No Country For Old Men has turned adaptation into an art form of its own

On the road to adapting prose to the canvas, two paths inevitably separate. There’s the pious route: adaptations ripped unedited from an author’s pages. Then there’s the reverse approach: the film is so interpretive that the original lyrics on set are little more than a perfume in the air.

At the interface between these two sits Joel and Ethan Coen No country for old menadapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same name. RThe film was released on November 9, 2007 won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. It is an almost shot-for-shot recreation of the text, a gritty western with typically McCarthian themes of violence, aging and fate. But the film fundamentally expands what it looks like to go “by the book” — and 15 years after its release, it still stands as a testament to adaptation as an art form in its own right.

A simple problem

In spite of No country for old menThe Coens and McCarthy’s indelible success initially made for an unlikely marriage. Known for stylized genre oddities like Miller’s Crossing, Raise Arizonaand Fargo, the Coens’ established aesthetic wasn’t exactly dour or meditative. They had also never filmed a book before.

“From our point of view, it was a simple problem,” said Joel Coen of the adjustment No country for old men for the screen in a conversation with colliders in 2007. “How do you turn that into a Movie?”

“That” would be the story of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a poor Texan living in a trailer park with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald). One afternoon, Moss stumbles across a pile of dead bodies and a suitcase containing $2 million in cash. He takes the money and runs; He soon has a ruthless killer, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), on his trail.

When it was published, McCarthy’s novel faced literary opposition criticism to read like a screenplay. The Coens took advantage of this form, but never rested on it. Instead, they delved into the similarities between their work and McCarthy’s—an awe at the setting and the hermetic possibilities of the high genre. Whether or not No country for old men is the Coen brothers’ best film (it might be) or Cormac McCarthy’s best book (it isn’t), it’s the best adaptation of McCarthy’s work.

Much traveled country

The Coens had never adapted a screenplay before when producer Scott Rudin brought them McCarthy’s book, but they already knew their way around a western. The brothers’ debut in 1984, blood easyfollows code similar to No country for old men. “What I know is Texas” blood easy‘s opening voiceover reads, “And you’re on your own down here.”

The line is a fair summary for No country for old men, if not McCarthy’s entire work. Known for sparse punctuation and somber lyricism, several of McCarthy’s works have been adapted for the screen with varying effects. There’s the good (The street), the bad (The Counselor, a screenplay written by McCarthy and not based on a novel) and the ugly (All pretty horses, to cut in pieces by Harvey Weinstein.)

Notoriously absent from the list is blood meridian, a 1985 epic widely regarded as McCarthy’s masterpiece. As No country for old men, blood meridian deals with mortality and morality in the American West. Countless master directors – among them Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese – have tried and failed to film the story.

As The AV Club‘s Todd Gilchrist noted in Mel magazine in 2019, blood meridian illustrates the difficulty of adapting McCarthy “without either neutralizing the author’s work or producing a film steeped in unrelenting, misanthropic cruelty, both physical and philosophical”. Faced the same problem No country for old men-Without light, how could a story still shine on the screen?

rough diamonds

The key to No country for old menThe cruel glint of is its main cast. Despite tonal differences, McCarthy’s colloquialism fits seamlessly with the Coen brothers’ mockery. The resemblance makes the transition from text to screen easier, but without heavyweight performances, the Coens risked flattening McCarthy’s ambiguous characters.

That never became a problem as Brolin, Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones portrayed the Three Horsemen leading McCarthy’s Apocalypse. Ed Tom Bell (Jones), the sheriff in charge of Moss’s case, serves as narrator and ambivalent voice of reason. In the book, each chapter is preceded by Ed Tom’s thoughts on life, death, and the law; The film confines its philosophizing to the beginning and the unconventional (true to the text) ending. But Jones, graying and expressionless as ever, brings enough calm nuances to Ed Tom that any further conversation would feel out of character.

The same goes for Llewelyn – although an entire sequence of thought processes alongside a young runaway was cut in the book, it doesn’t feel like Brolin is missing anything at the wheel. In the film, Llewelyn’s introspection lives in quiet moments, prone on a desert ridge or holding his breath in a dark motel room. (A barely there heartbeat, that of composer Carter Burwell mumbling score is only 16 minutes long.)

The limited attention McCarthy gives to female characters doesn’t slow the film down, thanks largely to a subdued but defiant performance from Kelly MacDonald as Carla Jean. In the book, Carla Jean is just a consequence of the men around her – MacDonald reveals a more cerebral side to the character. (A masterfully tense scene between Carla Jean and Chigurh is a film highlight.)

But the most memorable acting work here is Javier Bardem’s role as Chigurh. The role earned Bardem an Academy Award and was also dubbed by the magazine as the most realistic portrayal of a psychopath Journal of Forensic Sciences. With an absolutely unfuckable haircut (by Bardem’s own account) and wielding a cattle prod, Chigurh is death manifest: watch, wait, and flip a coin.

Often the biggest loss in adapting a great novel is the flattening of a truly unique character. It’s the horror movie paradox: It It’s just not quite as scary once you’ve seen “it”. The genius of Bardem’s performance lies in his masterful ability to remain completely unreadable. Chigurh is specific but nondescript, a bearer of ambiguous intentions but a frighteningly principled morality. McCarthy’s villain is memorable, but Bardem makes Chighurh the Coens unforgettable.

A testament to the craft

As different as they may be, McCarthy and the Coens share a penchant for the unknown. As Tommy Lee Jones said Uncut in 2008: “I believe that one assumption shared by Cormac, by Ethan and Joel, and certainly by me, is that the very best questions are more important than the variety of anyone’s answers.”

The Coens are more than skilled enough to leave these questions unanswered. As The New York Times‘ wrote AO Scott in his review, No country for old men is “pure heaven” for formalists who revere the technical art of filmmaking.

Creating heaven in hell in West Texas took a small, experienced team with a light touch. Editor Roderick Jaynes is a longtime alias of the Coens, and sound editor Skip Lievsay has worked with the brothers ever since blood easy. Cinematographer Roger Deakins is also in overdrive here – in his hands, the Southwest is both a sprawling universe and a claustrophobic prison. Completing the picture are the Coens, so in step that Bardem once described them as “the same man with two heads.”

Although the Coens would continue to successfully adapt other Westerns – most notably Charles Portis’ True grit-No country for old men remains their greatest craftsmanship. But the film is probably most revealing in how her style clashes with McCarthy’s prose – its battered themes bring the Coens’ eccentric idiosyncrasies down to earth. What remains is a cinematic Grand Canyon, magnificently made and worth traversing – a pinnacle of modern American filmmaking, born from the prose of one of America’s greatest living writers. From McCarthy’s skillful and refined thriller, the Coens fashioned an essential myth.