I finally saw No Country for Old Men and I was surprised at how much I liked it. I thought the book was okay, but marred but an overlong and out of place philosophical ending. I'm not a McCarthy hater, I loved the Road and Blood Meridian, but this book just didn't work for me.
The movie though works almost perfectly. Javier Bardem is astounding in his protrayal of the wicked Chigurgh, but I really liked the movie's emphasis on loneliness. Josh Brolin Llwelyn starts alone in a vast West Texas desert, but he becomes truly alone once he is pursued by Chigurgh. Wherever he goes, even within cities, the scene is devoid of people, or quickly becomes devoid thanks to Chigurgh. The final lines of the movie reinforce this as well. Such a good movie.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Only the lonely can play
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5 comments:
I only know the Mccarthy book, The road.
It had a strange, philosophical ending as well where, after a (wonderful) book of short words and sentences, he is suddenly talking about the variegated map-like patterns on the backs of trouts. I don't know that it was a bad ending but it was surprising.
The Road ending felt better integrated into the flow of the story, than in No Country. In that book it is almost like two novellas have been sewn together. The movie does it much better.
Okay, and i was commenting on only one paragraph so its not a big deal: just a little different, is all.
The movie hasn't arrived in Korea yet - I'm waiting.
This is the rare case where I think you can skip reading the book.
Did you see they are making a movie of the Road. That is going to be hard to do well.
KB:
I too was struck by the final paragraph of The Road.
In terms of the novel's structure, I saw the final passage as a complement to the cave dream sequence at the beginning of the book, with the first passage presaging (in metaphorical terms) things to come and the final passage lamenting (again in metaphorical terms) things that have been lost and can never be recovered.
The lofty diction used by McCarthy in the final passage echoes the technique used to describe the landscape in previous sections of the book (black talc roiling down deserted streets like squid ink, etc.). As for the content of the final passge, McCarthy appears to use the trout explicitly as a metaphor for the pre-cataclysmic world and natural order. Likewise, the "road agents" could be seen as embodying the rapacity and basest aspects of mankind, which perhaps led to the disaster that precedes the narrative. I have not yet been able to wrap my brain around the message - if any - that McCarthy intended to convey regarding the future of this bleak world.
Jennifer Egan wrote an interesting review in Slate, drawing an interesting stylistic and thematic comparison between McCarthy's work and Ernest Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River. http://www.slate.com/id/2151300
B
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