Features

The New Wild West

Jason Silverman
From the set of the filmed-in-New Mexico Oscar contender No Country for Old Men (adopted from the Cormac McCarthy thriller), film editor Jason Silverman scoops on the Coen brothers' dark directorial vision, Tommy Lee Jones's star performance, and the harsh beauty of the Southwest desert.

What do you get when you mix the cinematic talent of the Coen brothers, a stellar cast that includes the unflinching virtuosity of heavyweight Tommy Lee Jones, and the unparalleled writing of our city’s favorite recluse, Cormac McCarthy—then shoot it all in New Mexico? A haunting exploration of America’s New West in the Oscar contender No Country for Old Men, coming to a theater near you.

After a long, painful separation, America seems to be falling in love again with the Hollywood Western. This year, audiences lined up for an old-school remake of 3:10 to Yuma, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale and shot in New Mexico. Critics loved Brad Pitt’s latest release, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The cult following of HBO’s surprise hit Deadwood continues to grow, despite the show having wrapped its third and final season last year. And two made-for-television Westerns, Broken Trail and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, dominated this year’s Emmy Awards with 33 nominations.

The wild Western, at least this old-fashioned kind, is in vogue. This month will test whether audiences are ready for a more contemporary take, as Oscar-winning directors Joel and Ethan Coen (who deconstructed the deep South with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the far North with Fargo) train their sights on the Southwest with the release of the star-studded No Country for Old Men. Adapted by the Coens from the 2005 novel of the same title by Tesuque’s own Cormac McCarthy, and shot largely in New Mexico, the film brings a new dimension to the revival of the Western in a tough-minded, unapologetic, present-day approach that’s much wilder and darker than anything tried before.

Set not in some vague, dusty frontier past but in the familiar 1980s, on its surface, No Country for Old Men doesn’t look like a Western. The story forgoes the tired iconography of bows and arrows, tremulous main-street showdowns, and whores with hearts of gold. And don’t hold your breath for an into-the-sunset happy ending. No Country, which stars Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and Woody Harrelson, paints an uncompromisingly nihilistic portrait of Western society.

In his novel, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Cormac McCarthy tells the story of three men whose lives intersect after a drug deal gone brutally wrong. While hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam vet, comes across a shot-up pickup truck and a scattering of dead bodies. Poking around, he also stumbles on a pile of heroin and a briefcase full of $2 million in cash. Taking the money, Moss sets into motion a chain reaction of events at once catastrophic, uncontrollable, and beyond the law. With the hell-bent bounty hunter Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) soon on Moss’s trail, casually exterminating anybody who gets in his way, local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) steps in to find Moss before Chigurh does. As the book’s title suggests, the case, to be Bell’s last, pits an aging sheriff against a ruthless killer in a world of violence that seems as unnecessary as it is unending.

The action unfolds along the West Texas–Mexico border, and McCarthy’s book spins the story in the spare, muscular, punctuation-light, disorienting style that has become his trademark. As in his earlier novels, McCarthy de-romanticizes the American West, countering the more easily digestible visions churned out for decades by tourist boards and travel agencies with tales of slaughter, casual cruelty, and trampled dreams. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy said 13 years ago, in a rare interview—since then, he’s spoken on the record only with Vanity Fair and Oprah Winfrey. And while his work may be hard to wade through, “it’s harder to ignore,” wrote Caryn James, former editor of the New York Times Book Review. McCarthy’s 1985 masterpiece, Blood Meridian, an uneasy exploration of the vicious, frenzied turf wars between mercenaries and Native American warriors in the 1840s, was named in a New York Times writers’ poll as the third most important work of fiction in the last 25 years. His Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, 1992; The Crossing, 1994; Cities of the Plain, 1998) was set in the late 1940s and follows a young man who discovers love, heartbreak, and brutality as he travels back and forth between New Mexico and Mexico. And last year’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Road, which takes place in the near future, tells the hauntingly painful tale of a man who heads south from Texas, trying to lead his son to safety in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse.

With its contemporary backdrop, No Country provides a historical link between these novels, which together chronicle a chain of human struggles, largely in the American West. Couple that with the cinematic brilliance of the Coen brothers, who co-directed, co-produced, and co-wrote the adaptation to screen with a deep appreciation of McCarthy’s vision.

