When The Movie is Better Than The Already Really Good Book: “No Country For Old Men” (2007), a Coen Brothers film.
The frequent expectation or common assumption that “the movie is never as good as the book” is one that cannot be true, simply because no blanket generalizing statement can ever be completely true in regards to any topic, generally speaking. The film No Country For Old Men directed by the Coen Brothers, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, is a strong example of a film that was successful in expanding on cultural dimensions of the original text, to the extent that it is fully deserving of further exploration. The film adaptation was able to more daringly portray the story’s main characters, establish them in a more three-dimensional way on-screen, and successfully layer the stories of these main characters in a way that the novel couldn’t quite do so as effectively in comparison.
The film’s distinct visual style and masterful cinematography also created a more immersive connection for viewers as far as experiencing the story’s Southern Gothic tone and setting, and more vividly brought to life the world that Cormac McCarthy constructed in the original novel. The film also found its way into winning an incredible host of awards across a number of award ceremonies, and ended up receiving four awards at the Academy Awards, most triumphantly for Best Picture. The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men has also found its way into the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest films of the 21st century.
As Lynnea Chapman King details in the book “No country for old men from novel to film”, a lot of the cast and crew members of the film were unsure of how to appropriately describe the genre of the film because of its complexity and nuance in genre play, as those involved in the production named genres ranging from “horror, crime, Western, noir, even comedy at times” (p. vii). Although it is true that the novel itself also consisted of more than one genre style, yet is almost always considered as nothing more than a straight-up thriller in terms of its best match in genre category (p. vii), the film is able to able to better portray moments of horror and comedy in particular due to its visual cues and human performances on screen (King, 2009). By visually reading and understanding how the actors portray the character’s emotion, spoken diction and tone on screen, in comparison to the lack of visual information in the text in the novel, the viewer is able to better recognize moments of humour in terms of its situational context and delivery of lines by the actors in character and properly communicated by facial expressions and manner of speaking.
In the source, “A Life as Potent and Dangerous as Literature Itself”: Intermediated Moves from Mrs. Dalloway to The Hours”, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth (Lindgren Leavenworth 2010), explains that in the film The Hours “The theme of haunting naturally also applies to the intertwining of lives we notice, emphasized in the film by visual shortcuts already in the opening scenes” (p. 511), and this theme of haunting and the intertwining lives of characters can also be seen in the film No Country For Old Men. The opening scene of the film features a voiceover narration from Ed Tom Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones, as the film visually introduces us to the antagonist of the film Anton Chigurh played by Javier Bardem at the same time, and it acts as a cue to expect that the narrator of the voiceover and the character on screen are going to likely be involved in each other’s lives in some capacity, even before the audience might be certain of this direction of the film’s plot. In the novel, in comparison, the opening voiceover narration is in the form of a monologue separated from the action of Chigurh’s introduction to the story on the immediately subsequent page.
The film overlays the narration, or monologue, with the introduction of Chigurh on screen, and creates a more immediate sense of connection between the characters due to the nature of the medium of film and its instantaneous visual communication. Similar to how in The Hours (2002) the film is able to create an immediate display, both in visual and audible terms of how the main character’s lives will be interwoven and profoundly connected to one another, this opening scene from No Country For Old Men accomplishes a similar cinematic feat compared to the inability of its original text to do the same. This is further detailed and specified by Leavenworth by recognizing that “This instantaneousness is virtually impossible in the written form” (p. 511).
In the book “Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to the Passion of the Christ” author Thomas Leitch observes that “Many filmmakers make contributions so definitive to the films on which they collaborate that their hand is instantly recognizable”, and then references a number of directors ranging from Joseph H. Lewis to Douglas Sirk, a number of cinematographers and production designers, editors and sound designers, as well as choreographer Busby Berkeley (Leitch, 2007). Then goes on to explain that “All these filmmakers are well known to film scholars and film students; all have some claim to authorship of their films. But although several of them are more widely recognized than the authors whose work their films adapted, none except perhaps Berkeley is a household name commonly recognized by a more general audience” (p. 237).
When pondering on the question of whether the Coen Brothers as directors are more commonly recognized than the author Cormac McCarthy, and what effect this would create on audiences when viewing the film, there appears to be no straightforward answer in how to gauge the recognizability or popularity of the directors and author in direct contrast to each other. Cormac McCarthy is considered by many to be one of the most accomplished modern American writers, and the Coen Brothers have directed a film that is considered to be among the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American movies ever made in Fargo, and have tallied 13 Academy Award nominations.
It might be a fair argument to suggest that due to the arguably greater influence of cinema and film in today’s world as far as reaching a mainstream audience, the Coen Brothers as a duo would likely be slightly more identifiable than Cormac McCarthy in the average contemporary household universally. However, how much of the Coen Brothers’ adaptation could make for instantly recognizable auteurship on-screen to viewers from their directorial hands and aesthetic vision? Explained by Chapman King, “The Coens’ adaptation retains elements of the novel that continue what one can find in McCarthy’s novels about the West, particularly the Border Trilogy” (p. 193), meaning that it could be that ultimately the film might resonate with audiences in a way that recognizes it as an example of distinctly McCarthy-like style, tone and setting, rather than immediately recognizing it within the Coens’ universe.
There is some evidence that this might have been the case also due to it being the Coen's first identifiable Neo-Western film, coming three years before the more traditional Revisionist Western film of theirs True Grit, or The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. A lot of the dark comedy that is a trademark of the Coen Brothers’ films is also clearly more subdued in No Country For Old Men when comparing it to other films such as, for example, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Hudsucker Proxy, or O Brother, Where Art Thou?, to name only a few. It appears as though the Coen Brothers’ were able to elevate the work of Cormac McCarthy by robustly capturing the essence of the novel’s spirit and allowing for the undeniable strength of cinema to fill in any of the gaps that were apparent in the novel by fully fleshing out the characters, time and place, and stylistic tones of the story in a meticulously perceptive fashion.
Annotated Bibliography
King, Lynnea Chapman, “No country for old men from novel to film.” 2009,
No country for old men from novel to film — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Lindgren Leavenworth, Maria, “A Life as Potent and Dangerous as Literature Itself”: Intermediated Moves from Mrs. Dalloway to The Hours.” 2010,
Leitch, Thomas, “Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to the Passion of the Christ.” 2007, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mtroyal-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318337
