Tomorrow in the Book Club section, around noon, I’ll post the first entry in our book club for Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, concerning the opening story “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking.” If you’ve never participated in a book club before, this is a great chance to get on board - we’ll be doing one short story a week, so you can drop in and drop out as you please. I encourage you to get your hands on a copy of the book, but you can find this story online with a little digging if you need to.
Recently I was listening to the Ringer’s podcast The Rewatchables as they discussed Paul Thomas Anderson’s celebrated film There Will Be Blood. It was a fanboyish affair, as that show always is, but the hosts are good company and I enjoyed it a lot.
What caught my attention in particular was the reminder that the big Oscar showdown of 2008 (thus film year 2007) was between There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, considered by many to be the masterpieces of Anderson and the Coen brothers, respectively. They went up against each other as two critically beloved heavy hitters, and in a rare turn, they didn’t inspire derision from most of the cool-kid critical class that so often disdains Oscar movies. Those two films were respected in seemingly all corners and were rightfully regarded as serious, attention-must-be-paid cinema. In the year where a little-seen trifle like Coda won Best Picture, it’s hard to imagine something like that happening again.
Thinking of that Oscars night, in turn, reminded me of how rarely I think of those films or want to rewatch them, while I return to other movies by the same filmmakers again and again. There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men are impeccably crafted, well cast and acted, gorgeous tributes to the craft of cinema, capital-G Great movies that will live on for decades. And both of them leave me cold. Their well-machined perfection leaves too little space for weirdness; the parts fit together a little too well. Give my movies that don’t quite work. Give me interesting messes. Give me films that are a little less interested in their legacies and a little more interested in trying big, weird things.
Give me Raising Arizona! Look, I can totally recognize the craft of No Country for Old Men. I get why it was so celebrated by critics. In fact, it’s sort of a checklist of the things that would get you rave reviews in the mid-aughts: a reserved and self-serious tone, “artistic” violence, a minimalist score, long gazes at a barren landscape, strategic narrative ambiguity. I’m not saying that any of this is bad, mind you, although I find it weird that people see a movie like The King’s Speech as Oscar bait but not No Country for Old Men, which seems teed up to perfectly flatter the biases of the critic class. What I can tell you for sure is that I’ll be rewatching Raising Arizona for the rest of my life, whereas I never have to see Javier Bardem acting gravelly and deep ever again. I don’t need to see a meditation on the meaning of chance before a delicately choreographed murder again. I do need to see Nicolas Cage ripping the skin from his knuckles against a stippled ceiling and shouting out in pain again. I do need to see the bounty hunter prowling around in his chopper again. I do need to hear H.I.’s ending monologue again. Because that’s all vibrant, moving, weird stuff.
Raising Arizona is short and can feel somewhat slight. Not every minute of it works. It certainly doesn’t cry out to be taken seriously in the same way as No Country for Old Men. But every minute of it is deeply felt and totally its own, particular and peculiar in a way I’ve never felt from another movie. I respect No Country for Old Men, especially its refusal to have a Hollywood ending and its willingness to peter out after the climactic action. But it’s also kind of inert, for me, and I don’t need to own the Blu-Ray. I saw it, I got it, I get it, well done guys. Now let me find something new I never noticed before in Southland Tales, also a 2007 movie. As Manohla Dargis wrote at the time,
American cinema is in the grip of a kind of moribund academicism, which helps explain why a fastidiously polished film like “No Country for Old Men” can receive such gushing praise from critics. “Southland Tales” isn’t as smooth and tightly tuned as “No Country,” a film I admire with few reservations. Even so, I would rather watch a young filmmaker like Mr. Kelly reach beyond the obvious, push past his and the audience’s comfort zones, than follow the example of the Coens and elegantly art-direct yet one more murder for your viewing pleasure and mine. Certainly “Southland Tales” has more ideas, visual and intellectual, in a single scene than most American independent films have in their entirety, though that perhaps goes without saying.
