No Country For Old Men
By Coens to direct Cormac McCarthy’s NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN starring Javier Bardem & Tommy Lee Jones!
I didn’t really care for No Country for Old Men, which is odd because I love almost all of McCarthy’s work. It was kind of hard for me to see the point, and it suffered from McCarthy’s decision to place an epic villain in a clearly non-epic story. The villains of Outer Dark and (especially) Blood Meridian are massive, outsized characters who McCarthy places within an epic, almost gothic setting. Similarly, the villain/protagonist of Child of God is appropriate to his world. No Country for Old Men, on the other hand, seems almost to be a confused union between Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy, only without the mythic trappings of the latter that might have helped to make sense of the antagonist.
However, fine films are often made from mediocre novels. Make no mistake; if the Coen’s stay close to the story, this will bear far more resemblance to Blood Simple or Miller’s Crossing than to Intolerable Cruelty or The Big Lebowski. It’s hard to do much better than Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones, although I confess that I’m not quite certain who will fit where.
For McCarthy fans, this is probably the best we can expect. Billy Bob Thornton killed any chance we had of seeing The Crossing and Cities of the Plains, which is unfortunate as they most “cinematic” of McCarthy’s works. Suttree and Blood Meridian are unfilmable, as are Child of God and the Outer Dark. I suppose the Orchard Keeper might plausibly be turned into a minor film.