Well, time for another Coen Brothers movie. Like most David Lynch movies, some Coen Brothers movies don’t quite go down easy for me. I find myself engaged more than average during the process of watching their films. However, I am often left with vaguely unsatisfied feeling — a yearning for the movie to have been more than it was. No Country For Old Men was no exception.
Don’t get me wrong — I freakin’ loved Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. The Hudsucker Proxy, which I didn’t realize they had anything to do with, was an incredibly fun and hilarious adventure. I adored Fargo (you got to have your eggs!), and noticed some of my mom’s Wisconsin-bred inflections for the first time ever. I remember liking Barton Fink pretty well, but it was a good 15 years ago that I saw it.
But the other ones I’ve seen? They’ve left me vaguely dissatisifed. The Ladykillers was about my least favorite, despite quite charming characters (“Mountain Girl is 54!”). O Brother, Where Are Thou, with similarly charming characters, still left me wanting. I watched Blood Simple in the last 2 years and just had to read the IMDB plot summary to even remember what happened. Miller’s Crossing was a bit more memorable (“look into your heart!” was about the best scene I watched that entire year) … But in the end, a lot of their movies are just a series of violent events, chasing some unseen goal which often doesn’t get met. They just aren’t as memorable as most movies to me. I can’t quite gauge how much I like them.
I also take into consideration Ian‘s advice that the stories in life don’t always have a concrete beginning and ending, and don’t always have answers… And that some directors try to make their movies like that. I believe we were talking about our disagreement with Robert Altman’s Shortcuts. The advice does help me understand more, but I’m not sure that it makes me enjoy more.
In the end, I had mixed feelings about No Country For Old Men. The killer is such an asshole. The gas-station coin-toss-for-your-life scene was brilliant. But it was just another “everyone kills each other while chasing the money” movie too. I’m not sure how much I like it. Carolyn says 4/5 stars [Netflix], 7/10 [IMDB]. I think I can agree with that, though I’m more likely to say 3.5/5 stars [Netflix]. And maybe more like a 6.8/10. I just have a nagging feeling about this.
Of course, maybe that was the intent. Sort of like how Last Days made me want to die with boredom, and thus captured an aspect of the feeling of Kurt Cobain before his suicide. But I sort of doubt such grand machinations are in motion. This really reminded me of Miller’s Crossing, but with less reason. Instead of gangsters with factions, you have a sociopath with universal hate. It just didn’t strike me as being quite as interesting as the others. Perhaps the silence and aloneness contributed a bit to that — there was hardly any score, the 3 main characters do not share any screen time with each other, and there were very few human beings in the movie (not counting those that were killed rather quickly). And I can’t say the ending made me happy… Especially her reluctance to call it! Jesus!
Considering the 4 Oscar wins (and 83 other wins), and IMDB #45 movie of all time rating — I must conclude that this movie is a bit overrated.
Not saying it’s bad. It’s not quite to my taste. But it’s definitely overrated. :)
(ducks)
BTW — Funny that they got the killer’s hairstyle [IMDB link] by looking at an 1879 photo of a brothel patron. That explains something, at least…
March 19, 2008 at 8:51 PM
Plot Spoilers!!!
I absolutely loved NCfOM. Anton Chigurh has to be one of the most evil characters to ever appear in film. He was like the grim reaper, completely unstoppable, and producing and incredible body count. And that was an important point for the movie’s message. The old sheriff was so completely incapable of even coming close to stopping him that they never even meet. I thought that was brilliant, incredibly frustrating, but made Chigurh’s character all the more terrifying.
That being said, I can definitely accept that this was not a film for everyone. : )
March 19, 2008 at 10:21 PM
I have to disagree about the “universal hate” line. I think Chigurh is way beyond that which is what makes his character so chilling. The saying goes “hate is the opposite of love” and Chigurh is basically devoid of any emotion whatsoever. This is what makes him an effective hit man because he isn’t wrapped up in trivial things as “right” or “wrong” or “good” or “bad”. I really don’t think he hates people; he just has marked apathy. Lives are inconsequential to him.
March 19, 2008 at 10:24 PM
Actually, I meant to say that “the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference”… Sometimes I don’t type fast enough to keep up with my brain. ;) Love is a passionate emotion as is hate is what I was trying to say.
I wish I could edit comments!!
March 19, 2008 at 11:47 PM
also there is a some philosophy to consider in the film. when chigurgh asks his victims, “if the path you took led you here, was it worth it?”
the author, cormac mccarthy always writes books that are bleak and not uplifting. to think that man is always good, and that if you lead a good life only good things will happen to you is false.
March 20, 2008 at 12:06 AM
Yeah, I’ll agree with Angel there. Chigurh isn’t an embodiment of hate, he’s an embodiment of fate. Much as I hate to reference a marketing tagline in analyzing a movie, No Country’s tagline is pretty much the best five word summary of the movie I can think of: “You can’t stop what’s coming.” You can’t stop death once it’s coming for you, and you can’t stop the world from inevitably passing you by as you grow old (which is where the title of the movie comes in as an unusually descriptive summation of the other major theme at work here).
