Books on Film

Posted 10 September, 2007 in Film |

Today was a very literary day at the Toronto International Film Festival. This morning, I attended a screening of Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. This afternoon I saw Nothing Is Private, Alan Ball’s adaptation of Alicia Erian’s novel, Towelhead.

On the surface, both books seemed ideally suited to their respective filmmakers. The Coens’ debut film, Blood Simple, shares both its Texas setting and a kind of unresolved existential dread with McCarthy’s tale of stolen money, revenge, and retribution. And Erian’s story of a thirteen-year-old half-Lebanese girl’s sexual awakening at the hands of a classmate and her racist — and very adult — next-door neighbour seems tailor made for the creator of American Beauty and Six Feet Under. Plus, both novels are extremely dialogue-heavy, rendering them obvious candidates for film treatments.

So why is it that the Coens’ film works so brilliantly, while Ball’s categorically doesn’t?

I suspect that the first and perhaps overarching reason is that the Coens are better filmmakers than Ball, whose directorial debut this is. In films such as (the aforementioned) Blood Simple and Fargo, the Coens have used landscapes to brilliant effect, such that the setting becomes an integral part of the story, indeed, becomes almost a character in itself. No one can convince me that the opening shot of Fargo, with William H. Macy’s car appearing wraithlike out of the blowing snow that envelops the screen, is not one of the most startling and effective opening shots ever inserted into an American motion picture. Similarly, the sweeping vistas of the Texas plains that dominate the opening scenes of No Country for Old Men provide a sense of hardness and alienation, even before the plot starts to kick in. This gives the film an advantage over the book, where the Texas landscape seemed oddly constrained and muted, particularly when compared to the epic grandeur of earlier McCarthy works such as All the Pretty Horses and — especially — Blood Meridian.

Tonally, the Coens’ film resembles McCarthy’s novel in its spareness, its complete lack of ornament. The storytelling is brutal in its efficiency, with not a wasted shot or line of dialogue and, except for one very brief moment, there is absolutely no music in the film. It takes a great deal of confidence and skill to pull off an entire feature film without a score, but the Coens’ decision to let the story propel itself is unquestionably the right one, as it simultaneously builds tension and inculcates in the viewer a sense of alienness and uncertainty. It’s often not apparent how a musical score can affect the experience of watching a movie until it’s taken away.

The film is also brilliantly edited: fluid pans of the Texas skyline are juxtaposed with short, sharp jump cuts during the action sequences; moments of calm quiet give way without warning to startling, graphic violence. The editing of a film determines its pace (which is something so obvious it’s often overlooked), and the Coens modulate No Country for Old Men magnificently, creating the visual equivalent of a symphony.

They’ve also taken the important step of casting the film flawlessly. There is not a false note in it, from Tommy Lee Jones as the laconic, world-weary sheriff Ed Tom Bell to Josh Brolin as the hapless antelope hunter who stumbles on a cache of money to Woody Harrelson in an inspired cameo as a gun-for-hire.

But the revelation of the film is the great Javier Bardem as Chigurh, the sociopathic killer who pursues the satchel of lost cash. Bardem has been terrific before in roles both large (Before Night Falls) and small (a chilling cameo that constitutes what are arguably the five best minutes in Michael Mann’s Collateral), but here he inhabits his character so completely that it almost appears he is channelling him. Bardem’s performance is largely in his eyes, which are watchful and intense, whether they are scanning a room for evidence of his prey, or focused unblinking on an incipient victim. Like Meryl Streep in last year’s The Devil Wears Prada, Bardem cleverly underplays a role that could easily have devolved into caricature, and in the process creates one of the most indelible screen villains in recent memory.

Casting is absolutely essential to any movie, but the irony is that when it’s done right, you don’t notice it. It’s only when it’s done wrong that it calls attention to itself, and this is one of the signal problems with Ball’s adaptation of Erian’s novel. In the key role of Rifat, the protagonist’s domineering Lebanese immigrant father, Peter Macdissi is so miscast that he ends up torpedoing the entire film, or at least those scenes in which he appears. Macdissi, who also appeared in Six Feet Under, proves congenitally incapable of manifesting the tonal modulations the character requires. The actor who plays Rifat must be charming one moment and vicious the next, but Macdissi can’t seem to pull off these one-eighty-degree turns; his performance is forced and artificial throughout.

Another problem with the movie is its unwillingness — or inability — to retain the edginess of its source material. This starts with the title, which has been softened from Erian’s deliberately provocative one-word epithet, perhaps as a balm to mainstream movie audiences who are presumed to be too easily shocked. But part of Erian’s project in the novel was precisely that: to shock people as a means of providing perspective on matters of race and a young girl’s burgeoning sexuality. This is not a story that is supposed to make its audience comfortable, and sugar-coating the title strikes me as just a bit cowardly on the part of the filmmakers.

To give Ball credit, he has set himself a challenging, not to say insurmountable, task. The central event in the novel involves the statutory rape of an underage girl, and it’s probably not possible to deal with this directly onscreen in the manner that Erian deals with it in the book. However, by diluting this material in the process of translating it, Ball has drained it of much of its potency.

Finally, Ball is simply not as good a director as the Coens. Much of the visual grammar in Nothing Is Private is pedestrian and uninspired; much of what is not is stolen from Sam Mendes’s suburban alienation film American Beauty, which Ball also wrote. Ball does not have a visual style or cinematic sensibility of his own, so what he’s left with is a straightforward adaptation that basically just photographs as much of the book as he thinks he can get away with.

In No Country for Old Men, by contrast, the Coens remain faithful to the source material, while simultaneously making it their own. The film has a distinct cinematic style and a unique visual approach, from bird’s eye panoramas of the Texas landscape to a low shot of a killer standing behind a motel-room door, his face half-illuminated by a beam of light from the outside. The poetry of McCarthy’s prose is seamlessly replaced by the poetry of the Coens’ camera.

There is an old saw that says you should never judge a book by its movie. This holds true for Nothing Is Private. No Country for Old Men, by contrast, is one of the best films of the year, and might also have the happy effect of driving more people in the direction of McCarthy’s book.

4 comments to “Books on Film”

panic, September 11th, 2007 at 9:37 pm:

• I saw Atonement last night. However, my movie reviews are even worse than my book reviews, so I’ll spare you my trying to tell you about it. I will say that it was well-done as far as adaptations go, and that Keira Knightley is really, really beautiful. I was missing some key red herrings though, which makes the twists at the end less… twisty.

Steven W. Beattie, September 13th, 2007 at 7:51 am:

• Had you read the book before seeing the movie? That strikes me as a formally difficult book to adapt for the screen. I am kind of interested to see what they’ve done with it, but I couldn’t fit it into my Festival schedule.

Panic, September 13th, 2007 at 9:56 am:

• Indeed I had, many years ago, and I loved it. I think I actually screwed up, reading that first of all the McEwans, because none of the others really come close to it.

  It really is one of the better adaptations I’ve seen (the best being Trainspotting). Though I think the audience laughed in the wrong places, during certain points… but that might only be because I knew what was coming, and so I knew that certain lines weren’t meant to be funny. OR, I have no sense of humour.

  Holy crap, what’s with this cover!?

Steven W. Beattie, September 13th, 2007 at 10:39 pm:

• Good Lord, it looks like an historical romance!

  I don’t think it’s just you; the audience at No Country for Old Men laughed at terribly inappropriate moments too.

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