Cormac MacCarthy and No Country for Old Men: Book to Film

Writer Cormac McCarthy's work will probably end up in school anthologies. McCarthy's the type of writer who seems to have vanished from the American literary scene. Don't expect to meet him at New York loft parties. You're more likely to find him wandering the deserts of Texas and New Mexico.

I've often wondered why McCarthy would sell film rights to his books and leave the work exposed to risky interpretations. Given the degree of insecurity and pain involved in much writing, an author understandably will gravitate toward financial stability. But the book to film creative odyssey sells more books, too, so the idea of reaching out to the massive film audience does not automatically lead to cultural decline.

Certainly, Cormac McCarthy seems to have been selective in allowing certain directors to use his novels. Billy Bob Thornton created the first film treatment of a McCarthy novel. Both book and film were entitled "All the Pretty Horses." That film was released in the year 2000 to mixed reviews and general public neglect.

Currently playing in cinemas around the country is the second film made from McCarthy's novel entitled "No Country for Old Men." This film, directed and written by Coen brothers, has captured a great deal of critical and public attention.

The Coen brothers, as everyone knows, were writers and directors of such mayhem filled films as "Fargo," "Miller's Crossing," and "Blood Simple." It's easy to understand how, in light of their past movie fare, they may have been attracted to write the screenplay for "No Country For Old Men."

I watched "No Country For Old Men" in a movie theatre at 4:15 in the afternoon of a stormy day when the only other patrons watching the movie were two, one of them a thin, faded, and bony stick figure of a man in a wheelchair, the other probably the paraplegic's wife. That dark and vacant setting seemed particularly apt for the McCarthy experience.

The movie was as faithful to the novel as a film could be, given the compressed format of film. The plot of the film is simple, more a vehicle of conveyance for Cormac McCarthy's philosophical thoughts about existence. A hunter named Llewellyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, happens upon the bloody aftermath of a desert shoot-out between rival drug dealers. Llewelyn's good luck in finding a satchel filled with money is also his bad luck. Psychotic killer, Anton Chigurh, figures he's the rightful owner of the money and begins tracking Moss. What Llewellyn doesn't know is that his efforts at running and hiding are futile; the money satchel has been implanted with a radio-frequency identifying device.

The Coens interpreted the McCarthy philosophy faithfully. Previous films they'd made convey a similar sense of random and pre-determined violence so it's likely the view of an indifferent and cruel universe is a shared concept. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is the leathery police chief of a Southwestern border town, amazed by the level of modern violence. The sheriff and his pals are trying to catch up with Llewellyn before Anton Chigurh does. Meanwhile, disillusionment and old age are catching up with Sheriff Bell.

I think Billy Bob Thornton did an impressive turn in bringing "All the Pretty Horses" to film, in spite of an overemphasis on an equestrienne love angle which was not so pronounced in the book. Unfortunately, movie goers seemed to resist the kind of story that McCarthy tells about young men adventuring in Mexico. The scant audiences for that film also seemed to have missed most of what director Thornton was driving at in his take on the novel.

McCarthy's not for everyone. He is often criticized on the grounds that his stories are too cruel, too bloody, too little redemptive. If those precepts were the only criteria for judgment, about ninety percent of the modern film industry would promptly vanish.

There is a very young teenage character in "All the Pretty Horses" named Jimmy Blevins. Blevins tags along with sixteen year old Grady Cole and his sidekick Lacey Rawlins on their odyssey to Mexico. Perhaps it is Blevins, more than any other character, whom Cormac McCarthy has chosen to carry the McCarthy bible toward the apocalyptic future. With Cole and Rawlins collapsed against some rocks and forced to watch, a screaming and struggling thirteen year old Blevins, with heels dragging through the Mexican desert sands, is executed with a rifle shot to the head. What McCarthy seems to be saying about future worlds, perhaps, is that there may be none.

Meanwhile, booksellers like Amazon, Borders Books, or Barnes and Noble can sell far more copies of a best-seller after it's made into a movie. Most books vanish soon after they're written and perhaps enjoyed by a few thousand people. If a book sells well into the thousands, even into the hundred thousands, the auteurs of the cinema may be taking a look at it as they did with McCarthy's novels. If the film becomes a great success (or even a modest one), the publishers rush thousands of new copies into print for the booksellers to sell. It's a windfall for writers who suffer longer and through greater difficulties than Hollywood film agents.