesota. Like Dylan and the Coen Bros, Schulz consistently, throughout his life, downplayed the cultural significance of his work. Bob Dylan says "I'm just a song and dance man," the Coens say "O Brother is a simple hick comedy," and Charles Schulz, to the end of his days, rued the smallness of his ambition, bemoaning the fact that he spent fifty years doing nothing more than drawing a simple comic strip.

Just as Dylan and the Coens have, occasionally, seen fit to acknowledge that yeah, they're pretty proud of some of their work, Schulz, when pressed, would reveal that he thought of himself as a serious artist doing better work than any of his contemporaries in his field (which, in fact, he was).

Dylan, it is well known, is obsessed with identity and masks, and the Coens have proven to be impenetrable in their interviews. Schulz, as well, said that he wore his unassuming looks as a kind of mask -- he always knew he was better than anyone around him, but craved invisibility, anonymity, lest anyone take too much notice of him.

(And then there's Prince, another Minnesota oddball, who seems to not have gotten the memo about Minnesotans being reserved and self-effacing.)

I clearly remember seeing this movie for the first time. I was in Paris with urbaniak  and our wives and we were all very excited to see the new Coen Bros movie before it opened in the US. Before the title sequence even began, I knew that I was watching a singular work of genius.

"Your revolution is over! The bums lost!" images swiped from the excellent Coen resource "You Know, For Kids!".

NOTE: I have gone over (not to be confused with "micturated upon") the deeper meanings of The Big Lebowski once before -- you may read my previous analysis here.

THE LITTLE GUY: The Dude is unique in the Coen universe in being a protagonist who is perfectly happy with his social standing. He does not seek money, betterment, achievement, a child, a mate, clean clothes or, really, anything besides a state of blissful intoxication. Anything he does he does because someone else is forcing him to do it. As the Stranger describes him, "he's the laziest man in Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the running for laziest worldwide." He's not particularly interested in saving the kidnapped girl, recovering the stolen fortune or even defending himself from hoodlums. Even his desire to reclaim his soiled rug is something that his bellicose friend Walter puts him up to -- if it were up to The Dude, his peed-on rug would be worth it just for the story to tell his bowling buddies.

(It's also worth noting that, for all the time The Dude spends hanging out in a bowling alley, listening to bowling games of the past and fantasizing about bowling scenarios, we never actually see him bowl.)

Fargo is a remake of Blood Simple, insofar as they are both crime dramas without protagonists. Oh, one remembers Fargo as having a protagonist, but it doesn't really. What it has is a likable main character, which is a different thing from a protagonist, and is something that Blood Simple doesn't really have. Marge, the pregnant sheriff, is but one-third of the three-pronged narrative of Fargo, and does not show up until the beginning of Act II. Up until that point, it appears that the protagonist of Fargo is Jerry Lundergaard, the hapless, bitterly frustrated car salesman who plots to have his wife kidnapped. That would, in fact, make Marge the antagonist, the Javert to Jerry's Jean Valjean. But, as the narrative develops, we find that Fargo is balanced between Jerry, Marge and Carl Showalter, the fuming, delusional, small-time crook whom Jerry hires to kidnap his wife.

( Real good then )

THE LITTLE GUY: No Coen Bros movie illustrates their interest in social mobility more graphically than The Hudsucker Proxy. Norville Barnes is a hick from Muncie, Indiana who rises up, up, up in the sophisticated New York corporate world, then falls down, down, down and then, miraculously (the word is not too strong) rises back up to the top.

"Up" and "Down" are not mere words in The Hudsucker Proxy -- they are story elements, almost characters. The action takes place in New York City, certainly the most vertical place in America, and largely within the Hudsucker headquarters, a 45-story skyscraper (44, not counting the mezzanine). Great emphasis is placed on the verticality of the building and what it means to its inhabitants. Norville begins his work at Hudsucker in the basement mailroom, a seething, windowless dungeon filled with oppressed humanity, and ends his work at the top, where the offices are huge, unpopulated rooms with vast floor space and high windows. Waring Hudsucker (the outgoing president) starts out at the top, both metaphorically and physically, but finds the top wanting, and so jumps out the 44th-floor window (45th, not counting the mezzanine) and plunges to his death. But we see by the end of the movie that Waring Hudsucker has risen again, this time into Heaven, before descending, yet again, to help Norville out of his problem.

Barton and Charlie compare their soles.

THE LITTLE GUY: I don't like to dwell on the symbolism of Opening Shots, but the first thing we see in Barton Fink is a lead weight descending on a rope, backstage in a Broadway theater. The weight comes down as the protagonist's career goes up.

