Comments on: The Wonderful Thing About Chigurh

By: David Ehrenstein

David Ehrenstein — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:44:05 +0000

Terry Schaivo.

By: David Ehrenstein

David Ehrenstein — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:38:00 +0000

It’s just a grim caper aboud stolen money and an unstoppable killer. Jim Thompson meets Friday the 13th.

The whole thing of giving water to the virtually dead Mexican is a replay of that brain dead woman in Florida that became a right wing cause celebre.

By: dcairns

dcairns — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:10:15 +0000

Whew!
Moss starts out rather unsympathetic because he leaves the dying Mexican, but then he redeems himself in sympathy by going back with water — a dumb move. (an anonymous call to the cops would’ve been smarter, and what’s he going to do if the Mexican’s alive? Hand him the water and piss off?). So he’s balanced between smart/mean and nice/dumb, but the story never allows him to be both nice and smart at once.

Nearly everybody in Morgan’s Creek aquires depth and grace notes. There’s a small-minded councilman and the justice of the peace, but even they aren’t THAT bad, and don’t really deserve their comeuppance imho (”His license is REVOKED and his motel is CONDEMNED!”) Even Mister in Sullivan’s Travels is given a few plus points.
I guess all Sturges’ characters are parts of himself, which is why he’s generally so generous and understanding to them.

Now, I quite like some of the Coen idiots. I think Blood Simple is just rats running a maze, diverting but empty, but the chumps in Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski are rather loveable. So the Coens being superior to them doesn’t worry me so much — audiences have to feel superior to Laurel and Hardy but they have to love them too.

Maybe this is part of the problem — it’s fine in short films, just about sustainable over a few features, but starts to get wearisome over the course of a long career.

I was OK with No Country, but I sort of felt the sombre tone didn’t actually signify a much more serious film — what serious and real matter is being covered? Or is it just a grim caper about stolen money and an unstoppable killer?

By: David Ehrenstein

David Ehrenstein — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:38:57 +0000

Many of Sturges’ characters can be regarded as fools or naifs in a thumbniail fashion. But he gives them a depth that can’t be dismissed out of hand. The characters and situations in for example The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek verge on the cartoonish. But Trudy’s love for Norval is genuine as is his for her. By the halfway point the fact of their love for one another becomes as moving as anything in Duras. Constable Knockenlocker is a hothead, but he has a lot to put up with besides Trudy and Noval. And Diana Lyn’s wisecracking kid sister is more than a device — like the heroine of the unspeakably smug Juno. When mass hysteria takes over as it frequently does in Sturges (hg. Hail the Conquering Hero, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock) its offered up as irresistible excitment of the sort that makes life worth living.

BTW my dear friend Ruth Olay, who was quite the chic cabaret singer in th e 1950’s (she’s now in her 80’s) worked as Sturges’ secretary in the last leg of his U.S. studio years. Ruth says the most amazing thing about him was the way he could take whole chunks of well worked out dialogue and transpose them to different places in the screenplay and have different characters speak it. In this sense all of Sturges is a monologue.

Gore Vidal is a great Sturges fan and can quote Robert Greig’s imperious butler in Sulliavn’s Travels verbatim, accent and inflections included.

The Coens almost always approch their characters with barbeque tongs. Marge is one of the very few Coen characters who’s actually smarter than the viewer. It comes with the territory as she’s a classic “eccentric” detective. Female and extremely pregnant the villaisn scarcely pay her any mind. But she’s on to everyone’s game. You see the thing is the Coens are perfectly capable of creating admirable characters like Marge but lazily prefer to offer spectators a sneering gallery.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:22:41 +0000

I thought the interesting shift in No Country was that the Coens actually respect Llewelyn Moss , he’s a a mostly moral and intelligent protagonist. Behaves smartly under pressure and doesn’t screw up for stupid reasons. His demise comes about when he wavers in his purpose, loses his moral footing for a moment.
While the Deputy Sheriff was the only obviously dopey looking character, he was the one who made all the smart deductions about the crime scene.

I thought the film marked an interesting tonal shift too, harder , more austere, less self consciously flamboyant than the usual Coen piece. The use of sound is superb, particularly in the suspense scenes and there’s some great bits of implication in the storytelling ( checking his boots for blood ) that I could feel the audience shuddering from.

I’ve never really been a big Coen fan up to now, it was always too smart-arse, something to admire rather than love. This is something different. Their best film IMHO.

It was quite funny too.