Even on a surface level, it\u2019s remarkable that we\u2019d get three high-profile, prestige westerns (or neo-westerns) in a single year (make that four, since the sturdy 3:10 to Yuma <\/em>also debuted that fall), let alone three that can be regarded, without hyperbole, as amongst the greatest ever made. More remarkable still is the way their stories and themes dovetail into one another to paint a mythic picture of the American West\u2014spanning Missouri, Texas, and California\u2014while also shining a cold light upon the lies that built its legend, the brutality and greed that actually<\/em> built it, and the mental and spiritual reckoning that results in the squaring of both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Andrew Dominik\u2019s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, <\/em>we witness the erosion of said legend as mirrored by the mental erosion of THE folk hero of the wild west, famed Missouri bandit Jesse James (Brad Pitt), as well as the obsessed sycophant who would end up murdering him (Casey Affleck) in 1882. In Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s There Will Be Blood, <\/em>we jump forward 16 years to 1898, and follow a years-long descent into madness and murder by way of ruthless self-made oil baron Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he battles both the harsh California desert as well as a duplicitous evangelical preacher (Paul Dano). Finally, in Joel and Ethan Coen\u2019s No Country for Old Men<\/em> (which came out between the other two, but which takes place after them, story-wise) we find ourselves in the badlands between West Texas and Mexico in 1980, following a trio of men\u2014Vietnam vet and welder Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), aging sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), and psychotic, phantom-like hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem)\u2014in a race to find $2 million worth of stolen drug money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even as each film feels singular, they share several obvious qualities, both onscreen and off. While Assassination<\/em> and Blood<\/em> are grander in scale and run time, all are existentialist slow burn narratives that contain long stretches of quietude punctuated by vicious violence. They are each of them deeply concerned with notions of morality\u2014both man-made and cosmic\u2014without ever coming off as moralistic. They are harshly stoic and deeply pessimistic, yet too forlorn to be considered nihilistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both Assassination<\/em>\u2014which was marred by post-production issues stemming from arguments over final runtime, resulting in its release getting delayed by a year\u2014and No Country<\/em> were shot by our greatest living director of photography, Roger Deakins. He found himself nominated for his work on both at the 2008 Oscars, only to lose to Robert Elswit for, of course, There Will Be Blood<\/em>. The only flop of the three, Assassination<\/em> still scored two Oscar nominations, one for Deakins for Cinematography, and one for Casey Affleck for Best Supporting Actor, while No Country<\/em> and Blood<\/em> battled it out at the top of the card, with the former taking home Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture, and Blood<\/em> nabbing Best Cinematography and Actor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Along with Deakins, Assassination<\/em> and No Country<\/em> also share an actor between them: Garrett Dillahunt, who steals scenes in both as a poor, pitiable, and doomed bandit in the former and a surprisingly keen sheriff\u2019s deputy and good ol\u2019 boy in the latter. Dillahunt, who broke out around this same time for his astonishing dual performances in HBO\u2019s Deadwood<\/em>, was simply born to deliver poetic western dialog the likes of which feature heavily in all three films.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sonically, they are very different films, with each putting special emphasis on their soundscapes. The scores for Assassination<\/em> and Blood<\/em> were composed by famous rock musicians\u2014the former by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis of The Bad Seeds, the latter by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead\u2014and for as disparate as they are (Cave and Ellis composition is achingly elegiac, while Greenwood\u2019s is nerve-jinglingly discordant and sinister), they can each lay claim to the title of Best of the Decade. No Country<\/em>, meanwhile, is shorn of almost any score, outside some ambient sounds and a menacing closing credits track from the Coens\u2019 loyal composer Carter Burwell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All three films are adaptations from books, with Assassination<\/em> and No Country<\/em> very closely and faithfully following the novels of the same name from authors Ron Hansen and Cormac McCarthy, respectively, arguably the two most renowned writers of literary\u2014for lack of a better word\u2014western fiction still living; their mix of ornate, yet terse prose and harsh, funerary stories set in the American (particularly, the Southern American) idiom have brooked lots of understandable comparisons between the two. Blood<\/em>, meanwhile, is an extremely loose adaptation of only the first hundred or so pages of muckraking writer\/populist activist and politician Upton Sinclair\u2019s novel Oil!<\/em>. Despite the disparity, Blood<\/em> hardly lacks a literary sensibility. Indeed, its idiosyncrasies, particularly its willingness to turn away from plot in favor of character, marks the shift in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s style that would see him embrace this type of novelistic approach in his next several projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, all three movies are transitional films for their makers: only his sophomore feature, Assassination<\/em> brought the Australian Dominik\u2014who broke onto the international scene on the strength of his blisteringly fierce true crime drama Chopper<\/em> seven years earlier\u2014to America and served as a baptism by fire with a system innately antagonistic to his infernal vision (a process that has repeated itself again with the release of this year\u2019s controversial Blonde<\/em>). Although the oldest and most established of the three, the Coens had just gone through a critical rough patch, thanks to the disappointing reception of their two prior movies, Intolerable Cruelty<\/em> and The Ladykillers<\/em>. If not quite a comeback, No Country <\/em>was regarded as a serious rebound, one that would kick off arguably the greatest run of their career up until they split in 2018. It also kicked off their own western trilogy, which would go on to include True Grit<\/em> and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs<\/em>. Finally, along with being a major stylistic departure, Blood<\/em> was and continues to be celebrated as the movie in which Anderson\u2014previously viewed as a brilliant but overly-indulgent enfant terrible\u2014finally matured (although many, myself included, would argue that this already shallow interpretation unjustly ignores Punch-Drunk Love<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/no-country-1024x576.jpg\")
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