THE GHOST OF SIERRA MADRE

It seems ironic that, of the two directors who came closest to creating their own modern equivalent of John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 2007, it was Joel Coen with his No Country for Old Men rather than Paul Thomas Anderson (who, allegedly, watched the 1948 gold-rush classic almost every night while shooting There Will Be Blood).

I can imagine Joel Coen being utterly oblivious to making any overt references to a specific film, given the consistent originality of his work as a director. In contrast, Paul Thomas Anderson (much like Tarantino) appears so cine-obsessed that it’s almost impossible not to see references to other films and directors—particularly Robert Altman, whose work and career Anderson’s most closely resembles, almost film for film.

Which is why, for me, it’s ironic that the ghost of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is most resoundingly felt in No Country for Old Men, where the cautionary tale of chasing gold or money is laid bare in similarly simple yet profound ways, echoing Huston’s masterpiece. However, while Sierra Madre offers a glimmer of hope with a relatively optimistic ending for Curtin (Tim Holt) and Howard (Walter Huston), No Country presents a bleaker conclusion. As the universe seems to look more favourably upon Howard and Curtin for learning the fateful lessons of material greed, No Country for Old Men’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) faces a deeper and more disconcerting lesson: the suspicion that the universe doesn’t care one way or the other. By the end of No Country, the ever-weary sheriff is left with the unsettling realisation that the universe may be indifferent to his attempt to seek justice for wrongdoing, offering no solace or redemption for him, Texas, or the world at large. Both films, however, share a similar sense of futility in the pursuit of greed.

"Sierra Madre is as direct as you can get—nothing clever, nothing structurally new or different—and I mean that as a high compliment." - Paul Thomas Anderson on John Huston's The Treasure Of Sierra Madre

The pacing of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and No Country for Old Men is similarly compelling, with both films clocking in at nearly the same runtime. In contrast, the more laborious There Will Be Blood (with its extra half hour) feels less mobile and more viscous—perhaps deliberately so, as it deals with the heavy, sluggish nature of oil rather than gold.

One particularly striking quality of Sierra Madre and No Country is their ability to convey, in no-nonsense ways, clear visual representations of the cheap value of money when pitted against the far greater cost of life and death. One such example is a scene in No Country that made my heart skip a beat upon first viewing, when an injured Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) sits near a church on the Texas-Mexico border and hands a group of mariachi musicians a blood-stained dollar for their inappropriately upbeat performance. This type of simple visual storytelling is echoed at the film’s end, where Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) similarly hands a blood-stained hundred-dollar bill to a hesitant teenage boy as payment for a shirt. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre does something similar with a scene in which the life of a sick Mexican child, whose fate hangs in the balance, forces prospector Howard to confront his conscience over money. In the very final scene, a torn sack of gold is blown by the wind and snagged on a cactus, reminding the audience that there are bigger, more important things than material wealth.

The weight and burden of money, so effectively demonstrated in simple scenes in No Country and Sierra Madre, is far less clear in There Will Be Blood, where Daniel Day-Lewis's silver miner-turned-oilman, Daniel Plainview, generally huffs and puffs like a pantomime dame throughout his own laborious cautionary tale. This detracts from the emotional impact, leaving me disconnected from whatever lesson is learned (or not learned) by the end of the film, where Plainview bludgeons to death, with a bowling pin, the Little Boston version of The Vicar of Dibley, Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano.

Most of my life, I've been accused of making unnecessary comparisons, but considering that Blood and Country were shot in and around Marfa, Texas, and both films went head-to-head during award season in the same year, it seems obvious to me that the ghost of Sierra Madre, with its similar themes to both films and obvious influence on Paul Thomas Anderson, should invite such scrutiny.

In conclusion, I believe that by not chasing the gold (of Sierra Madre as an influence), Joel Coen ended up making a film that more comfortably and confidently sits alongside it as an all-time classic. Perhaps one day I'll feel differently about Blood, but it’s been nearly twenty years now, and I’m still as stubborn as Daniel Plainview in my indifference toward it.