Notes from Cannes
The buzz machine slammed the French Riviera this weekend. Its target was one film: The Coen Brothers’ noir-tinged, darkly comical and meditative Western, “No Country for Old Men.” Critics and audiences have gone berserk over the film, and the Coens and their cast of Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin are already fielding Oscar questions (Tommy Lee Jones would be as well, but the notoriously testy actor steered clear of Cannes). A colleague wrote me late last night and asked whether the hype was justified, whether the Oscar talk could possibly be true. I can’t predict anything about the Oscars, because Miramax won’t release the film until November. But I can answer the first question.
Yes, it’s that good and, no, it’s not overhyped. I’m a rabid Coen Brothers fan, and for me, this near masterpiece is their best, most mature and beautiful work since 1990’s “Miller’s Crossing” (”The Big Lebowski” is on another plane, so I can’t even compare the two). But I won’t use the M word until I’ve seen it again — which I almost did this morning (I’ve never seen a film twice at the same festival) — until I saw the line around the block.
For those unaware, “No Country for Old Men” is the Coens’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2003 novel (if you haven’t read it, you should; I think it’s better than his recent Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Road”). In retrospect, the pair seems perfect. “Country” is McCarthy’s most accessible novel, a genre blur loaded with the type of colorful, local characters (West Texas, in this case) and the sharp, pitch-black funny dialogue that the Coens have written for more than two decades. It starts when ex-’Nam vet Llewlyn Moss (Brolin, in the type of rugged performance for which the word “breakthrough” was created) blindly stumbles upon a horrific desert scene while hunting: dead bodies and shot-up pickup trucks littering the sand. Inside one of the trucks, Moss finds enough heroin to keep a city on the nod for years and a case full of $2 million. When he decides to grab the money, he sets off a chain reaction of cataclysmic events for everyone involved. And there are a lot of everyones in “Country.” There is Moss’s wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), whose unquestioning trust of her husband drives his insane ambition; there’s Sheriff Bell (Jones, born to play this role), who knows Moss is in over his head and tries to chase him down; there’s bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), who’s simply tracking Moss and the money as another paid gig; and most importantly, there is Chigurh (Bardem … sure, start the Oscar talk), a Mexican assassin with a page-boy haircut, a ghost-white face, pink eyes and a coin he likes to flip for human lives. Chigurh is death and violence embodied; rarely has there been a badass like this on the big screen, one who kills for pure pleasure, without conscience and just because, well, as Nick Cave once sang, “All God’s creatures, they all gotta die.”
The plot is labyrinthine and ambiguous, but the Coens handle it with ease. It’s bloody and messy, but also laugh-out-loud funny (”I laugh to myself sometimes,” says Bell. “It’s all you can do”) and startlingly creepy. Good chunks of the film are shot in silence, with little, if no music, and only the Texas wind on the soundtrack. It’s the sound of a country withering and dying, where money is worth any sacrifice, where violence has escalated to the point of inane hysteria and a simple, aging sheriff like Bell muses about “dismal tides” that he can no longer contain. And this is, at its core, what “No Country for Old Men” is about: an America now without logic, reason or conscience.
We’re only halfway through the festival, but it looks like a two-horse race between “No Country” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days” for the Palme d’Or. And win or not, prepare yourself for “No Country”: It’ll floor you.
Lunch With the “Men”
How much did “No Country” floor me? So much so that I agreed to join the Coens, Brolin, Bardem and a small horde of quote-hungry journalists at a roundtable lunch on Sunday afternoon. I never do these. My reason for attending this time was simple: I just wanted to meet the Coen Brothers (though I must say that Bardem is one of the more thoughtful, intelligent actors I’ve met, and Brolin’s enthusiasm for actually being in a good movie was endearing). And I did … and I gushed to Ethan Coen like a silly fan … but I had to suffer through some brutal personalities and ridiculous questions to do so. Honestly, I don’t understand how people do roundtable discussions for a living. It was brutal. I was eating lunch and nearly spit out my food half a dozen times. I only had one question, actually: Did the duo show the movie to McCarthy and, if so, what was his reaction? “Yes, we did,” said Joel Coen. And? “He sat through the whole thing. We heard him laugh a few times.” So, will you be doing “The Road”? While laughing, Ethan and Joel simultaneously answered a resounding “No!” That was it for me. I got up and headed to another movie.
