Two Great Films
by Danny Fisher
One of the pleasures of being home for the holidays is that I get to see a lot of movies with my family (especially my dad). In the past two days, I’ve seen two recently released films that I would consider great–they’ve stayed with me, and I suspect they will continue to stay with me for years to come. The first is Ethan and Joel Coen’s critically-lauded, awards season juggernaut No Country for Old Men.
Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy (whose book The Road won a Pulitzer Prize last year), the film, set in Texas in 1980, tells the story of out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (played with extraordinary restraint by Josh Brolin) who happens upon a border drug deal gone bad. With only one mortally wounded survivor left, walking away with a satchel containing $2.4 million is a cinch for Moss. Late the same night, though, his guilt (or compassion) overwhelms him and he returns to the scene with water for the survivor. This proves to be a catastrophic mistake, as he is identified by the cartel behind the drug deal. Moss goes on the lam, but he’s pursued by psychopathic bounty hunter Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem in what is hands-down the greatest and most horrifying portrayal of villainy ever seen on screen). At about this point, the police start noticing a pretty grisly trail of carnage, and investigating falls to Terrell County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (played with unforgettable gravitas by Tommy Lee Jones), who is in the middle of an existential crisis–dire straits that are not helped by his coming face-to-face with the problem of evil so completely embodied in Chigurh.
Much like Fargo, their magnum opus, the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is about provincial folks grappling with extraordinary crimes. In Fargo, though, the criminal element seemed to occupy the same mundane landscape as the film’s heroine. In the case of No Country for Old Men, the baddy is so terrible that he seems to occupy another planet altogether: Bardem’s Chigurh has an unplaceable name, an indecipherable accent, an arsenal that looks otherworldly, and a truly perplexing pageboy haircut. No one is prepared for the quality of his fiendishness. The Coens, though, seem to suggest that they (and by extension we) ought to be; to quote Sheriff Bell, in a world where we’ve “stopped hearin’ ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am,’ the end is pretty much in sight.” The line is humorous, but the sentiment not: what else but a monster like Chigurh can we expect if we even begin to “overlook” each other’s humanity?
As a viewer, and as a Buddhist, I was most impacted by the sad plight of Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. In large part, I’d say this is due to Jones’ profoundly affecting performance–it’s the best of his distinguished career. He’s astonishing, especially when you consider that he’s probably played one too many parts like this one. His eyes suggest perpetual mourning for his own broken heart. Saddled with most of the substantial dialogue in the film, he gives McCarthy and the Coens’ words an added poignancy.
[SPOILERS AHEAD!] What made the most lasting impression on me were the closing scenes of the film, which all feature Sheriff Bell. In one moment, he visits crippled ex-cop Ellis (played brilliantly by a stoic Barry Corbin). Bell is devastated that Chigurh has gotten away with everything–the money, the murders, everything. It’s the final straw for him; he can’t believe in God anymore, and he can’t be a cop anymore. He tells his friend this. Cutting through Bell’s messiah complex, the wizened codger says to him bluntly, “You can’t stop what’s comin’. It ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.” As one trying to make good on a bodhisattva vow, this line touched me very deeply. It called to mind something Bob Thurman once said about “Buddhist Messiahs”:
- [We] pass into a kind of rapture of agony or madness of over-sensitivity, a burning impulse to do something, anything, to lessen the great mass of suffering that is the ordinary life cycle. We take upon ourselves the great pressure, the unbearable burden of responsibility of doing something…
[...]
Nothing else has any importance, nothing must deter us, we must become the sole parent of all helpless living beings.
At the same time that we feel this determination, however, we also keenly feel our inability to carry it out. We realize we need complete freedom from afflictions ourselves, as well as virtual omniscience about the condition of others. We need to know the techniques to lead the sufferers to happiness. And we need a perfect impartiality towards all others, coupled with a complete selflessness. In short, we realize that we must ourselves become perfect Buddhas first. [emphasis added]The final scene of the film echoes the last scene of Fargo: it’s a picture of domestic normalcy. Sheriff Bell, on the first morning of his retirement, is having breakfast with his wife (played terrifically by Tess Harper). Quite unlike Fargo, though, which closed on a distinct note of hope, the concluding moments of No Country for Old Men lack hope. Despite the presentation of a striking vision of peace in the final seconds, it’s a tragedy to the end. I know that I will never forget the last lines of the film…
- LORETTA BELL: How’d you sleep?
SHERIFF ED TOM BELL: I don’t know. Had dreams.
LORETTA BELL: Well, you got time for ‘em now. Anythin’ interesting?
SHERIFF ED TOM BELL: Well they always is to the party concerned.
LORETTA BELL: I’ll be polite.
SHERIFF ED TOM BELL: Okay. Two of ‘em. Both had my father. It’s peculiar. I’m older now than he ever was by twenty years. So, in a sense, he’s the younger man. Anyway, first one I don’t remember so well, but it was about money and I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains at night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and snowin’. Hard ridin’. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down. And when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do. And I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead. And then I woke up.
A man in his midlife at a crossroads is at the center of No Country for Old Men. Two such men are at the center of Michael Clayton, the other phenomenal film I saw this week. The first is Arthur Edens (played to heartbreaking perfection by Tom Wilkinson). The second is the eponymous Michael Clayton (played by a revelatory George Clooney–this is an absolutely stunning performance).
