Me and Tommy Lee
No Country for Old Men is Tommy Lee Jones’s new movie. I don’t think he’ll be granting me an interview anytime soon.
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On the other hand, I could have spent more time regaling readers with all kinds of stories about his temperamental and sometimes bullying nature around other people who were involved in one of his movies. I could have quoted Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed Jones in Men in Black, who said that “Tommy started every damn day (on the set) complaining that the writer didn’t know what he was doing and that Tommy could write better stories in grade school than this writer...He complained about the length of the lines of the other characters...He complained about where his marks were and where he had to stand and for how long.” I also left out a quote from Will Smith, who co-starred in Men in Black. “Tommy Lee carries this certain air and he allows it to affect the people around him,” Smith said. “He makes them very uncomfortable.”
But the whole point of the story was to try to get readers to understand that Tommy Lee wouldn’t be Tommy Lee if he acted any other way. It’s that basic ferocity, which sometimes borders on malevolence, which makes him the great American actor that he is. I love that he doesn’t suffer fools—i.e., me. I love that he doesn’t play the basic Hollywood game, sucking up to the media in order to get better press so that more people will perhaps be tempted to come out to see one of his movies. (One of my favorite Jones stories, which I did not mention in my original story, involves the time he had a writer for The Los Angeles Times thrown off the set of a movie, declaring nobly to the crew, “The media is interfering with the process of American art and has been for some time now.”)
I also love the fact that Jones is driven by the idea of perfection, by getting everything in the movie just right, regardless whose feelings get hurt. I have heard stories that he was battling with the Coen brothers from the moment he signed onto No Country for Old Men, telling them that their plan to save money by shooting much of the movie in New Mexico, instead of the Trans Pecos area of West Texas where the novel was set, was ridiculous—absolutely god damn ridiculous—because the land in the Trans Pecos looks different than the land in New Mexico. (As if anyone other than Jones would be able to tell.)
I mean, is there a more fascinating actor who has ever come out of Texas—someone who can be so brooding, so mysterious, and so extraordinarily volatile?
Which is why I was in my seat early for his latest performance. He’s already had one great performance this year in the movie In the Valley of Elah, playing (yes, once again) a lawman (this one from Tennessee) who sets out to investigate why his son went AWOL in New Mexico. The reviewers loved him, and some wanted to trumpet his performance as Oscar worthy (his only Oscar came fourteen years ago for The Fugitive), but Jones refused to play along. He was predictably irritable during interviews, snidely telling one reporter that he was only granting the interview to fulfill “my contractual obligation to promote the movie.” When one guy from the Philadelphia Daily News asked him what the title of the movie meant, Jones said he had no idea, which, of course, was not true at all. (At one point in the movie, Jones’ character tells a young boy the story of David from the Old Testament, who fought Goliath in the Valley of Elah.)
Apparently, for No Country for Old Men, he decided to do no interviews at all except for thirty or so minutes with Charlie Rose (you can find it on charlierose.com, the October 19th show), where he wiggled his fingers impatiently through the introduction but actually turned out to be rather pleasant, albeit utterly unrevealing. As such, his Oscar chances could be hurt once again, despite the fact that there are plenty of critics who think he should be up for a Best Supporting Actor nomination.
Over the years, there are a lot of great actors who have tried their hands at playing Texas lawmen—do your remember, for instance, Kris Kristofferson’s portrayal as a Texas sheriff in John Sayles’ Lone Star?—but I have to say, Jones takes the cake. In this film, it’s simply impossible to take your eyes off of him whenever he’s on the screen. At the age of sixty one, he has more creased-leather lines in his face than ever, some of them seemingly going vertical up and down his face. And then there’s his voice: there is no one else in the movies who talks the way he does. In fact, the movie begins with Jones, unseen, just talking in a voiceover. “I’ve been sheriff of this county since I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe,” he says, and off he goes for the next three minutes, talking in that parched voice with its off-kilter intonations—“his voice rising when you would expect falling, or just deadpan,” the New Yorker movie critic David Denby once wrote about him. His opening voiceover lasts close to three minutes—an eternity in movie time. But here, it goes by like magic.
In the movie, Jones, as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, is a disillusioned geezer, ready to hang up his holster and retire, stunned by the new wave of mindless violence stemming not only from the drug trade but also the way society’s mores seem to be crumbling. “Any time you quit hearin’ Sir and Ma’am, the end is pretty much in sight,” he says in one of his many memorable lines. In another line that made everyone in the theatre chuckle, he describes the psychopathic assassin (played by Javier Bardem), who does his killings by using a tank of compressed air attached to the kind of bolt gun used to slaughter cattle, this way: “He’s got some hard bark on him.”
The sheriff tries to remove himself from the investigation into the killings and stolen money, but in the end he finds himself trying to help—too late, as it turns out. The movie ends on a tight shot of Jones, finally retired, sitting at the kitchen table in normal clothes, telling his wife about a dream from a previous night that still haunts him. There are no bells and whistles at the end of the movie, no great resolution—just Jones sitting there, a hardened man, and a wounded one. And then the screen goes black.
There is going to be plenty of criticism about No Country for Old Men (which hits theatres November 9th). For one thing, the entire film was set up from the beginning for there to be an old-fashioned showdown between the assassin and the welder who got the money—but the Coen brothers, who love to break traditional storytelling rules, leave out that scene altogether. Too bad. Because there is no climactic showdown, the last fifteen minutes of the movie fizzle out altogether.
But no one—absolutely no one—is complaining about Jones. For a while, I thought about calling his publicist, requesting an interview, just to see if he would talk one more time, so I could gush on and on about his performance in the movie.
But I knew that was pointless. “TL,” as he’s known by his friends, is a proud, proud man. He doesn’t forget, or forgive, a slight.
And, you know, when it comes to him, that’s exactly how it should be.
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