McCarthy in Film

All the Pretty Horses (2000)

Pop culture, especially movies and best-selling novels, has explored concrete instances of the ties between the culture and economy of southwestern United States and Mexico. For example, All the Pretty Horses based on Cormac McCarthy’s best selling novel, illustrates a heightened awareness of Mexico in the popular imagination, following a long history of Hollywood’s representations of Americans and Mexicans in contact on the border. This film presents classic Western themes of fear and tension, but in a new setting. No longer is the antagonist a wealthy land-owner from the east or the wild savage a bare-chested Indian. This western land had been conquered all the way to the Pacific, leaving a void in the hearts of the young adventurers of America. This void was filled by the expansive wilderness to the south. Americans beginning to populate the areas adjacent to the Mexican border, and Mexicans beginning to immigrate into America set the state for a new popular drama. Instead of the traditional western villain, the rich Caudillo became the villain and the Mexican people bore the weight of America’s xenophobia. Because of this change in perspective, but not in traditional ideologies and mythologies, films about the cowboys near the Mexican border have been dubbed the “revisionist Western.”

Yet, revisions still depend on the previous vision. All the Pretty Horses illustrates the persistence of Hollywood’s Mexican stereotype, both of men and of the nation. The film relies on long-held conceptions of Mexican men as brutal and enigmatic figures located in a desolate and poverty-stricken, though beautiful, landscape (Sugg 2001, 118). For McCarthy’s American characters, this Mexican landscape represents opportunities that had been shut down in the United States in the 1950s following World War II: open pastures and freewheeling cowboys working outside the constraints of corporate and urban culture. The Mexican landscape was romanticized by the youths of America just as the old cowboys did the American west.  

ATPH follows the traditional Hollywood Western coming of age story, where the youthful protagonist turns his back on civilization and heads out through the desert and mountains on horseback into the wilderness where innocence experience the evil of the universe (Morrison 1993, 176). However, unlike traditional Hollywood Westerns, revisionist Westerns such as All the Pretty Horses,have been credited with representing a new kind of cowboy hero (Sugg 200, 119). These culturally ambivalent American cowboys engage in the iconic romance of the border—a cross-racial love affairs with a Mexican woman—and ostensibly embody a critical attitude toward the racial mythologies of the Western (Sugg 2001, 121). John Grady’s journey portrays him not solely as a modern day horse-taming cowboy, but also as an unlikely knight errant, displaced and dispossessed, heroically tested and stubbornly faithful to a chivalric code whose power is severely circumscribed by the inevitable evil (Morrison 1993, 176). Though All the Pretty Horseswas a critical and box office disappointment, it paved the way for more popular revisionist Western films that have captured the American imagination.

No Country for Old Men (2007)

No Country for Old Men, directed by the Coen Brothers, is a searing, shocking movie that plays like a eulogy for the great American West (Ogden 2007). Like Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, or Blood Simple this movie is about the intrusion of fast-paced violence in a normally peaceful setting, a place where the inhabitants truly treasure the life void of emotion and are profoundly puzzled by people who would disturb their peace. No Country for Old Men, in the violence it portrays and in the starkness of the moral conflicts it examines, has the potential to veer toward Tarentino-like hysteria. But the Coens are wintry and dead calm ironists, and their movie is finally less an assault on our sensibilities than a subtle — and possibly permanent — insinuation into our consciousnesses (Schickel 2007). One of the most surprising aspects of this film was the resurrection of the western film that accompanied it, so much so that a new genre, called the post-modern western, was created. This new genre of film deploys Western elements in a modern day setting in order to express the complexity of the postmodern condition. It’s narrative and formal designs portray our moment of historical rupture with a palpable sense of loss, when culture feels increasingly disconnected from the meaning and national cohesion once glimpsed in the past (Strang 2010).

 Such loss and disconnection is embodied by Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem. As a cinematic villain, Chigurh is, arguably, at the head of a table that seats Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter, Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance from The Shining and Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates from Psycho (Nair 2008). As a multilayered character that challenges and destabilized the idea of a singular Western villain identity, Chigurh can also be identified as a true postmodern villain (Covell 2009, 95). As a destabilizing character, Chigurh’s uncanny wardrobe is appropriate for the film. Bardem was costumed in a new, dark colored denim jacket, and sported an odd and now, infamous, haircut. His hair cut is by far the trait that most sets him apart from other characters. Comedian Jon Stewart calls Chigurh a combination of “Hannibal Lecter’s murderousness with Dorothy Hamill’s wedge-cut,” (Nair 2008) and late-night talk show host David Letterman was quoted saying, “The haircut alone is too creepy for Americans” (Letterman 2008). Small aspects, like the choice of hair, make No Country for Old Men slide into black comedy. Alternatively, it also contains aspects of a horror movie. The movie seems calm and objective most of the time, but Chigurh’s actions twist your gut as much as Lecter or Bates. Chigurh is at once universal and particular: he could be anyone – the innocuous everyman (Covell 2009, 97). As a boy tells Sheriff Bell in the novel, “He looks like anybody…He didn’t look like anybody…He didn’t look like anybody you’d want to mess with.” Bardem’s portrayal is about as perfect a representation of unambiguous evil as the movies have lately offered (Schickel 2007).