The obvious PT Anderson analog is Inherent Vice. Here it’s a little tricky for me, as I absolutely adore the Thomas Pynchon novel on which it’s based, and my knowledge of the novel is forever influencing my experience of the movie. Many critics complained about the movie’s lack of basic moment-to-moment plot coherence, and here knowing the book does help. Inherent Vice the book never coheres in terms of the big overarching plot the way that most noir does, but in terms of “who’s in this scene, what’s happening, and how does it connect to what I’ve seen before,” it’s easier to follow. Perhaps I can’t separate that from my appreciation of the movie. Still, I think Anderson’s Inherent Vice is uproariously funny, delightfully weird, and wonderfully acted throughout. It doesn’t quite capture the wistful sadness and feeling of a cosmic ending that’s in the book, but it balances its madcap pace and Doc Sportello’s picture-perfect weirdness with a quiet undercurrent of bittersweet feeling. It also pulls off the most difficult trick that the novel has up its sleeve, which is (uh, spoilers) to dramatize both Bigfoot’s ultimate betrayal of Doc and Doc’s immediately taking it in stride.
Is Inherent Vice better than There Will Be Blood? I don’t know, boring question! I love the former while I admire the latter. Perhaps the comparison that would be more useful for most people would be between TWBB and The Master, as the latter is also capital-G Great and self-consciously a towering work of art, while also being weirder, more singular, and more forgiving than the former. (And greater. Far greater.) Either way, I think you get what I mean here: I would rather spend time with movies that are somewhat distaff, lefthanded, perfectly imperfect.
Of course, movies have to be broken in a particular way and to a particular degree. There are plenty of movies that don’t fully work in ways that are banal and uninteresting. (Most movies, actually.) And there are movies I want to like more than I do because of these sorts of problems. When I first saw the trailer for Inside Llewyn Davis, I thought, wow, this is a movie made just for me. The soundtrack is sublime, the 1960s New York that’s portrayed feels attractive without being whitewashed, and Oscar Isaac gives a lovely, delicate performance. But the movie doesn’t really work for me, sadly, as gorgeously rendered as it is. For one, I think it’s a good example of how the Coen brothers can turn their dark humor into a kind of shtick. When Davis plays a gorgeous song for his father in a senior center and then the father immediately soils himself, the problem is not that I can’t handle the darkness of that moment but rather that it seems obligatory and designed to deflect criticism. (So much criticism of the Coens is deflected by defenders by asserting that critics just can’t handle their wicked, dark sensibility.) You don’t have to deflate every emotional moment to be a serious filmmaker, you guys.
More relevant to our purposes here, I think the whole journey to Chicago section just doesn’t work. Yes, I’ve heard the explanations for what the Coens are doing - that the two road-trip companions represent two unappealing alternatives for where Llewyn’s life could go. John Goodman’s jazzman represents a kind of musical aesthete who’s up his own ass about his craft; Garrett Hedlund’s beat poet represents the triumph of pose over everything, a type of cool from which nothing else can escape. And yeah, maybe? The problem is that it pulls us out of the movie we’ve been watching for an interminable stretch, and the characters are so broad and archetypal that they make the movie feel less grounded. Certainly the scene where Llewyn auditions for F. Murray Abraham is the climax of the story, a linchpin scene where we see that Llweyn’s fundamental inability to understand what’s popular has doomed his music career. (The song he sings is lovely, but of all the ones he plays in the movie, it seems to me to be the least commercial, at precisely the moment when he should be most interested in playing the hits.) But there’s no reason why the Bud Grossman scene had to take place in Chicago rather than New York, other than to fill the middle third of the movie with a road trip that takes us away from the gorgeously-realized 1960 Greenwich Village. Llewyn Davis’s weirdnesses, its not-quite-right parts, are appealing to me in spurts. But the movie is muddled and directionless in its heart, and the strange time jump “twist” of its ending doesn’t really do anything for me.
Still: I rewatch that movie. I study its various imperfections. I enjoy where the seams show. Meanwhile I distractedly respect No Country for Old Men and want only to watch Tommy Lee Jones describe his dreams again, the central story of Josh Brolin and Bardem now seeming rote and uninspired to me. I realize that what I’m saying is “be weird, make shaggy meandering films where the parts don’t all fit together right, but do it all just the right way.” And I realize that’s a lot to ask. But hey, who said making great art was meant to be easy?
I eagerly looked fwd to There Will Be Blood and found it awful. I reluctantly watched No Country and found it magnificent. I can't for the life of me see how the two are even remotely comparable. Just me though....
Mine is a Raising Arizona stan account.
"I don't know what his damn jammies looked like... they had Yodas and shit on them!"