There have been a few adaptations of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, to date. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men is easily the best.

I’ve already written about the Billy Bob Thorton’s 2000 adaption of All the Pretty Horses, lamentably fronted by Matt Damon. I don’t want to return to that bitterness. I felt bad about it. But I don’t apologise.

Before moving on, though, I want to suggest that the essential point of difference between the two adaptations is that the Thornton one did (and seemingly did not attempt) to understand the humans McCarthy had created in his story, but the Coen brothers do.

There’s evidence to suggest that the Coen brothers don’t agree with my assessment, since they later went on to cast Matt Damon in a western film of their own, a 2010 adaptation of Charles Portis’ masterful 1968 novel True Grit. Damon wasn’t cast as the lead in that film and the character he plays is a little dim and straightforward, so maybe the Coens showed a subtle stroke of genius.

Or maybe I’m wrong. I’d vote that way myself.

A sidenote of speculation: on first viewing, I wondered whether this type of genius is what Quentin Tarantino was trying to pull off in casting Kurt Russell as John Ruth in The Hateful Eight (2015). His performance looked something like he was acting at acting, or pretending to pretend (I was, paradoxically, so assured of the authenticity of this performance that I was sure it was an intentional act on the part of Tarantino to direct Ruth act in that act).

A last word on the concept (if it exists at all) is that the all-time standard for the skill of acting that you’re acting is Richard E. Grant’s sublime performance of Withnail in Bruce Robinson’s criminally unseen Withnail and I (1987). Of course, in that film, neither you nor Richard E. Grant (nor, probably, Withnail) know whether Withnail is acting at any given moment. Unsurpassed brilliance.

So far, this has been an article about an idea I’d only snatched at once while watching a Tarantino B-Side, and it’s become the whole article. Well, it deserves a name then. ‘Meta-acting’ is logical. ‘Metacting’ works. So that there’s a rigorous taxonomy, I’m going to split the concept: I’ll call it Withnailesque when done with grace and metasticating when it’s unintentional. AKA cancerous. AKA Damonic cancer. 

I’ll just put a few asterixes in to draw a line in the sand:

***

It seems so very rarely the case that good source material finds a worthy filmic adaptor, but there’s true symbiosis in this pairing of the aesthetic sensibilities of McCarthy and the Coens.

The most evident congruency is dialogue. Both keep it sparse, they keep it simple, and they keep it droll. But that’s a crude reduction because what really distinguishes the excellence of McCarthy’s and the Coens’ dialogic styles is each has the deftest touch of subtlety, which is what transforms the seemingly mundane into beauty.

Consider, for example, the interplay of the story’s villain, Anton Chigurh, and ‘Woman’, who is the administrator of the trailerpark Moss has been living in, till just now:

//

WOMAN: Yessir?

CHIGURH: I'm looking for Llewelyn Moss.

WOMAN: Did you go up to his trailer?

CHIGURH: Yes I did.

WOMAN: Well I'd say he's at work. Do you want to leave a message?

CHIGURH: Where does he work?

WOMAN: I can't say.

CHIGURH: Where does he work?

WOMAN: Sir I ain't at liberty to give out no information about our residents.

——Chigurh looks around the office. He looks at the woman.——

CHIGURH: Where does he work?

WOMAN: Did you not hear me? We can't give out no information.

——A toilet flushes somewhere. A door unlatches. Footsteps in back. Chigurh looks at the woman. He turns and opens the door and leaves.——

//

The dialogue is near word-for-word lifted from the novel, but the Coens are due credit not just for understanding the subtleties of the interplay but for generating a filmic atmosphere from them. There’s a dry mirth in Chigurh’s repetitions, but it’s not trivial. Beneath the subtle humour of each repetition is the understanding that Chirguh is an implacable force and truly malevolent. Diabolic. This exchange mirrors other conversations Chigurh has throughout the story in which he forces his interlocutor to call heads or tails, the wager being one made against death. The point here is that none of that shines on the surface of this seemingly mundane dialogic interplay, but it’s there. In the mundane, the seemingly trivial happenings of the human species, some dimension of a badness so authentic can yet pervade as subtext.

This wankerish wordplay is all I offer, in full knowledge of its falling short of expectation of insight expected in the label review. I offer a child’s sketch of a simple reality. But whereas a master like Van Gough might see what, to us, a banal vase of irises, and by his art reveal some appreciation of a moreness of what seems to have no more to give than what irises are not more than a flower unpainted, McCarthy and the Coens see those irises, this mundane Texas conversation, as a dialogic interplay which, somehow, facilitates the very logic of an encounter with all that is bad, the diabolic. 