“It is hard for us to tell a story without connecting it to the region or the landscape somehow,” said Joel Coen at the film’s debut in May, at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was up for the Palme d’Or award. “It’s so obvious from the novel that it’s written by someone who knows the region and who lives there and even what the natural history of the place is,” added his brother, Ethan. “Cormac is a great describer of nature and it’s all very real. … Like the novel, like the story, with the landscape you wonder: Is it really incredibly bleak or is it beautiful? It’s kind of both.”

If No Country for Od Men has a theme, it’s that the New West has begun turning a few good men into monsters. The lure of easy money (including the fast cash of the drug trade), our loss of faith, and the breakdown of the social order have left our culture increasingly unmoored. In the book’s first chapter, Sheriff Bell, known to philosophize about life, describes sending a baby-faced 19-year-old murderer to the gas chamber. “Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was goin to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I dont know what to make of that. I surely dont. I thought I’d never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin if maybe he was some new kind.”

With Bell serving as the story’s narrator and conscience, the callous bounty hunter Anton Chigurh, whom Bell calls “a true and living prophet of destruction,” radiates a polished and relentless malice: He literally flips a coin to decide between taking or saving a life. Llewelyn Moss, hardened from his service in Vietnam, remains honorable but is destined to pay the price for his bad choices. Together, the three form an unholy trinity that propels the story forward at a heart-pounding pace. “It’s as close as we’ll ever come to doing an action movie,” Joel Coen explained to film critic Emmanuel Levy. “It’s a chase story—with Chigurh chasing Moss and the sheriff bringing up the tail. It’s a lot of physical activity to achieve a purpose. It’s interesting in a genre way, but it was also interesting to us because it subverts the genre expectations.” No Country is McCarthy’s most screen-ready novel to date, built around convincing, imaginative action and a taut, coherent narrative.

McCarthy’s works have grown leaner over the years, with tighter narratives woven into a Faulkner-esque appreciation of time and place. And if they seem to employ an almost scientifically austere approach, it may be because he’s spent much of the past five years working alongside the world’s most innovative thinkers at the Santa Fe Institute, a science-oriented think tank nestled in the hills off Hyde Park Road. McCarthy, who’s pulled up stakes throughout his life, moving mostly in and out of Tennessee, settled down in Tesuque in 1999 with his wife and eight-year-old son, John Francis (who, he told Oprah in her June, 2007 interview, inspired The Road). Soon he was sharing meals and tea, editing scientific papers, and serving as SFI’s general muse. (Oprah’s interview was shot there.) He worked on both No Country and The Road at his SFI office, punching out the text on his Olivetti Lettera portable typewriter, and dedicated No Country to the Institute. “I like being around smart, interesting people, and the people who come here are among the smartest, most interesting people on the planet,” he said in a 2005 Vanity Fair article timed for the book launch of No Country for Old Men. “It’s sobering how investigations into physical phenomena are done. It makes you more responsible about the way you think. You come to have a lot less tolerance for things that are not rigorous.”

Though it may seem strange for a reclusive, Southern-boiled author to hang around eggheads, Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and a founder of SFI, figures McCarthy’s residency makes perfect sense. “There isn’t any place like the Santa Fe Institute,” he told Vanity Fair, “and there isn’t any writer like Cormac, so the two fit quite well together.”

As in his past work, McCarthy isn’t afraid to take on some of the heaviest topics of our times. Writers who don’t confront death, he told Vanity Fair reporter Richard B. Woodward, are “not serious. … Most people don’t ever see anyone die. … Death is the major issue in the world,” he said. “For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.” Death and destruction come suddenly and with startling regularity in No Country. As Woodward said of the book, there are probably more corpses than commas.

In that sense, Joel and Ethan Coen seem to be McCarthy’s artistic kin. Since their first feature, Blood Simple, in 1984, the Minneapolis natives have handled death in explicit if sometimes darkly comic ways. Fans will forever remember Steve Buscemi’s mangling by a wood chipper in Fargo, along with the harrowing execution scene in Miller’s Crossing. “There is a good deal of humor in [No Country], although you wouldn’t call it a humorous novel, exactly,” Joel Coen said in Cannes. “It’s certainly very dark—and that was our defining characteristic.”

