Manhood in Mailer, Peckinpah country

The keenest observation about the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” came from its ace cinematographer, Roger Deakins. He said that from the moment he read the script, he saw it as a Sam Peckinpah movie.

With all the ink spilled over the resurgence of the western, Peckinpah, the most influential and talented director of westerns of the past 50 years, and for my money the greatest of all American filmmakers, has received short shrift. His erratic output and excesses, his long-declining energy and his pop-culture image as a purveyor of mindless (versus brainy) machismo long ago gave the genteel and ungenerous excuses not to take him seriously.

In that way, and others, he was like Norman Mailer. Peckinpah’s death in 1984 was by and large ignored; Mailer’s was mostly covered grudgingly or inadequately. But who can gainsay the peak achievements of the director of “Ride the High Country,” “The Wild Bunch” and “The Ballad of Cable Hogue,” or the decades-long stream of accomplishment from the author of “The Executioner’s Song” and some of the most incisive and embracing political and boxing journalism ever written?

A lot of their energy did come from machismo. But it was machismo as Mailer’s idol Hemingway understood it and as the men of Peckinpah’s beloved Mexico tried to live it: the urge to embrace experience and form one’s character in the world, and take responsibility for the consequences -- including the disasters that can occur at the intersection of an unfettered sensual life with family life.

In the “Masculine Principle” section of his landmark book “Peckinpah: The Western Films,” Paul Seydor linked Mailer and Peckinpah as artists defined by their pursuit of extreme action, their rebellion against official culture and bureaucratized society, and their recognition that the quest for authentic manhood is absolute and never-ending.

Their paradoxical linkage of fragility with appetite and strength -- so different from the cheap certainty of macho camp -- drove Peckinpah to create the most dynamic of all visual lexicons and Mailer to master a dazzling variety of rhetoric in both intimate and epic modes. They found their real security only when they fully practiced their art. That’s when their genius cast a spell over other artists who would rarely share their styles or biases.

Peckinpah would have been the ideal director for movie versions of Mailer’s most disreputable novels. His signal gift was to imbue each frame he shot with the eye of a mad poet. In the shooting and editing, he found ways of conveying every ounce of his agony over the mechanization of the modern world and his ecstasy at escaping it on the edge or in the wilderness.

Deakins’ insight that “No Country for Old Men” resembles a Peckinpah film resonates within and without the borders of the picture. Tommy Lee Jones, who plays the sheriff hero, was Mailer’s Gary Gilmore in a 1982 TV movie and later gave a ruthlessly honest and moving performance as Ty Cobb. “Cobb’s” writer-director, Ron Shelton, said he based it partly on his knowledge of Peckinpah’s fierce and relentless creative and competitive drive.

“No Country” pits Jones against the stoniest of stone-cold killers (played by Javier Bardem), a ghostly abstraction of a human being. Bardem’s weapon of choice is a sterile air gun. He reduces existentialism to basing on a coin toss who will live or die in his presence. His mere existence diminishes the life force of a man like Jones -- a man of experience and emotion.

Today’s over-hyped cinematic breakthroughs have become impersonal, like the digitized universe of “Beowulf.” But “No Country for Old Men” renews the legacy of Mailer and Peckinpah, who extended the reach and freedom and redefined the positive and negative limits of the male character in American literature and movies.

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Michael Sragow is a film critic at the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.