…as the title evolved in our house, somehow.
Discussion after the jump so we don’t have to worry about spoilers.
Okay, so I read the novel last night – don’t be impressed. McCarthy is a quick read, generally, and in this case – in which much of the screenplay was just lifted (justifiably) from the novel, especially quick.
Reading the novel left me sort of ticked at the Coen brothers. Not that I didn’t expect not to be ticked. I am not a Coen brothers fan except for Raising Arizona,which seems to me the Coen film that everyone hates (besides The Ladykillers, of course). I don’t know why. It is incredibly heartfelt about the yearning, not just for a baby, but for everything a baby represents – love, commitment, the future.

Well, maybe that’s why it’s the least liked.
Even Fargo walked a thin edge for me. Yes, the pregnant sheriff was a moral center, but much of the tone of the rest of it didn’t seem like affectionate mocking to me, just..mocking.
The major difference between the novel and the film lies in the center – who is this movie about? The film’s center is clearly Chigura, the psycopathic mass-murderer. It’s not that he has more screen time than page time, exactly. It’s partly that the actor playing him is so startling and compelling, as well as (more importantly) some other aspects of the book have been dropped so as to put the spotlight even more brightly on him.
Because in the novel, Sheriff Bell (the Tommy Lee Jones character) is certainly more important. You can tell this from the film, which begins with his voiceover and ends with him. You can tell that it’s on him – his ambiguity, his muted confusion about the whole mess in the midst of his determination to put a stop to it – that the story hinges. Chigura’s actions may be horrible and bizarre, but they are, in the end, expressive of the greater problem infecting the landscape – which is another loss from the book.
The story is set in 1980, a time period in which (I suppose) the drug problems around the US-Mexico border are reaching a level they never had before, with more money and more blood flowing through the sagebrush and over the buttes. That context is very, very clear in the novel – and crucial, as you can probably tell from the title. It is not just the story of any psychopathic killer on the loose after a case of money. It is about the chaos and upheaval produced by the drug trade and how it challenges everything about what a society thinks it is about, including the law.
But in the movie, that background takes a few steps even farther back, so that our focus is on the crazy killer and the hunt for him.
The other element which the film leaves out is an important element of the Sheriff’s character. He is a veteran of World War II, and the recipient of a Bronze Star he feels he doesn’t deserve, related to an incident in which he was cited for courage but really, in his own mind, was a coward and did not do all he could and should have for his men. Leaving that out omits then an important level of motivation for the Sheriff – there is something in him that is driven, however laconic he might appear on the surface, to try to compensate for that act, to try to rescue those under siege.
You combine that with the fact that the fellow who finds the suitcase is a Vietnam Vet, as is the other contract killer sent out to find the money (Wells, played by Woody Harrelson), and you have a whole other layer in the work about war – what we have here is a new kind of war, but even then, the veterans of the old wars have their own doubts about what happened in the past, what the nature of courage is, where the balance between courage and self-preservation lies, what is worth fighting for.
Finally, I think the changed element that most startled me was a small one – there is a speech that the Sheriff gives when he’s visiting an old, wheelchair-bound fellow who was either a relative or a colleague of his own father’s (also a lawman). In the film, the Sheriff says something like, “I always figured that when I got older God would find me. He never did.”
In the novel – it’s the old man in the wheelchair who says it.
Yes, Sheriff Bell seems at sea, but in the novel it is never articulated as a spiritual crisis of faith – in fact, obliquely, he keeps his spiritual footing in various ways – by conversing with his deceased daughter, by listening to what his wife has to say about her readings of Revelation.
That was curious to me.
So, while there was a lot I enjoyed about the film – the scene in the gas station on the coin toss – masterful. The dialogue comes exactly from the novel, but the gift of being able to translate it to film, capture the tension on the page and take it up just enough notches to make you want to squirm out of your skin in suspense – impressive and memorable.
But like so many other Coen brothers films, layers of meaning, interesting internal struggle and moral slogging are stripped clean, leaving nothing more than style and idiosyncrasy, both of which are interesting to watch, but which ultimately leave you cold.