If the cowboy with a cigarette, riding a horse, and a gun faster than the wind is always the center in the long sandy western world, then in this system, women have always been only supporting roles in the story: they may not exist at all , or as a rescued object, or just an introduction to the story. Even in the Western movie "My Darling Clementine", which is named after women, most of the time women just wear dresses, their breasts are half exposed, and they are revelled in their own gentle hometown, detached from the western stories.
In 1992's "Unforgivable", the former "God of the West" Clint Eastwood (Clint Eastwood) personally shot, using the image of an old cowboy who was limping and struggling to catch pigs in the pigpen. Deconstructed the Red Dead Redemption, who was chasing the murderer for thousands of miles. Since then, Westerns have also completely declined, losing their charm as genre films and becoming the carrier of a few directors and writers.
The Coen brothers are one of them (or is it two?), and No Country for Old Men, which swept the 80th Academy Awards, is one of the most outstanding works of the post-Western era. Three years after filming "No Country for Old Men", they remade the classic 1969 film "True Grit" by Henry Hathaway, the master of westerns, with the same name and the same story, but they Still playing some tricks:
1. Character Subversion: Women, Police, Cowboys
Even though the 69 version of "Thunderbolt" already has a capable female figure with short hair, it is hard to say that it has a greater role in the whole film, in addition to providing the prerequisites for the murder story, and the new version of the Coen brothers is in the frame. It has created almost the most charismatic women in the western world: the film opens with the little girl's self-report, "People don't believe that a little girl can leave her hometown and avenge her father in the icy winter, but that's what it is. (People did not give it credence, that a young girl could leave home and go off in the winter time to avenge her father's blood. But it did happen.) Accompanying the narration of the little girl, the camera zooms in from a distance, The dim light and the father's body gradually became clearer together with the background of the story. In the original version, the episode "Father was killed" was directly filmed in detail, but here it became the subject of the protagonist's voiceover. One of the Coen brothers' ambitions for this remake: to strengthen the little girl, weaken the old cowboy and the cool cop, is also clearly explained in the calm female voice through such modifications. It is also "True Courage" (True Grit literal translation), the original version is "One-Eyed Dragon, Two Guns and Four Tigers" (1969 Hong Kong translation) belonging to the old cowboy, and the new version is "A Bizarre Revenge Incident" (2010 Hong Kong translation) belonging to a little girl ).
This kind of ambition is expressed throughout the film - the young and handsome Texas Ranger pursues the murderer for money, he does not have the revenge of the little girl to kill his father, so he can choose to give up; the old cowboy gradually realizes himself in the process of chasing the murderer The old age, the Western laws he was familiar with told him that this pursuit should be over. And when both of them decided to give up, it was the accident and the little girl's dealings with the villain that finally brought this revenge story to an end.
The Coen brothers have piled up countless plots to create a little girl with an adult's mind: she has the perseverance and persistence of an adult, but this kind of character charm can't make up for the limitations brought by age and knowledge; and an old cowboy whose hero is dying : He can't shoot a gun, can't hit anyone, and his rich experience of living in the West can't make up for the physical and mental damage caused by alcoholism and aging. With the advancement of the story line, these details and characters have already paved the way for the final outcome of this "Cohen movie"——
2. Subversion of the ending: everything has a price
When the old hero finds his youthful glory, when the cool cowboy shows off his stunt, and when the little girl kills her father's enemy with her own hands, a warm and romantic western legend ends here. However, for the Coen brothers, who have been discussing the loss of control and the inability to control their fate since their debut work "Blood Labyrinth", this ending obviously lacks charm. So at the end of this version of "Thunderbolt", when the heroine shoots and kills the enemy, the recoil of the gun causes her to fall into the snake pit, and the snake-girl-old man forms an interrelated chain of cause and effect: the old cowboy rescues the little boy from the hole. The girl, hugging the bitten her, ran from dusk to night on a horse in the ice and snow, especially when the foal was exhausted and the old man stabbed him violently, the little girl couldn't bear it, but such self-mutilation incentives eventually Not for long, and soon the foal fell to the ground and could no longer run. When the old hero wanted to pick up the little girl and walk to the hospital on foot, he finally fell down and said something he never wanted to admit: "I'm old". All the characters that have been foreshadowed in the front are shown here in a very tense form, and "I'm getting old" pushes this successful revenge story to a reverse climax in an instant.
