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During an interview with Creative Screenwriting Magazine, the Coen brothers admitted that while writing "O Brother Where Art Thou" they weren't exactly adapting Homer; it wasn't until late in the process, that the two realized the similarities between their screenplay and "The Odyssey."  So what happened?  The Academy honored the pair with a "Best Adapted Screenplay" Oscar nomination.

As of this past Tuesday, the brothers find themselves competing again in the same category, though this time, the source material was recognized right away--Cormac McCarthy's same-titled novel.  "No Country For Old Men" (no. 3 on my top ten list for 2007) is without doubt a great film, though one can't help but notice its almost too-literal adaptation on screen.  Tommy Lee Jones' monologues in the film are italicized in the novel, the action scenes match paragraph to paragraph, beat to beat, and the film ends in the same anti-climatic, epilogueesque note as the novel.  All together, the Coen's have remained true to McCarthy's original vision, but for a pair of filmmakers who are starkly original in their body of work, one can only quietly wish that Coens could have brought a bit more of themselves to the table--added to their masterful talents of film editing and directing. 

For me, the "No Country" screenplay is essentially a weak entry (out of the five nominated) for the category, though I predict it will ultimately win it due to its recent wins with the National Board of Review and the Golden Globe Awards. But the other four nominees represent what is key to adapting a screenplay: elevating and augmenting the source material to a degree that can be best viewed as whollistically new, yet thematically similar (to the source).  Look at Sarah Polley's delicate balance of nuanced episodes of past and present in "Away From Her," or Christopher Hampton's selective trimmings of class commentary in the first act of "Atonement."  Paul Thomas Anderson, perhaps the most significant case of adapting, takes the historical and personal impacts of Upton Sinclair's "Oil!" and manifests a story that is in no way a mirror to the novel, but has the same staggering effect in "There Will Be Blood."  Oscar-winner Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist"), in a bold and brilliant stroke, takes the thin-paged memoir of the late Jean-Dominique Bauby, and repositions the audience into a first-person subjective point of view in order to experience the dilemma in a move that juxtaposes the novel's poetic, dreamlike examination of ideas and philosophies in "The Diving Bell and The Butterfly."

Yet, it seems that it's been a year for "No Country" (great, but not the year's best), so the Coen's might be adding another Oscar to their mantle.  If it does happen, maybe the Academy will not honor the pair in the directing category, and give the gold statue to the true Best Director (note the singular) of the year: Paul Thomas Anderson.