Barton Fink finds its protagonist at a moment of transition, socially speaking. He's just become a success on Broadway and is quite pleased with himself, but is tempted by the opportunity to go to Hollywood and write for the movies. When he gets to Hollywood, he finds that no one knows who he is, no one has seen his play, no one cares about his ideas and he's back at the bottom of the social order again.

(It was fantasies like Barton Fink that led me to believe that life could be good as a playwright in New York. Damn you, Barton Fink!)

THE LITTLE GUY: For one of the few times in their movies, the Coens tell a story not about a poor man. Tom Reagan is the right-hand man (I think) of Leo, the Irish mob boss who controls whatever vaguely-east-coast city this story takes place in. So although he is not the top dog, he's close enough to the top to make a difference in his world.

THE LITTLE GUY: Like most Coen Bros' movies, Raising Arizona is about a man trying, and failing, to raise his station in life. Like the protagonist of many noirs, Hi has a wife who wants something and doesn't care what Hi has to do to get it. In Jules Dassin's Brute Force, Whit Bissel's wife demands a fur, forcing him to resort to embezzlement to procure it. Ed (that is, Hi's wife) doesn't want a fur or a ring or anything material -- she wants a baby. With the baby, she will have family, and with family, she reasons, she will have "decency," respectability.  (And, as we will see, she expects nothing less than divine salvation.) 

Hi loves Ed, but he's less comfortable about the idea of a baby and unsure about the notion of decency. But he goes through with the theft of the baby for Ed's sake.

THE HERO'S JOURNEY: In the opening montage of Blood Simple, a voice-over from reptilian slimeball Loren Visser tells us "What I know about is Texas -- and down here, you're on your own." That line sums up Blood Simple and, in a certain way, the whole of the Coen Bros' work. When you watch a Coen Bros' movie, oftentimes you're on your own -- they're not going to tell you who to root for, they're not going to be your guide, they're not going to hold your hand or flatter your prejudices or spoon-feed you plot.

The idea that the Coens would choose for their first feature to create a story without a protagonist is remarkable in and of itself. That Blood Simple is riveting cinema regardless is a testament to the sheer raw talent these guys had, lo these 23 years ago. Just think! They'd never made a movie before, and yet Blood Simple positively overflows with precise, concise filmmaking, stark, innovative scene construction and bravura visual dynamism.

Spoilers.

The first time I saw this movie, I didn't like it much.  For a comedy it wasn't funny enough, for a mystery it wasn't satisfying.  There was too much weirdness, not enough punch, couldn't figure out what any of it meant.  The cowboy, the dream sequences, the dotty peripheral characters, it just didn't gel for me.

But all Coen movies are worth seeing more than once, so when it came out on video I watched it again.

It still didn't work for me as a comedy, although it worked better.  It worked better for me as a mystery, but not that much better.  It seemed to me that the movie worked best as a study of an unlikely friendship, between the foggy sixties liberal and the hothead throwback Vietnam vet.  I still couldn't follow the mystery and of course it doesn't really matter.  I shrugged and gave up on it.

But, you know, there's so much going on in it, so many details in it that stick out at weird angles.  And a couple of years later I rented it again.

Suddenly, something clicked.  What does the cowboy say at the beginning?  "Every once in a while, there is a man who is the right man for his time."  And the characters are constantly talking about how things were in the past, and judging current events based on how they feel about the past.  Round about the moment where the Dude says to Walter "Man, you're living in the past" and Walter screams "3000 years of tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you're goddamn right I'm living in the past!" and suddenly my hair stood on end, because a whole other layer of meaning snapped into focus.

The Big Lebowski is a movie about how nothing means anything anymore.

The cowboy, the quintessential American icon, is our narrator.  He appears to be a "real" cowboy who has somehow made it out of the mists of history and legend and kept going west until he came to Venice Beach in 1991, at the time of the Gulf War.  He introduces the Dude with profound words of deep meaning, as we watch the Dude shuffle around a 24-hour supermarket and pay for a quart of milk with a check.  Then, even in the midst of his well-worded, carefully-considered, eloquently spoken introduction, the cowboy loses his train of thought.  It's like he can't keep up the pretense any more.  Or the 20th century has suddenly caught up with him.  The icon, perhaps the soul, of America is stuck here in the late 20th century and he's looking for something to hold on to.  And here comes the Dude.