`And it is no

I always knew you had to be willing
           to die to even do this job -- not to
           be glorious. But I don't want to
           push my chips forward and go out and
           meet something I don't understand.

PLOT

The plot is another aspect of the film. It’s a simple vessel, sure enough, but it’s seaworthy to transport a valuable cargo.

Already referred to in the dialogue, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is the protagonist. He’s an ordinary Texan who lives with his wife Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) in a trailer home, and we guess he makes ends meet. The spark of the plot’s fire is that, one day, out hunting, Moss comes across the carnage of a drug deal gone bad. Everyone is dead or dying.

There’s a good bit of narcotics stacked about and Moss correctly assumes that one of the parties also brought money to the exchange. He asks a near-dead Mexican pleading for water where the ‘Ultimo hombre—last man standing’ got to. He cleverly assumes the last man standing would have taken the money and that, in the heat, he would have sought shade. There’s a lone tree, set away from the scene of the shootout, and under it a dead man clutches a briefcase of cash. Once again, simplicity belies import, but here it's the image that’s significant. It’s biblical: a tree with something Llewelyn longs for (not an apple, but money), that everyone knows it’s a bad idea to take—figurally, Adam (maybe Adán) is lying right there dead beneath the tree. But Llewelyn is an ordinary man, descendant of Adam, and he can’t but eat of that forbidden fruit. He takes the money.

And so now the devil is on his tail.

THE DEVIL

The plot spools out from there, and there’s no need to recap its mechanics. They’re not too important. What’s important is the devil.

One of McCarthy’s distinguishing literary gifts was always a skill for crafting of villainy. Nothing quite matches the villain of the Judge in Blood Meridian, but McCarthy’s invention of Anton Chigurh is excellent.

From the film’s opening, before the genesis of the plot, we are introduced to Chigurh by a segment of narration, the words of sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The narration is an abridgment of the first-person opening to McCarthy’s novel. It’s short. Sheriff Bell reflects on the only person he ever sent to the gas chamber, a boy of nineteen who admitted he had always wanted to commit murder and knew he was going to hell.

But the story has nothing to do with that boy, because something worse has been conceived, what Bell goes shortly on after to call ‘a true and living prophet of destruction’. We don’t know it yet, but this is Chighur.

The brilliance of both novel and film pivot on Chighur and what he stands for. Several times he asks characters in the story to call heads or tails as he flips a coin. An odd adornment to this deranged character is that his most common weapon of murder on such occassions is a pneumatic bolt pistol used to make the slaughter of cattle humane (that it’s now being used to slaughter humans by someone truly inhumane is the kind of black irony McCarthy loves).

Like everything in the book and film, the coin flip is no triviality. Somewhat obscure in this modernity, but I would be shocked if the prime influence of McCarthy’s invention of Chighur and his coin toss wasn’t Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840), in which a Russian officer paradoxically offers a 20-ducat wager on the reality of predestination. At first it’s a joke, but an officer takes the bet, puts a pistol to his head, pulls the trigger and it misfires. We’re none wiser about whether that was fate or not, but that’s the sort of grim irony that McCarthy and the Coens both seem to chuckle at.

The whole idea of the coin-toss is so important that I’ll wager the existence of one further element of this essential plot device. I wager it’s Pascal’s wager: in essence, gambling on the existence of God. But remembering the depth of villainy that McCarthy and the Coens wish to probe, Chigur’s coin-toss can be seen as a sort of diabolical inversion of Pascal’s wager.

A word on the acting. Bardem was little known to English-speaking audiences prior to this role, but the strange brilliance he brings to the film has ensured they will never forget him. It’s surely what secured him an accreditation as a Bond villain (Skyfall, 2012), just as Christoph Waltz’s inspired performance of malevolent Nazi Hans Lada in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2008) secured him Bond villain status for the later Spectre (2015).

I won’t say how the film ends.

But I’ll offer a grim anecdote in the spirit of the occasion. Lermontov’s novel centres on an antagonism between two characters, who are friends but ultimately fight a duel to the death with pistols. It’s fiction, but Lermontov is known to have loosely based his protagonist on himself, a Byronic hero named Pechorin. As fate would have it, a friend of Lermontov, a man much like Pechorin’s antagonist in the novel, challenged him to a duel just one year after the publication of the novel. In the novel, Pechorin wins the duel and his friend dies. In real life, Pechorin died.