"No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy; Vintage; 309 pages; $14.
"I sent one boy to the gas chamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My
arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three
times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didn't
have to go but I did. I sure didn't want to."
Those are the opening lines of Cormac McCarthy's novel "No Country for Old
Men," and they're pretty much the opening lines of the Oscar-winning movie
as well, intoned in narration by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The
movie ends with the book's last lines, but not in narration, as McCarthy
wrote it: Adapters Joel and Ethan Coen instead have Bell speak the haunting
words - the recounting of a dream he'd had the night before - over the
breakfast table, to his wife.
It was a minor but telling and effective change. McCarthy had room in the
book to delineate the depth and power of the devotion Bell and his wife held
for each other. There's not nearly enough time for that in the Coen's
breakneck film, but this touching scene, in which the sad, retired and
confused old sheriff relates the dream, in almost mystical drawl, becomes a
special, shared moment that adds texture and relief to his character - and
to the film as a whole.
The film falls, or rather, is flung by the Coens headlong into the "faithful
adaptation" category. Readers familiar with the novel can not only cross off
the scenes one by one, but mouth words along with the actors: The Coens know
enough not to mess too much with killer dialogue.
Yet they had to cut a lot of stuff out; the book is 309 pages in its
paperback edition. And they did so masterfully; the edits are swift, sure
and seamless, the scars from the cuts invisible. Take, for example, the
dialogue between the psychopath Chigurh and a befuddled, then increasingly
terrified owner of a gas station/minimart. As far as I could tell - I don't
have a copy of the script - it's taken word-for-word from the book. And then
it's not: McCarthy ends it with Chigurh's one-paragraph lecture on fate and
its instruments; the Coens saw it as extraneous to their purposes, and
excised it. And the scene clicks, horribly. Good choice.
(I'd have excised it from the book as well, but that's another argument.)
In his brilliant film adaptation of Jim Thompson's "The Grifters," Donald
Westlake eliminated one of the four main characters; what worked in the book
would have gummed the movie up hopelessly. Likewise (almost), the Coens
pared down the presence of the fourth person in the drug-money-chasing party
- the folks whose frontman, played by Woody Harrelson, is after both Chigurh
and the cash. Four's a crowd, apparently, on the big screen.
The greatest temptation, the fattest target, for the Coens was in all
likelihood the violent death of one of the main characters. (No spoilers
here.) For all the on-page slaughter in the rest of the book, McCarthy has
it occur off the page; another character comes across the massacre a few
minutes after it has taken place. There's a reason for that - it makes the
death seem inevitable, a force of the nature of evil.
It would have made a hell of a shootout on screen, shocking and awful and
likely unforgettable. But it never made it. A wise screenwriter knows when
to leave great enough alone.