Translating McCarthy’s tough, philosophically spiked language and idiosyncratic story for the screen meant assembling a killer cast. The wide-ranging Tommy Lee Jones, who brought home an Oscar for The Fugitive and a nomination for JFK, signed on to play Sheriff Bell in part because he wanted to work with McCarthy’s words. “Cormac is our best living prose stylist,” he once remarked. “And he’s also a friend. I’ve read all of his books and most of his criticism. I have the greatest respect for his work and for his imagination.”

Playing Bell also gave Jones another chance to return to New Mexico (he starred in Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah and Ron Howard’s The Missing, both shot in the state), along with another meaty role to add to an already impressive career. Both he and the film are already serious contendors—Best Actor and Best Picture—for February’s Academy Awards.

Spanish-born actor and Oscar nominee Javier Bardem (Before Night Falls, The Sea Inside) took on the role of Chigurh, and Josh Brolin, fresh from the success of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse and the hit tweener TV series Wildfire (also made in New Mexico), agreed to star as Moss. It was Brolin’s first time working with the brothers Coen. “It’s kind of strange, I suppose,” he said in Cannes. “One guy with two heads … It’s very subtle, but they put a lot of trust in their casting so they don’t have to do a lot of work on set. They can focus on the other aspects of the filmmaking.”

The Coens also lined up a strong supporting cast. Woody Harrelson, no stranger to our state since the filming of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers at the Rio Grande Gorge in 1993, plays a powerful businessman who pulls strings behind the drug-running scene. The Oscar-nominated Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) plays Bell’s wife; and Emmy winner and Golden Globe nominee Kelly Macdonald (HBO’s The Girl in the Café) plays Moss’s wife, Carla Jean.

Yet one key character remained to be cast: the rugged, unforgiving landscape across which No Country’s tragedy spills out. “[West Texas] is a place with a history of violence and of being inhospitable in a way,” Joel Coen once explained. “As with all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, the location is a character itself—and it can’t be separated from the story.”

New Mexico didn’t begin very high on the list of places to shoot No Country. In fact, location manager Michael Dellheim didn’t want the Coens in his home state. When the brothers hired him to find appropriate spots for the film, he was up-front with them. “I tried to talk them out of coming here,” says Dellheim, who has locked in New Mexico locales for filming The Milagro Beanfield War (1986), the TV series Earth 2, The Longest Yard, North Country, Seraphim Falls, Bordertown, and John Carpenter’s Vampires. “I had such respect for the Coens, and thought, ‘Yeah, for most movies, we can fake it with New Mexico.’ But I didn’t want them to compromise their look. We just don’t look like West Texas. It’s a different terrain and different elevation. This doesn’t look like Marfa. It doesn’t double for Sanderson or Odessa, the locations named in the story. And the book is very specific—this isn’t one of those ‘somewhere-out-West’ towns.”

Tommy Lee Jones, himself a West Texas native, also berated the Coens for considering shooting No Country here. “The regional thing is strong for us, and this was not East Texas or South Texas; this was West Texas,” Ethan recalled about Jones’s initial response. “We turned over the idea of shooting exclusively in New Mexico, where there are great tax incentives, but Tommy Lee Jones, who comes out of that West Texas landscape, yelled at us that it would be a mistake. So it wasn’t all principle; it was partially browbeating.”

Still, hoping to take advantage of New Mexico’s film-incentive program, which includes investment dollars, tax breaks, and bend-over-backward support from state agencies, the Coens were determined to shoot as much of their Texas-set film in and around Santa Fe as possible. They knew that New Mexico had doubled for other places: Las Vegas had stood in for the snowbound climes of Minnesota in Niki Caro’s 2005 film North Country (which received Oscar nominations for Charlize Theron and Joel Coen’s wife, Frances McDormand). Santa Fe recently played Juarez, Mexico, in Gregory Nava’s Borderland, and Albuquerque even doubled as Germany in Beerfest.

