The Devil and Mr. Jones

One time, my friend and I walked into this fancy chocolate store, and the girl behind the counter encouraged us to try a truffle infused with cayenne pepper. I said, “No way, but I’ll take that chocolate with the sugar-encrusted violet leaf on top.” It turns out a sugar-encrusted violet leaf does nothing to enhance the taste of chocolate—it’s a bit like eating a regular truffle with a Lucky Charms “marshmallow” on top. My friend tried the cayenne peppered chocolate, and she said it rocked. She offered me a bite, but I just couldn’t bring myself to try it. The violet leaf situation was a disappointment, sure, but a truffle infused with cayenne pepper sounded too much like someone had purposely put two laughable ingredients together to see which idiot would buy it.

I tell you this because I swear I would never do that to you—I know how it feels to be tempted by an obnoxious pairing only to back away because you’ve got a nagging feeling that someone’s yanking your chain. So, to earn your trust, I will explain why I think the pairing of The Devil Wears Prada and No Country For Old Men works.

I make it a rule never to watch movies based on thinly veiled memoirs. Never seen the movies Angela’s Ashes or The Nanny Diaries, even though I read both and enjoyed them for a fun read. The Devil Wears Prada, also a memoir-ish adaptation, had two things going for it—Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci—but I still refused to see it because…well…it just sounded too damn girly. Held hostage one evening by boredom and lack of anything better to do, I begrudgingly watched Devil on cable, and was pleasantly surprised. The lack of plot and character depth not being one of the aforementioned surprises, the utterly mesmerizing performance by Meryl Streep is a thing to behold. So rarely do we encounter a true female alpha dog on film, and Streep takes us to school. She speaks softly, and her underlings strain to listen. She asks the impossible with a lackadaisical tone. She carves unwanted vulnerabilities out of her soul as a hardy farm wife might bludgeon and skin a hen. I’m talking about nuance—sprinkling an unpredictable element on a worn-out stereotype and making it fresh. Nuance in alpha female roles is rare, and it was surprising to find it in a movie about the inner-workings of a fashion magazine. Add the presence of the always-endearing Stanley Tucci as Streep’s number two in command, and you’ve got yourself a swell piece of movie candy.

Next, take a break with some crisp Chardonnay and Frito Pie, and then dive right into No Country For Old Men.

If you haven’t been living under a rock this past year, Javier Bardem, with his Beatles haircut and pneumatic cattle prod, turned in quite the performance as the serial killer Anton Chigurh. Most award ceremonies would have you believe this character is the story’s centerpiece, but in Cormac McCarthy’s novel the story belongs to Sheriff Tom Bell, played in the Coen Brothers’s adaptation by Tommy Lee Jones. The South Texas landscape and its ruthless gangs conjure the Biblical brutality of hell, and Sheriff Bell is getting too old for that shit. If you got a whiff of female alpha dog in Devil, open up your nostrils for a real alpha male in No Country. I’m not talking about Bardem’s Chigurh, a strange sexless dichotomy of clownish fear. I’m talking about the haggard face of Jones’s Sherriff Bell, peering from behind the newspaper long enough to talk to his second in command through a crime scene like one might talk to a toddler. It’s that same face, haunted, that lingers in the final frame—solid, weary, and frightened.

Mmmm…chew on that.