Saint Michael
The weekend’s other big event was Michael Moore’s return to Cannes — his first visit since his 2004 Palme d’Or win for “Fahrenheit 9/11″ — with his latest doc, “Sicko.” The Coen Brothers and Moore films couldn’t be more different: “Sicko” is as confused but more angry about America than “No Country for Old Men.” In Moore’s usual first-person, sarcastic, left-leaning and self-promoting style, he takes a scathing look at America’s health-care system. Moore asked people to submit to his Web site stories about how the system had let them down. By the end of that week, he had received tens of thousands of messages. And for the first chunk of “Sicko,” we meet these people and Moore lets them tell their stories: The couple who had to sell their home because they couldn’t make their co-payments; the woman whose infant child died in her arms, because the Kaiser insurance company wouldn’t let another doctor work on her; and several people who were insured but whose life-threatening claims were denied (they all died before the end of the making of the movie). And for a whole hour, Moore stays behind the camera! And then he decides to visit other countries and explore their government-supported health systems. We visit Canada and England and France (oh, how Moore panders to the French … and the crowd loved it), and through interviews with residents, doctors and administrators, it’s driven home that America has the worst health-care system on the planet. And, yes, at the climax of the film, he takes a boatload of Sept. 11 rescue workers to Cuba, where they receive amazing medical attention (would they have if a camera hadn’t been there? Dunno). Moore offers solid arguments throughout all of this, but he also neglects to investigate ANY of the criticisms of social medicine. It’s a no-brainer that our health system is a joke, but Moore could have made a stronger argument with a bit more research. But, hell, this is Michael Moore! He’s not interested in arguments as much as creating a revolution. And if this film can somehow create some type of anger to spur change, I’m all for it. And I know I was manipulated, but it wasn’t by Moore (he’ll never learn that his presence hurts his ideology) — it was by the interviewed Americans I saw and heard. For the first time after a Moore film, I didn’t feel anger at our government. I just felt shame.
More Movies
I saw other films last weekend, but I don’t have space to review all of them. So here are a few comments:
“Boarding Gate”: Walked out. Olivier Assayas takes a major step backward after “Clean.” Michael Madsen and Asia Argento as your two stars? Dude …
“Triangle”: Three great Hong Kong action directors — Johnny To, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam — teamed up for this fun thriller about three drinking buddies who decide to steal a chest full of gold. It’s a blast, wryly comical, moves like a shark and, two days later, I can’t tell you a single thing about it.
“Magnus”: An Estonian “Harold and Maude,” except substitute Maude for the death-loving kid’s father. Magnus wants to die; Dad decides, through acid, coke, hookers and other exciting means, to show the kid that life is worth living. Doesn’t work. The most powerful thing about this, however, is it’s a true story and Magnus’ dad is played by the real father.
“Breath”: I love me some Kim Ki-duk (”The Isle,” “3-Iron,” “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring”), but he’s starting to cover the same territory repeatedly. This is another odd tale of screwed-up lovers (a wife who falls for a mute death-row inmate), silence and death … I dug it for the first six or seven films. This one left me numb. The crowd seemed to like it, and it’s screening in competition, so …
Cannes Stories
Cannes of course isn’t just about the movies … here are some other things I experienced or heard about this weekend:
Fish soup … or U2? That was my quandary. I heard on Saturday night that the Irish lads would be playing a free concert on the steps of the Palais around midnight (to help promote the documentary “U2 3D”). I overheard this while hanging out with three sexy Swedes at a Finnish party where a band, all members wearing Orc-esque masks, called Lordi was going to perform. But that’s another story. Anyway, U2. So, I was hungry and I had to make the call: Watch U2 or grab some amazing fish soup at La Pizza. If this were 1987, I would have joined the mob on the Croisette. But it’s not and the fish soup was great. I heard “Where the Streets Had No Name” walking home and later learned they only played two songs (”Vertigo” being the other). Chalk one up for the Kid!
Finally, at a press conference on Sunday morning, where a ton of big-name directors gathered to discuss a collection of three-minute-long short movies called “Chacun Son Cinema,” Roman Polanski stood out. Or rather, he stood up … and walked out. But not before chastising the press for asking stupid questions. He should have attended the Coen Brothers lunch later that day. Oh, and in other news, David Cronenberg apparently said cinema is dead and people won’t be going to the movies soon. Which begs the question: Why am I here?
