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The Determination of Joel and Ethan Coen - The Hands That Built America

Charles Mc Coll Portis

The country was very young

the cavalry was his defense,

the brilliant green of the prairie,

demonstrated in an impressive manner, the existence of God

the God who designed the border and build the railway.

At that time I was a kid, playing rummy and whistled at women.

Gullible, romantic, a man with mustache,

if I could choose between life and death,

between life and death, I would choose America.

Francesco De Gregori "Buffalo Bill"

A black wire connects part of the film production of the fabulous brothers Joel and Ethan Coen. It 's a thread that starts from the crude and violent debut "Blood Simple", is held in the beautiful "Crossroads of Death", whose original screenplay is explicitly indebted to Dashiell Hammett, a wire passing through the cold "Fargo" to arrive at Cormack Mc Carthy " No Country for Old Men "and the" True Grit "in theaters today, faithful to the famous film finally (U.S.) Mc Coll novel by Charles Portis.

We are not in front of the remake of the film that earned him the John Wayne his only Oscar, too distant from the real issues of the novel.

Instead, it is the faithful and passionate narration of the novel by Portis. The female character, as in Fargo, requires order, security, justice, as in Fargo is stubbornly willing to take risks and to use any means to redress the balance unfairly broken. It 's a fracture that can only be reconstructed through compensation, the amount of which is uncertain, as uncertain of the true value of a horse: something you notice when you find the star closely with the murderess of her father and His current accomplices.

So far, so normal. The reflection on the nature of retributive justice and its distinction (if any) from the private vengeance would not bring the film far from the great classics of the genre films, as "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," the first "That train to Yuma" and "Rio Lobo."

Joel and Ethan Coen

The conflict in the Coens give voice (along with Portis and Mc Carthy), however, is that between Form and Substance , between Order and Chaos: Order / Form requires compensation, it that the guilty be punished or that the fault is repaired, the material fact that may be brought within the fold of abstract forecasts. E 'in substance / Chaos, however, that the events actually occur, and once and for all: the horse is stolen or purchased at a nominal price, the father is killed, no compensation will restore the status quo ante.

The law, often called the protagonist in the person of his lawyer, a construction is fragile and illusory, and certainly, as the heroine realizes many years later, the dogged research of pay and repair does not bring happiness, but rather the its opposite. The upheaval operated by Coen (and Portis, and Mc Carthy) is here: the film features the traditional American (and western) indicated as positive in itself (grit, courage, persistence, rule of law) were only Forma the creation of a functional system (A little 'more) efficient, not to achieve the "happiness" mentioned in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution.

The subtitle of "Gangs of New York was Scorsese's" America was born in the streets. " Not only that. E 'was also born in the prairies of Oklahoma described by Portis: and hands that built America, remind us of the Coen brothers, dripping with blood and obstinacy.

Ugo Chickens