The Big Lebowski is, of course, a noir.  And not just a noir, but an LA noir.  The title is even a reference to one of the most famous LA noirs, The Big Sleep.  As we quickly learn, however, the LA of Raymond Chandler, no longer exists.  This LA is filled with bowling alleys, burnouts and punks, none of whom ever have the slightest idea of what the hell they're ever talking about.

There's a moment in the second act where the Dude goes over to Ben Gazzara's house, and Ben is talking to him about the money, and he suddenly gets a phone call.  Ben takes the call and hurriedly jots something down on a notepad.  He leaves the room and the Dude darts across the room, takes a pencil and shades the paper.  Why does he do that?  Because he saw it in a detective movie.  The Dude, at that moment, is finally thinking like a detective.  A movie detective, but a detective nonetheless.  And he shades the paper and what does he find?  Ben Gazzara has written down not a phone number, nor a safe-combination, nor a cryptic acronym; he has scrawled the image of a man with a big dick.

Because this is a movie about how nothing means anything anymore.  LA still exists, but the LA of Raymond Chandler does not.  Why does it not exist?  Because the noirs of the 40s took place against the backdrop of World War II.  The horror and agony and anxiety of that war, which could not be expressed in the actual war films of the day, were instead expressed in the noirs of the day, the darkness and duplicity and violence of detective stories.  The Big Lebowski, by contrast, pointedly takes place against the background of the Gulf War, a war which meant nothing and acheived nothing (and, history has shown, did not have a happy ending).

The fact is, nothing in the movie means anything.  The Dude is hired to be the courier for a ransom, but it turns out that there is no kidnapping, there is no hostage and there is no ransom money.  The Dude is cynical enough to suggest that the kidnap victim "kidnapped herself," but he doesn't take it far enough.  The fact is, the "kidnap victim" didn't even know any of this was happening.  And who are the "real" kidnappers?  Nihlists, whose cry is "We believe in nozzing!"

Why is the Dude the right man for his time?  Because he is the only man who can solve the case.  The Dude is a man for whom nothing already means anything.  And not in some "nihlist" way, either.  The Dude simply doesn't care.  The Dude, as he says to the cowboy, "abides."  The Dude takes it easy.  Nothing affects him.  The tumbling tumbleweed, at the beginning of the movie?  We think it's a talking tumbleweed at first.  But it's the Dude.  The Dude is the one who is rootless, blowing on the breeze toward the beach.

That's not Walter.  Walter clings to everything way too much, searches desperately for everything to have meaning.  No wonder he converted to Judaism, it's the only religion that means anything to him.  And the core of the movie is the scenes between, what's this, "the mismatched buddy detectives," Dude and Walter, one of whom skates along not paying attention and the other whom attaches far too much meaning to every new scrap of clue.

The rich man has no money.  The kidnappers have no hostage.  The hostage isn't even in town.  Donny's death means nothing.  No wonder Walter scrambles to find meaning, tries way too hard.

And now, tonight's viewing, my first of the movie since Katrina, reveals another level.  The Big Lebowski's rant to the Dude about the rug, "Let me get this straight, every time a rug is urinated upon in this city, I am to pay compensation?"  introduces a political thrust to the narrative.  The Dude's rug has been ruined because of the Big Lebowski's chicanery, but he feels no responsibility.  Instead, the Big Lebowski lectures the Dude about personal responsibility, thrift and hard work.  Keep in mind, this movie was released two years before Bush II was elected.

Then, this leitmotif keeps coming around, "fucking you in the ass."  People keep threatening to fuck the Dude and Walter in the ass.  This always comes down to people of means using force and violence to make the lives of the poor worse, sending goons into the Dude's house, over and over, to wreck the place.  Walter, for one, has had enough, and when it appears that a 15-year-old kid has "fucked him in the ass," he goes out into a street and demolishes what turns out to be an innocent stranger's car while screaming, over and over at the top of his lungs, "This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!"  He's certainly angry at the kid, but in a way he's angry about the ass-fucking that he's getting every day from the Big Lebowskis of the world.

Finally, at Donny's funeral, he's had enough.  He's not going to pay $182 for an urn.  He's not going to get fucked in the ass again.  He's going to put his friend's (okay, he wasn't that much of a friend) ashes into a Folger's coffee can and dump his ashes into the Pacific (although, of course, he misses) before he gets fucked in the ass again.

And the Dude and Walter go back to bowling.  They are even, miraculously, still in the finals, despite the death of their partner.  The Dude abides.

This movie, for me, went from being pale and unpersuasive to standing as the Coen's densest, most intricate, most interesting and, in a way, most profound movie.