But a critique of No Country is not my objective here. What I have been thinking about is that I have yet to find any lawmen or lawwomen who have objected to the film’s generalized portrayal of police officers. The central “good” character is a rural sheriff named Ed Tom Bell who at the end quits his job because he can’t hunt down or protect people from the film’s killer, a fellow named Chigurh, the main “bad” character. In my experience and studies, cops are seldom so easily defeated (nor were they so in 1980, the year in which the film is set). Even if one cop might get to feeling spiritually bruised by a stone propelled at him from some sling of outrageous fortune, plenty of other doggone determined and devoted cops always take up the mission to catch a killer, especially one of such horrific cruelty as the one this film depicts (he’s so horrific that he’s rather a cartoon, in my judgment).
Why have no cops jumped up to point out the weakness and inaccuracy of this film’s portrayal of police work? (The photo is a shot of the Ship and Shore Motel in Saugatuck, MI, by the way. There were several sinister motels in No Country for Old Men.) Heck, I’m not even much for cops. As a class, I find them a little too law-loving and autocratic for my don’t-tread-on-me inclinations (vestiges of dreams of Sixties-style hippie-dom, no doubt). Yet I find the portrayal of Sheriff Bell so skewed as to be insulting. I am aware that some have said that this film is not intended as realism, but as an allegory of the darkness of life, a mythic delineation of some of the ways in which human beings can lose all control of evil and in which unbridled evil can wreak so much damage in our lives. If so, the allegory is told in an intensely realistic manner and, thus, owes a great deal to accuracy and plausibility. Yet I have found that seldom, if ever, are cops so beaten down about a killer as callous as Chigurh. On the contrary, they get charged up, gung-ho to the point of obsession, to get their “man,” as the saying goes (though women can kill like this, too, as depicted in the true-crime biopic Monster, which concerns an infamous female serial killer in Florida). The film portrays Sheriff Bell as a symbol of exhausted, bewildered dismay in the face of utmost evil, but I think he is a defective symbol because of the film’s inaccurate, almost contemptuous, portrayal of him. His portrayal wholly falsifies the allegory.
I might write more about this film, which so many have extolled. Some critics have pronounced it one of the great artworks of all time, an assessment with which I disagree quite strongly. The specific topic of the portrayal of police work plays only a very small part in my judgment of the film as very weak art. As I was writing this post, as probably most Americans know, another mass shooting occurred in America, this time in Missouri (within a day or two that shooting was out of the headlines, but not off the minds of the cops). It turned out to have been a businessman with a grudge who shot up some city officials with whom he had had squabbles over a contract. At a time like that, no doubt, people were happy to have cops around. Does this film help us fathom such factual occurrences of mayhem? Hardly at all. Which is mostly why I consider inferior cinema. Though such are matters for a separate excogitation.
I don’t know how to classify this excogitation, my first one. The portrayal of Sheriff Bell is just something I’ve been pondering lately. This is the way it’s going to go in this series, for good or ill. And I didn’t come close to keeping it to 250 words. Try, try again.
3 comments:
Ben, Sorry to hear you did not like the film. I have not seen it yet but I heard good things about it and I usually like the Coen (not Cohen) brothers' stuff. (is my apostophe in the right place?)
As far as cops go, however, I tend to think most are portrayed unrealistically. I suspect many are jaded and disillusioned. For every crook they put away another one pops up. The stories about the dedicated cop who does anything to "get his man" are not relalistic. If the system prevents a cop from doing his job, I think most would just shrug their shoulders and move on, they wouldn't care a hoot about the one that got away. They are just doing their job. One criminal is as good as the next. Or maybe I'm the one who is jaded?
Thanks for the reply, Kev. Interesting thoughts. Off the mark, in my opinion, but interesting. Your description of cops doesn't fit many small-town, small-city cops that I know or have read about, especially in the circumstances of a serial killing hitman on the loose. Moreover, I think you need to see the film (as the saying goes). There’s a big difference between “jaded” and “dismayed”.
But on the other matter, one thing to understand about me: I make a big, fundamental distinction between art I LIKE and art I evaluate or judge as good or great. I like about half of the Cohen brothers’ work. But I don’t think they’ve achieved much yet, outside of Fargo, which I consider a very good film. Much of their early work is lurid spectacle, such as Barton Fink. The later work has wandered off into interesting, enjoyable experimentation. I truly, deeply LIKED The Man Who Wasn’t There. Its black-and-white camera work is downright breathtaking, worth seeing for itself alone. But I don’t consider that a good film. It does have a small measure of value. It’s not junk. But it didn’t accomplish much in giving us insight into the criminal mind, which was its overarching purpose. I mildly enjoyed No Country for Old Men. It was nicely, chillingly spooky at times. The killer is creepy. But the killer’s long chase of the guy who stole his money is clumsily rendered. Overall, I found it just a tick or two above “not worth seeing”. The Cohens have style, though, and I enjoy style, much as I love the STYLE of the German director Werner Herzog. But Herzog’s substance has been, like the Cohens’, seriously lacking on almost all occasions. For all their style, the Cohens have a habit of botching up their art pretty quickly.
Kev and all: This weekend, I was surprised to find the New Yorker's David Denby backing me up on my judgments concerning No Country for Old Men in the most recent issue. Denby is a critic I don't trust very far, but he was on the money, mostly, about "No Country." Here's one quotation pertinent to what I was thinking about last week:
“No Country” is the Coens’ most accomplished achievement in craft, with many stunning sequences, but there are absences in it that hollow out the movie’s attempt at greatness. If you consider how little the sheriff bestirs himself, his philosophical resignation, however beautifully spoken by Tommy Lee Jones, feels self-pitying, even fake.
Denby's whole essay on "No Country" is available online.
Ben
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