Edens is one of the best attorneys at the high-powered N.Y.C. law firm Kenner, Bach & Leeden, which is why he’s been tasked with defending agrochemical corporation U/North in a $3-billion class action lawsuit. The problem for U/North is that Edens is having a crisis of conscience: he’s discovered some pretty damning evidence against the corporation. The situation is only aggravated by Edens’ decision to go off his medication, which leads to a full blown nervous breakdown. Firm partner Martin Bach (played with aplomb by the film’s co-producer Sydney Pollack) calls in-house “janitor” Clayton to reign in their old friend. (He was there to help Edens find his way after a breakdown a decade earlier.) Clayton, though, is in the middle of his own ethical dilemma, and he hears much truth in his friend’s ranting and raving. The problem is that Bach will bail Clayton out of a significant financial debt (the result of a bad investment and a gambling problem) if he puts things right for the firm. So, the titular character must make a decision between, essentially, doing the right thing and doing the safe thing. Edens, though, is guileful and complicates matters by giving everyone the slip. He then starts actively sabotaging the case, much to the chagrin of U/North’s unstable chief counsel Karen Crowder (played with expert intensity by the magnificent Tilda Swinton).
What is so stunning to me about Michael Clayton is that its unflinching realism and its entertainment value coexist so comfortably. This is quite a crowd-pleaser, but it also almost never sounds a false or unnatural note (more on this later). Ann Hornaday puts it well:
- From its hushed opening sequences in a Manhattan law office late at night to its sleek, pared-down narrative style, this uncommonly intelligent thriller evokes the great films of the 1970s (All the President’s Men, Klute, Three Days of the Condor) that managed to elicit gritty urban realism while maintaining a suave sense of style and moral complexity.
That it all comes from a first-time director–Bourne trilogy screenwriter Tony Gilroy–is all the more impressive. And Gilroy firmly establishes himself as a master filmmaker. Owen Gleiberman elaborates:
- …There’s a murder in the middle of [the film] that is one of the most plausibly terrifying things I’ve ever seen in a film, yet Gilroy’s touch is so subtle and glancing you might not even guess you’re watching a thriller–which is why, when the story begins to thrill, it earns every pulse pound. It never leaves human experience behind.
Michael Clayton is indeed loaded with genuine human feeling. Clayton and Edens burrow into your heart immediately, which is a testament to both the performers and Gilroy’s writing and directing. And there’s a scene about two-thirds of the way through the film between Clayton and his son (played beautifully by child actor Austin Williams) that is just exquisite–as powerful as those final scenes in No Country for Old Men. In the suprising scene, Clayton loses his composure and awkwardly, but touchingly, expresses his feelings about his son to him. It’s a remarkable moment in a remarkable film.
In a way, the scene between father and son sums up what the whole film is really about: not ignoring those nagging feelings–feelings of doubt, trust, fear, love, and so on. (This is also certainly a theme that Gilroy has been working in his screenplays for the Bourne films.) The characters in Michael Clayton–from the title character to Edens to even the villanous Crowder–must all contend with their feelings in one way or another. Edens decides to speak his truth with prophetic abandon; Crowder bottles everything up tightly and attacks any threat; and Clayton is somewhere between the two, trying to figure himself out. And then there’s “perfect and pure” Anna Kaiserson (well played by Merritt Wever), the plantiff who intuitively trusts Edens despite having every reason not to. And there’s also Barry Grissom (played excellently by Zen Peacemaker priest Michael O’Keefe), the attorney at Kenner, Bach & Leeden whose job it is to say out loud the things other people are “too nice to say.” It all calls to mind a quote from the Vidyadhara, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:
- Normally, we feel undermined by our emotions, and we feel bewildered by them. But once you have a sense of being in contact with the emotions, from that sense of familiarity, a sense of openness takes place… You might think that you have a problem with the emotions and I as a teacher will present you with a technique to control yourself. But instead we should give people some sense of experience and how awareness works with the general environment, which is what emotions are, basically.
For me, though, neither film was quite a masterpiece. I thought Michael Clayton‘s rather neat and tidy ending was a bit out of step with all of the wonderfully messy realism that preceeded it. And while I certainly think that No Country for Old Men is a film that speaks loudly and clearly to our troubled times, it feels to me somewhat less interested in this aspect than in its noir formalism. This is not to say that I don’t appreciate the film’s technical genius, because it’s quite the opposite: on this level, I think No Country for Old Men is an unqualified triumph. But as riveting as I found the craft of the film, its slower, more pensive moments (read: the scenes with Jones) had the greatest effect on me as a viewer…and, for my taste, there just weren’t enough of those. I think the film might have been well served by trading out one or two of its extended (though perfectly and lovingly rendered) murder/chase/suspense sequences for one or two more scenes with Jones. It sounds like Michael Phillips feels pretty much the same way:
- From one angle, No Country for Old Men is just a superbly crafted serial killer drama. But the best of the film hints at deeper mysteries…The movie, I think, just misses being a modern classic because, in the end, the Coens are probably more interested in [Chigurh's weapon of choice] and what it can do to door locks–not to mention people–than they are in the moral consequences of the bloodshed.
All of that said, I can probably count on one hand the number of films I’ve seen that I would consider “perfect.” Michael Clayton and No Country for Old Men are truly outstanding motion pictures–about as great as movies get. They’ll stay with you. Go see them.
