Best Pictures from the Outside In vol. 1: No Country for Old Wings

Nathaniel, Nick, and I have teamed up for a gargantuan, impossible, possibly crazy series of posts in which we will talk about all 80 Best Picture winners, two at a time, starting with the first and the last and working our way in toward the middle—like a dagger pointed at the heart of Oliver! Head over to The Film Experience Blog for the inaugural post.

We covered a lot of ground: Best Picture's traditional disdain for women, the need for Best Pictures to be all things for all people, the fact that Wings is a really good movie, etc. I had hoped to write a full-length review of each film, but that's not happening (I wrote a review of Wings seven years ago [my god I can't believe I've been doing this for more than seven years], but I no longer like it), so here are some thoughts about each.

No Country for Old Men hung around near the bottom of my 2007 top ten list on the strength of its first impression, but perhaps even then I was finding it wanting—I kept having to remind myself how good it was. The second time around, it doesn't hold up as well. What still works? First and foremost is the sound design, which, in a film with so little dialog, does all the talking; in two scenes in particular—Llewelyn's attempts to retrieve the suitcase from the air duct and, later, his preparation for Chigurh's raid on his hotel room—the layers of sound add to an already unbearable tension, to the point where the inevitable violence is a relief. The film's array of seemingly unstoppable forces—"you can't stop what's coming"—is also handled with aplomb, from the obvious (Anton Chigurh) to the unusual (the pit bull that won't stop chasing Llewelyn). I still love the entire first act, the deliberate pace of Chigurh's hunt for Llewelyn, the staging and editing of their gunfight, and smaller touches like the conversation Harrelson and Brolin have about welding. However, the threads holding these pieces together as a complete film seem weaker, and as the film progresses, the Coens lose their tight grip on the tone, drifting again and again into the kind of exaggeration that works in their comedies but doesn't belong in a film so self-serious. It's a series of dazzling setpieces in search of a tighter structure and a firmer hand on the tiller.

Wings, on the other hand, improved immensely on second viewing, for a number of reasons. First, I think, is that non-comedy silent films are something that takes a little getting used to. Because I watched this one rather early in my silent film career, many of that period's eccentricities stuck out to my untrained eye. Also, maybe because I was so wowed by the action scenes, I didn't notice how great the quieter moments were. It's a more complete film than I had initially given it credit for. The action scenes are still among the best ever shot, and I especially appreciate the introduction of and battle against the monstrous Gotha airship, which seems like something out of a horror film. But the back-home scenes, especially the ones contrasting the family sendoffs that Jack and David receive, feel much more resonant now, and they add a lot of emotional weight that makes the film a more complete work of art. Finally, the years between my two viewings made me endlessly thankful that the film is silent, because we're spared second-rate dialect comedian El Brendel's fake-Swedish act. As annoying as he is in this film, thank your lucky stars that you didn't have to listen to him.