NYFF, 10/9. Axe & Country.

The title of The Axe in the Attic [site], one of the few documentaries at the New York Film Festival, comes from a survival strategy used by homeowners in flood-threatened areas of New Orleans. Families who saw the waters rise and fall over the years, and who watched their neighbors fend for themselves when the government was nowhere to be seen, leave an ax in the attic. If the waters rise high enough, and people are trapped in their houses, they can chop through the roof and wait there - either for help, or for the waters to recede.

Updated through 10/12.

The lesson here is: Buy your own ax, because the odds are that you will need it. And if you're lucky enough to be rescued, sitting alone on your roof, then you're on your own once again. Sounds a lot like what we saw during and after Katrina hit. For a lot of those who survived the hurricane itself, the nightmare is still going on.

We enter that nightmare in the documentary by Ed Pincus and Lucia Small, who drove from New England through the South to the most stricken parts of Louisiana, visiting refugees from New Orleans on the way. (Small is the director of My Father the Genius, a doc about her father, the quixotic futurist architect and mostly-absent dad, Glenn Howard Small. Anyone interested in architecture and/or families should see it.)

In the course of the road movie, Pincus and Small meet hurricane victims trying to rebuild their lives. In some cases, those families are still trying to rebuild their houses. Most haven't gotten too far, nor will they, despite all the official rhetoric from Washington and elsewhere. In many cases, the damage is too extreme to continue where their houses stood.

I'm not sure whether the filmmakers intended it, but there's a parallel that's hard to escape between New Orleans and Iraq, not just in the ravaged landscape that they drive through but also with regard to the administration committed to "rebuilding" that's lost control of the situation and forced people to fend for themselves. The people in New Orleans, black and white, whose testimony the filmmakers gather are casualties of a natural disaster - neglected in the hope that they might go away. Watching Axe in the Attic, I couldn't help thinking of them as wounded; nor could I help contrasting their desperation in campgrounds and crumbling buildings to the Iraq War wounded who turned out to be sharing space with cockroaches and mice in Washington as they waited for authorization to be treated by military doctors. As the current government mantras go, it's more "mistakes were made" than "thanks for your service."

It took a lot of pressure to get a vacationing George W Bush to even look at television coverage of the disaster in New Orleans, and when he finally got around to responding, he gave us a new mantra: "Heck of a job, Brownie." I nominate him for a best supporting actor Oscar for his work (or his lack of work) in this film.

Axe doesn't have the poignancy Spike Lee's epic When the Levees Broke, and the filmmakers' hand-wringing about getting too involved in the story when interviewees ask for help or money seems beside the point. The Axe in the Attic reminds you that it could all happen again to whatever's left of the families and their houses.

In No Country for Old Men [site], a series of murders across West Texas is framed through the eyes and reflections of a sheriff who is a war veteran. Another vet, Lewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), is hunting for antelope when he comes upon the aftermath of a gunfight among drug dealers. All that's left are the bodies and a briefcase full of money. Moss takes off, not knowing just yet that a determined killer (Javier Bardem) is after him. The killer's weapon of choice is a stun gun, which can shoot the lock out of a door just as easily as it can put a hole in a man's head without a bullet. What can kill a cow can kill pretty much anything. It's an odd twist that helps set this saga apart from any other Western that you've ever seen. Tommy Lee Jones plays the sheriff who goes after them both.

The landscape here, not quite desert, seems to go on forever, while the sun rises and falls on the horizon like footlights on a stage, and it dominates this tale that has gotten as much attention as anything that came out of this year's Cannes Film Festival. Cormac McCarthy's novel has a glacial momentum to it, as the murderer Anton Chigurh (who strangles a cop with a pair of handcuffs) takes off after an opportunist, with both pursued by a sheriff who spends pages reflecting on what it all means. It doesn't mean all that much, especially when he sees innocent people slaughtered, most of them in disputes over dope.

The Coen brothers capture the wide expanses where the antelope, scared off by Moss's rifle, are replaced by pickup trucks riddled with bullet holes, carcasses that hold the carcasses of the men who were driving them. This is the landscape of the new Southwest and the new war over drugs; yet it's not so new,  as we've seen in McCarthy's other novels set the same region on both sides of the border a century ago.