And here’s where it really gets subversive. Because you’re right, it’s framed up as a paint-by-numbers “everyone kills each other while chasing the money” story, but that’s the sheep’s clothing worn by a wolf of a story that’s really about death, fate, and the impotent decay of old age.
One of the story’s two potential “heroes” dies because he makes a mistake that makes his death inevitable. A mistake, it should be noted, that stems from an inherent goodness in his character. The storytellers here are clear: karma’s a bunch of bullshit, and the universe doesn’t care if you’re “good” or “bad”. Then your have your villain, who is such an embodiment of fate that he will let a coin toss determine whether someone lives or dies: if they’re supposed to die, the coin will say so. Yet even HE isn’t immune to the vagaries of fate himself. In the end, though, he disappears, gets away with it; fate cannot be stopped and is as constant as the passage of time. Speaking of the inevitable passage of time, then you have the other hero, the sheriff, who is faced with a world and circumstances he just doesn’t understand anymore. In the end, he just gives up, submitting to the notion that the world has passed him by. You don’t need to be Freud to pick apart that final dream he talks about. His father’s dead, but he’s just up there around the bend, waiting for him.
All of which is REALLY heady and heavy stuff for a mainstream movie, and the fact that they manage to couch all of that so gracefully within such an ostensibly standard looking going-after-the-money thriller framework is part of what makes it so brilliant.
March 20, 2008 at 6:16 AM
One of the neat things about that dream at the end is that it kind of leads into another Carmack McCarthy novel, “The Road”, wherein a father and son fight to survive in an apocalpytic world.
Ellis’ line is very haunting and captures the entire theme of NCFOM very succinctly:
“Whatcha got ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming, it ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”
Finally, if you need an amusing chaser to wash down the bleak feeling you have after watching NCFOM, check out the Brandon Hardesty version of the coin flip scene, featured on Jimmy Kimmel towards the end of this clip:
March 20, 2008 at 6:18 AM
I also liked the Sheriff’s beef story:
Ed Tom Bell: You know Charlie Walser? Has the place east of Sanderson? Well you know how they used to slaughter beeves, hit ‘em with a maul right here to stun ‘em… and then up and slit their throats? Well here Charlie has one trussed up and all set to drain him and the beef comes to. It starts thrashing around, six hundred pounds of very pissed-off livestock if you’ll pardon me… Charlie grabs his gun there to shoot the damn thing in the head but what with the swingin’ and twistin’ it’s a glance-shot and ricochets around and comes back hits Charlie in the shoulder. You go see Charlie, he still can’t reach up with his right hand for his hat… Point bein’, even in the contest between man and steer the issue is not certain.
March 20, 2008 at 11:13 AM
“But it was just another ‘everyone kills each other while chasing the money’ movie too”
It reminded me a lot of Fargo in that respect. I even quoted “All for what? A little bit of money”. A story about detectives chasing people chasing money, with a little bit of life philosophy thrown in. And yeah, that killer is evil.
I did enjoy it overall.
March 20, 2008 at 3:04 PM
i didnt like fargo. o brother was to my liking tho. ncfom had offscreen deaths of two of the main characters, it was quite a non-ending.
yeah i get it, tommy lee jones is too old to be a sherrif, and his grandfather and his father were both shot and died/paralyzed on the job. but tommy lee got out before that. big whoop, still not interesting.
movie starts out with a huge plothole. lewellyn goes back to give dying man some water… then the rest of the movie is too unfocused to keep the camera on any one character, or to tell any one story.
i agree the movie is overhyped. i actually make it a point to avoid ‘oscar’ or other ‘award-winning’ movies.
September 5, 2008 at 7:08 AM
[...] The second half of the movie. While it held our interest, it has the same pointless, fey feel that No Country For Old Men had — you can’t outrun fate, blah blah. That’s fine and dandy, but preach a [...]
March 17, 2009 at 2:44 PM
[...] No Country For Old Men [...]
May 10, 2009 at 4:59 PM
[...] looks like an older, beefier, creepier Seth Rogan, and Kelly MacDonald aka Carla Jean Moss from No Country For Old Men, also in Trainspotting, Splendor, and a bit part in the same 2005 Hitchhiker’s Guide To The [...]
December 10, 2009 at 7:07 AM
[...] name came up. Javier Bardem (aka the serial killer from the well-filmed and intense but pointless No Country For Old Men). Scarlett Johansson (whose hotness is undeniable but extremely overrated–her face is her….) [...]
February 28, 2010 at 7:07 AM
[...] period of time, without receiving any proper answers. I hate movies that make me feel like this. (No Country For Old Men was one of them… But this one is far more unsatisfying…)) [...]
March 6, 2010 at 7:08 AM
[...] looks like an older, beefier, creepier Seth Rogan, and Kelly MacDonald (aka Carla Jean Moss from No Country For Old Men, also in Trainspotting, Splendor, and a bit part in the same 2005 Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy…))) [...]