The "gun's recoil" that has been foreshadowed many times before has completely transformed this successful revenge, and the ingenious intertextual relationship formed by "gun's recoil" and "revenge's recoil" also reflects the extraordinary skills of the Coen brothers. Returning to the beginning of the story, the little girl used a determined voice to read out the declaration before revenge: "Everything in this world has a price, and what is owed will eventually be repaid. Except for the grace of God, nothing is free." ( You must pay for everything in the world one way or another. There is no thing free except the grace of God.), adhering to this belief, she completed the task of seeking revenge for her father, and at the same time, this sentence It also became a curse she gave herself.
At the end, the little girl who chased the murderer for thousands of miles turned into a one-armed widow, and the old hero brought the glory and memory of his life into the urn, so those noble and romantic feelings finally melted in the starry sky. The nostalgia and humanistic care similar to "No Country for Old Men" is accompanied by the sound of the ending song Leaning on the everlasting arms, filling the long western wasteland.
3. Style subversion: authorship and nostalgia
In the original version, in order to shape the characters, a lot of dialogue was used, and these wonderful lines became the biggest feature of the 69 version. However, the Coen brothers abandoned these and used a lot of wonderful shots to complete the narrative and shape the characters.
Judging from the hanging scene not long after the opening, the old version arranged two lines in order to show the character of the little girl: the first line was when the servant helped her to cover her eyes, and she didn't want her to watch the hanging, so she took the servant's hand away, "Since I'm here, , you must watch this"; the second is the emotional "My God" after reading it. On the other hand, the Coen Brothers version had the little girl stand in the middle of the crowd, without saying a word or making any extra moves, but watching them hang to death with a slightly heavy expression. These two scenes also embody the image of a little girl - bold and determined but lacking the experience of facing death, the new version shows the condensed and advanced skills. Another passage that reflects the superb skills of the Coen brothers is the hospitalization at the end. The five-minute fast-paced and star-shifting, the picture changes from warm colors to cold colors in the middle of the night, from the hope of life to the near death, the image, the story, and the meaning are unified with each other. And this kind of picture from warm to cold is a metaphor for fate from life to death, which was carried by the Coen brothers to the last story of the latest work "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs".
"Cold color" also constitutes an important element in the new version of "Thunderbolt": weather factors such as snow, night, rain, etc., gloomy and unpredictable, together with the bearskin hunter in the story, the male corpse on the tree, etc. In the original version, the soundtrack was responsible for creating suspense points, but it was replaced by a large number of melodious melodies modified from Christian music, and a large number of holy scriptures were directly or indirectly quoted in the lines, subtitles, and videos (such as : The ending song Leaning on the everlasting arm is modified from the hymn, the opening subtitle The wicked flee when none pursueth, etc.), these religious elements form an interesting echo with "Three Kings Escape" filmed in 2000, in which Cohen Brotherhood uses "Homer's Epic" and uses the elements of the Bible as an important story component. The jokes reveal reflections on religion, politics, and commitment. In contrast, the Christian elements of "The Thunder" are more like It's some idle writing.
And just like the nostalgic feeling revealed by the blues music in "Three Kings", "Thunderbolt" can also make people feel this way. The monologues at the beginning and end are in the tone of "reminiscing about the past". The two monologues use the voices of teenagers and middle-aged respectively to highlight the vicissitudes of the years, and such themes and stories are reminiscent of "The Grandmaster". : Also seeking revenge for their father, and also widowed all their lives, Wong Kar Wai and Xu Haofeng reminisce about the dead martial arts, and the Coen brothers miss the wild west. The differences in the narrative clues, characters, and genre of the two films are destined to be impossible to compare them, but the feelings are similar. The same excellent audio-visual and film techniques that fit the theme also give these feelings a solid carrier. .
Perhaps with the talents of the Coen brothers, it is not difficult to deal with such a film at all, especially on the basis of the original novel and the old version of the film, so you can see the skill and neatness directly revealed from the first shot. This neatness And running through it, the main body of the story is too traditional and routine, the characters are too ordinary, and it is even difficult for people to find traces of the "Cohen movie" - those strange and unique characters, and the plots full of charm that make people ignore the authenticity. The same is snow, the "true story" of Minnesota in "Frozen" is even more chilling; the same is "Bible", "Three Kings" has a stronger meaning; the same feeling, "No Country for Old Men" is even more The aftertaste is long; even compared with the works after "Thunderbolt", which is also a hanging, "Buster's Ballad" seems more intense...
But these are not important, maybe they just want to tell everyone that in the history of movies, there was once a group of sincere and romantic souls flying in the sky of the western United States.
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