At the screening for press that I attended, the audience laughed at situations of quirky pain and powerlessness, even when the result on the screen was murder. Bardem's ridiculous bobbed haircut and his systematic, fastidious manner of murdering at almost every encounter fed into the humor. So did his victims' flatfooted response to his cold approach to killing. The Coens have been accused of being mean-spirited, of turning pain into jokes. (Isn't pain at the base of most humor?) McCarthy's book only got me laughing when I was listening to the West Texas twang and the dry everyday irony of the dialogue. The laughter in the theater seemed more like relief from a relentless parade of murder.

-David D'Arcy

For the Voice, Julia Wallace talks with Pincus and Small about their "raw examination of misery and hope in post-Katrina New Orleans."

"Rather than reducing their meditation on the Katrina diaspora into a navel-gazer, the filmmakers' insertion of their white, Northern liberal selves into profoundly disenfranchised Southerners' testimony actually expands the film's relevance and renders it more honest," writes Lisa Rosman at the Reeler.

Nick Schager, writing at Slant, disagrees: "In a manner exactly contrary to Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, The Axe in the Attic becomes as much the story of its makers as one about the economic and personal cost of Katrina, a wrongheaded transference of focus that finally manages to overshadow - as well as minimize - its various Katrina victims' stingingly visceral reactions to the calamity."

"It's not the concept that's inherently flawed - one day when the time is right and the execution works somebody will have created an illuminating portrait of both the legacy of Katrina and the unavoidable difficulties of engaging the issue from across racial and economic divides," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at Reverse Shot. "But until then we'll have to learn from the mistakes of others, and that's probably the most generous way to view The Axe in the Attic."

"Anti-Michael-Moores who are not afraid to cry, fight, or throw up their hands in front of the camera, they display admirable honesty - but that doesn't make The Axe in the Attic a satisfying documentary," writes Jürgen Fauth.

"Already being touted by a number of publications as a 'return to form' for the Coens, No Country for Old Men will probably enjoy a initially rapturous reception followed by a significant period of admiration and exaltation, before eventually encountering a raucous chorus of dissenting opinions who are reluctant to grant the film commendation without exposing its flaws," predicts Chiranjit Goswami at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

"This is really a movie about the hearts and lives of Men, capital M, a metaphor for the way the old signposts of masculinity - those phallic wooden things you could always find here and there to tie your horse to for a spell - have all but disappeared in today's world," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "That's not necessarily a bad subject by itself; Sam Peckinpah certainly made some great pictures mining variations on it. But it doesn't work so well when it's filtered through the Coens' knowing, self-aware lens."

Cinematical's Erik Davis hangs with Javier Bardem.

Earlier: Reviews and previews from Toronto and NYFF; and the first round of reviews from Cannes.

Update: "It's good to have the Coen Brothers back," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at Reverse Shot. "No Country for Old Men is such an about-face in the brothers' filmmaking that the most obvious of phrases can be unashamedly employed to describe their latest venture: an astonishing return to form. The clearest reason for the rebound is the new film's source material and, through it, the reestablishment of gravitas in the Coen universe. A minor but assured novel by one of our greatest living novelists, Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is perfect for a Coen screen adaptation: it's the sort of macabre/quotidian genre-bender rife with crime, violence, and a kind of everyman pondering that caters to the Coens' greatest strengths as absurdist chroniclers of the American ethos."

Updates, 10/10: "Brusque exchanges and austere violence are the story's stock-in-trade, with both elements so downbeat and harsh that they occasionally veer close to absurdity, thereby providing the filmmaking siblings with opportunities to wryly alleviate the oppressive despair and viciousness that hovers over the proceedings in the same way that the enormous Western landscape and its weighty silence hang over its human inhabitants," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "As Tommy Lee Jones's sheriff Ed Tom Bell says in reference to a particularly grim anecdote, 'I laugh sometimes. 'Bout the only thing you can do.'"

"The outcome is already known - the Coens easily tap into horror, western, and thriller genres enough to broadcast how badly this all will end - but, to play off the title of Christopher McQuarrie's admirable attempt at a similar movie, it is the way of the gun that matters," writes Daniel Kasman.

Update, 10/12: "It all works well enough for the first half of the film, when every click and jingle against the prevailing silence and whistling wind sets your nerves on edge, and Bardem enthralls as pure evil - the man in black," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler. "But as No Country moves on (and on) and into idea after idea (about genre, Vietnam, violence, immigration, American dreamers) with what feels like only passing attention, I found myself wondering if I cared where the film ended up."

Posted by dwhudson at October 9, 2007 6:25 AM