No Country for Old Men

Good movie.




Great book.


Isn't that the way it usually goes? The movie is never as good as the book. That's the way it is for me, at least.

I think it's for two reasons. First, the nature of my brain. I love to read and imagine my personal idea of the characters and the place. Once it's on the screen, it's not yours.

And I think the second reason is the nature of books vs. film. Books can do certain things that film can't. And vice versa. Books let your imagination work. Like I just said before. Film can show things on a big wide screen with sound coming out of surround-sound that, if your brain actually did work like that would scare the bejesus out of you.

But the thing about the movie, it didn't quite nail the actual story. And the movie left out two key characters, the sheriff and the little run-a-way Llewlyn picks up and rides around with and with whom he eventually gets killed.

Wait a minute, you say. The sheriff was in the movie. Yeah, but in the book, the reader is inside the mind of the sheriff the whole time. So much of the character was missing he might as well have not been there. That opening monologue of the sheriff's is just about the sheriff through the whole book. And old Tommy Lee didn't quite get this character right. He was still doing that guy from Men in Black. The sheriff wasn't that stoic, nor was he that condescending to his deputy.

Of course, the deputy, and Carla Jean's mother were both reduced to comic relief, which really stuck out in the movie.

And ole Llewlyn and Carla Jean were cleaned up a bit for the movie. In the book, they're real trailer trash, and that's what makes them so appealing. They are so in love (muskrat love) and that Llewlyn could get as far as he could against Chigurh sets him apart. He's really the good guy.

And Javier Bardem nailed Chigurh. No doubt, he deserved the Oscar.

Of course, God is in the details. Great character portrayals by Gene Jones as the gas station attendant, Kathy Larkin as the trailer park manager, and Richard Jackson as the chicken farmer.

So, as the Asians say, same/same but different.

A life's work

Okay, maybe you've had your fill of No Country for Old Men. This is the last quote I'll blog from the book.

"I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it. It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that's something I dont want to be wrong about."

Psychotherapy is the best thing we got here in the Western world to help us in self-actualization. I've used it in the past, and it helped. I know I'm not going to reach Nirvana this time around, but I want to be a helluva lot closer to it when I leave this life than when I got here. Like the old sheriff says, it's a life's work, and it's a helluva thing to think that you could spend your entire life doing something and be wrong in the end. But what are you going to do? Just sit in a hole?

Picking a sore

"It was like a ballplayer told me one time he said that if he had some slight injury and it bothered him a little bit, nagged at him, he generally played better. It kept his mind focused on one thing instead of a hundred. I can understand that. Not that it changes anything."

I don't know why this struck me the way it did. It's just that so much of what Cormac McCarthy writes I get. Even his sentence structure. Did you get that? That cadence? That ordering of the words? That uniquely American construct?

And he's so good at putting the intangibles of life into words. When something's eating at us, most of us, we tend to pick the sore until we figure it out. And then we move on. A ballplayer plays better. The rest of us just live a bit better.

The power of literature

"Most people dont believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking me that I second say the world. Do you see?

Yes, she said, sobbing. I do. I truly do.

Good, he said. That's good. Then he shot her."

I know exactly how that woman felt. In some ways, I've experienced exactly what she experienced. How for the longest time I refused to believe that there was such a person. And when you do finally acknowledge it, it's the end of a life. But then you can prevail. It's a very spiritual thought when you realize it. Death and rebirth. Good and evil. It's at the heart of Christianity.

Maybe it's being an actor. Or a writer. I don't know. I don't know if others experience movies and literature and paintings the way I do. I don't care. I just know how I do, and I love it. I love a good writer who can just miraculously choose words out of the thousands of words and put them in a certain order, the right order, to elicit an emotion like I felt when I read those words. That emotion that said, yes, yes, I know.

The hardest thing I've ever done

"The man that shot you died in prison.

In Angola. Yes.

What would you have done if he'd been released?

I dont know. Nothin. There wouldnt be no point to it. There aint no point to it. Not to any of it.

I'm kindly surprised to hear you say that.

You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more going out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it."

It's hard. It's hard to get past the anger and the injustice and the unfairness when someone gets away with something big and mean. When someone gets away with murder. But the anger just feeds on you, not on the person who caused it. They couldn't care less how you feel. They wouldn't have done what they did if they cared about you. And the anger will never go away completely. It eventually will go down deep inside you, and surface occasionally, in funny ways. But it's best to be like the old man, who was shot and couldn't walk anymore, and just rebuild a new life. But like I said, it's hard. It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life so far.

Regrets and happiness

"What's your biggest regret in life.

The old man looked at him, gauging the question. I dont know, he said. I aint got all that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things that you might think would make a man happier. I reckon bein able to walk around might be one. You can make up your own list. You might even have one. I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're gonna be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've known people who never did get the hang of it."

I've been happy and I've been unhappy. The worst was in between, when I didn't feel anything at all. Happy, of course, is the best, but it can make a person afraid, and cautious, so they don't do anything...they don't act or decide anything because they're afraid to lose the happiness...they try to keep the status quo by not doing anything, but it almost seems that happiness is independent of everything and anything. Happy people just seem to be like that, don't they? They're just naturally cheerful, and they don't let anything get in the way of it.

Life's lesson

She put her cigarettes in her purse and looked at him. I'll tell you somethin, Sheriff. Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it's all that more likely it'll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter. I think about that.

Bell nodded. I ain't a stranger to them thoughts, Carla Jean. Them thoughts is very familiar to me.

--No Country for Old Men

Why we need less laws

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

--No Country for Old Men