The Road (2009)

Produced jointly by 2929 and Bob Weinstein’s Dimension Films, The Road is an unusual undertaking for any film maker. Because it is set in a world that has suffered an unknown catastrophic event, its transfer to a visual medium becomes difficult. The empty feel to the novel has to be carefully rendered in concrete images that do not change the essence of the novel. For instance, director John Hillcoat, in a recent interview, said his team wanted to avoid the fantasy action atmosphere of post-apocalyptic thrillers such as Mad Max: “What’s moving and shocking about McCarthy’s book is that it’s so believable. So what we wanted is a kind of heightened realism, as opposed to the ‘Mad Max’ thing, which is all about high concept and spectacle. We’re trying to avoid the clichés of apocalypse” (McGrath 2008). The most arresting aspect of The Road is just how fully the filmmakers have realized this bleak, blighted landscape of a modern society reduced to savagery. A grimy, damp fog hangs over everything, and instead of birdsong there is the eerie creak and crash of falling trees. Vehicles sit abandoned on highways, houses stand looted and vacant, and what used to be towns are afterimages of violence and wreckage (Scott 2009).

For the crew of the film, the novel’s setting changed the usual rules of making a movie on location. Bad weather became good and good weather, bad. “A little fog, a little drizzle — those are the good days,” remarked Mark Forker, the movie’s director of special effects, to Charles McGarth of The New York Times in an 2008 interview while the crew was shooting some of the final scenes in the book. Located on a stretch of scraggly duneland by the shore of Lake Erie, it took great measures for the crew to turn the budding spring landscape into the post-apocalyptic setting McCarthy had envisioned. Some of the crew had even hand-stripped a little sapling of greenery, but some of the job would have to be done with electronic special effects by Forker, who was also in charge of sky replacement. The producers chose Pennsylvania as the main location for filming because it offered such a pleasing array of post-apocalyptic scenery: deserted coalfields, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, and windswept dunes.

In an attempt to fit cast to setting, Viggo Mortensen seemed like an obvious choice for the role of the father. John Hillcoat said,

The thing about the book is that there is such a huge range of emotions, from rage, fear, paranoia, all the way to tenderness. So what made Viggo appealing was his unbelievable range. And then there’s something iconic about the book. It’s about an American Everyman, and Viggo has some of that. You have to buy that this guy has what it takes to survive the end of the world. Viggo has this incredible physicality. (McGarth 2009)  

Hillcoat imagined the characters less as the usual post-apocalyptic freaks outfitted in outlandish outfit and more as homeless people. They wear scavenged, ill-fitting clothing and layers of plastic bags for insulation (McGarth 2008). This also makes the film less about the end of the world and more about the relationship between the boy and his father, echoing the novel’s focus. The film tries to suggest the fragile decency that a righteous minority must protect from the forces of chaos and evil. The odds are not terrific, and whether the father and son’s hope is a matter of hardy faith or persistent delusion is an open question (Scott 2009). Viggo Mortensen, who plays the father, spoke to this in the same interview:

It’s a love story that’s also an endurance contest. I mean that in a positive way. They’re on this difficult journey, and the father is basically learning from the son. So if the father-son thing doesn’t work, then the movie doesn’t work. The rest of it wouldn’t matter. It would never be more than a pretty good movie. But with Kodi [Smit-McPhee] in it, it has a chance to be an extremely good movie, maybe even a great one. (McGarth 2008)

Both the producers and Mortensen felt that real life should imitate art to get the relationship between himself and Kodi to be close to that of the film’s father and son. The script is broken down into short fragments of conservations between the two actors and most of the finer details come from their performance, not the words. During filming, Mortensen, protective of Kodi, worried about yanking or dragging him too hard, but also treated him as an equal. While waiting to shoot, Mortensen and Kodi have a more casual moment. Mortensen fretfully studied the monitor while Kodi dug for sand beetles, showing an especially plump one to Mortensen. “Looks like good eatin’,” Mortensen replied, and it wasn’t entirely clear whether he was joking or talking as a man who was supposed to be starving (McGarth 2008). Mortensen commented, “Being a father myself, I connected with Kodi right away. He kind of reminds me of my son at the same age, and even a little of myself. If I know anything, it’s about being a dad, and that freed me, I think, to be helpful and emotionally available to Kodi.” (McGarth 2008). The script, which was written by Joe Penhall, follows the novel closely. However, the script does enlarge and develop in flashback the role of the man’s wife, played by Charlize Theron. It was also noted that it lacks the biblical narrative style, which is found throughout all of McCarthy’s novels. However, the movie still remains true to the essence of the novel, focusing on the hope that remains in all of us. As Viggo Mortensen said in an interview on the film, “There’s something uplifting about the journey, something quite simple, Its better to be good to people, good to yourself, than not” (McGrath 2008).

by Kelsey Poorman