Once they began scouting, the Coens discovered locations that they felt served the story. Alongside I-25, just south of La Bajada, they found a canyon for the opening sequences in which Moss discovers the corpses, drugs, and money. River scenes were shot near Pilar, in and next to the Rio Grande. And Las Vegas doubled for a number of West Texas towns. With the exception of a few exterior shots around Marfa, the bulk of this $25 million film was made within our state lines.

“It’s a real art to create these kind of places that are pretty banal sometimes,” says Bob Graf, the Coen brothers’ executive producer, who served as location manager for Fargo and The Ladykillers. “Like a motel room—how do you make that feel real, with the little details real, the stain in the ceiling, the light fixtures? You don’t want it to look unreal. Some movies are flashy, some are not. This movie should feel authentic.”

The Coens, as fans know, have created some of the most memorable settings in recent cinema history: the comically sinister greater Phoenix area in Raising Arizona; the chill, snowbound Minnesota in Fargo; a surreal, absurd, vaguely menacing 1940s Hollywood in Barton Fink; the bowling alleys of The Big Lebowski; and the endless forest in Miller’s Crossing. Finding locations for No Country that would resonate as strongly was essential. “The setting is so integral to the book, to the story,” Ethan said at Cannes. “It’s about where it takes place as much as anything else. It is a very beautiful landscape, but in a bleak rather than picturesque way. It’s not an easy place to live in, and that’s important to what the story is about—the human confrontation with this harsh environment.”

On a summer night at the Greer Garson Studios, on the campus of the College of Santa Fe, the crew films scene 47, in which Moss hides the briefcase of money in a hotel room. It’s a mundane shot, but, like almost everything in filmmaking, it demands the use of high-tech tools. Some tattooed crew members type on PowerBooks perched on their laps, while others watch replays of footage and listen to sound recordings in the set’s video-assist room. But the Coens run a quiet, efficient, drama-free set: Machines quietly glowing, the studio feels nearly as peaceful as a hospital ward in the dead of night.

Signs of destruction, however, are near. While the crew sets up a shot, Louise Spencer, the unit publicist, shows off a crate of mannequins ready to be bloodied and strewn about the desert. Nearby, late-model pickup trucks and police cruisers, destined to be driven at high speeds, exploded, and incinerated, line the fence enclosing the soundstage’s parking lot.

A few nights later, on a closed-off public street in downtown Las Vegas, a team of makeup and special-effects artists use rubber gloves and gauze to spread goops of fake blood on the personable Josh Brolin. “There’s blood everywhere, right?” one crewmember asks a preoccupied Joel Coen. “Does it all get matted in his hair?” Brolin inquires.

Making Brolin bleed wasn’t a challenge. Turning Las Vegas into a border town was. Metalworkers in Santa Fe crafted a life-sized border crossing, using 50,000 pounds of steel, then transport it on flatbed trucks to a location off I-25’s exit 345, where it was erected. With a united states border station sign on one side and a bienvenidos a mexico sign on the other, the gate looked legit enough to confuse some longtime locals. Tourists were even more bewildered. As I watched the crew set up a shot nearby, two bikers rode past, did a double take and then a triple, and nearly tipped over their Harleys.

The effort was worth it. After its Cannes premiere in May, No Country, set for a U.S. release in late November, leaped to near the top of critics’ scorecards. The performances by Jones and Bardem have been singled out, and a consensus is building that, however dark, the film is one of the Coens’ strongest. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called No Country for Old Men “a completely gripping nihilistic thriller, a model of impeccably constructed, implacable storytelling. All you could hope for in a marriage of the Coen brothers and McCarthy, it’s a film that you can’t stop watching, even though you very much wish you could as it escorts you through a world so horrifically bleak ‘you put your soul at hazard,’ as one character says, to be part of it.”

Though few writers have contextualized No Country in terms of its Western setting, the rugged landscapes speak as emphatically as any of the film’s human characters. The foregrounding of the landscape in No Country marks an evolution for the Coens, according to Peter Rainer, the Pulitzer-shortlisted film critic for the Christian Science Monitor.

“The sense of place in the Coens’ movies tends to be ominous even when there’s no clear reason why this should be,” he says. “In this film, it’s all too clear why. It’s a rapacious world where violence can appear out of nowhere, and the wide-open spaces provide no cover. They only serve to point out the meaninglessness of survival against the fates.” Welcome to the new Wild West.