Asking for more in my final act.

By Ed Siegel

November 23, 2007

I RECENTLY celebrated turning 60 by having a boys’ day out at the movies. (No doubt early-bird specials will be next.) Since one of my friends is eligible for a senior citizen discount and another is slightly older than I am, the cinematic choice seemed appropriate – “No Country for Old Men.”

The reviews had just come out and they were almost unanimous in praise of the Coen brothers’ adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy, he who has been lionized by everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Harold Bloom. I have to admit that I had never been crazy about McCarthy – “All the Pretty Horses” being too purple and “Blood Meridian” too portentous for my taste. What was I missing? Maybe “No Country for Old Men” would make a convert out of me the way that “Atonement” and the film “Enduring Love” made a McEwanite out of me.

I’m afraid I’m still missing the McCarthy boat as the story about a contemporary cowboy chased by a psychopathic killer turned out to be no movie for at least this old man. Obviously a book shouldn’t be condemned because of the adaptation, but the film seemed faithful and featured great acting by Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, and others, as well as the always-arresting (if never first-tier) direction by Joel and Ethan Coen.

“No Country for Old Men” belongs to a genre that cuts across almost every artistic idiom, one that could be bundled under “The world is going to hell in a handbasket.” Many of Don DeLillo’s novels fit the category, as do Stephen King’s. The best of DeLillo’s are sublime, the worst of King’s ridiculous.

Which brings me back to turning 60. It’s now evident that I’m not going to read every great book or see every great movie before I die. Unless those wonder drugs get even more wonderful, middle age is gone, baby, gone. You know the joke – how many people do you know who are 120?

It’s not that everything has to be great – an episode of “The Office” is rarely memorable the next day, but it’s a fine way to spend a half-hour. But whatever piece of art or entertainment I look to has to get me past the “Am I wasting my increasingly precious time?” factor, and “No Country for Old Men” didn’t do that.

It reminds me more of King than DeLillo in that the degree of difficulty is about a two on a 10-point scale. The metaphor of the psychopathic killer as emblematic of the world’s increasing amorality is undeveloped and shallow. The draining of humanity from both killer and victims is numbing. Give the ending a different twist, and not much separates “No Country for Old Men” from “Die Hard.”

Here, too, we have heroes and villains performing almost superhuman acts with blood spurting out of what I used to think were vital parts of one’s body. Me, I’m likely to take to bed with a paper cut. That probably hasn’t changed much in my life, but the disconnect with blood-drenched films gets greater with age.

Paper cuts aside, it’s not enough for an artist to impose a barren vista on America or the world. David Rabe’s play “Streamers” is currently being revived by the Huntington Theatre Company. When it first came out in 1975, it was seen as a searing statement on men at war in contemporary times. Indeed, it seems like a combination of Edward Albee’s seminal play “The Zoo Story” and the first half of Stanley Kubrick’s great film “Full Metal Jacket.”

So why is “Streamers” so dull today, where those other works are still fresh? If you randomly take any passage from “The Zoo Story” – currently being revived in New York with a new first act – and one from “Streamers,” the former crackles while the latter seems flat or forced. Albee earns his “We’re all animals under the skin” points; Rabe doesn’t.

Similarly, “No Country for Old Men” is, on the surface, Samuel Beckett crossed with John Ford, with a dash of Hemingway or Faulkner thrown in, and that should be a good thing. But McCarthy’s cornpone philosophizing – “Any time you quit hearin’ Sir and Mam, the end is pretty much in sight” – is weightless compared with those other artists.

And the older I get, the more I want weight (except around the waist). The “Hell in a handbasket” dish seems like undercooked stew if it isn’t mixed by a master chef.

Ed Siegel, former theater critic for the the Globe, is a freelance writer.