No Country for Old Men: a follow-up

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

One of my blog articles usually generates no more than a dozen or so 
comments at best, which is more or less the way I like it. The thought 
of dealing with 50 to 60 comments, especially those annoying anonymous 
one-liners, would be enough for me to disable comments entirely. There 
is one exception to this, however. My November 17, 2007 highly negative 
review of “No Country for Old Men” has generated 113 comments so far. It 
is also my most accessed article, receiving over 6600 hits to date. This 
is mostly a function of it being included on Rottentomatoes.com, 
surrounded by a bunch of fawning reviews. People are curious to see why 
anybody would bash this over-hyped nonsense. Along with the equally 
pretentious “Atonement” and “There Will be Blood”, we can expect the 
Coen brothers movie to walk off with a bunch of Oscars this year.

After having mulled over the defenses of the movie posted to my blog for 
a while, I am ready to follow up with a kind of deeper reading of the 
movie’s problem, which almost everybody acknowledges (fans included) has 
to do with its anti-climactic ending. For the first 2/3’s of the movie, 
we see a kind of cat-and-mouse game between a very likable hero named 
Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and the Terminator-like hit-man Chigurh 
hired to kill him. Moss has walked off with a fortune in drug money left 
by rival Mexican drug gangs after they have bumped each other off. 
Chigurh follows Moss all over West Texas trying to recover the cash and 
killing everybody who gets in his way, usually with a pneumatic bolt-gun 
used in slaughterhouses.

As the film builds toward a final showdown between Moss and Chigurh, it 
takes a sharp anti-climactic turn with Moss’s corpse floating in a motel 
swimming pool. His murder takes place off-screen and we are not clear 
who has killed him or what has happened to the money. This doesn’t 
bother the movie’s fans who seem to get most of the pleasure tying loose 
ends together in a kind of DIY screenwriting fashion. Here’s one comment 
from my blog:

"The Mexican drug dealers killed Moss, they found him when they were 
following Carla Jean and one of them asked her mother where they were 
going. The Mexicans get the money. It is implied that Chigurh kills 
Carla Jean because he can’t comprehend the choice she makes by refusing 
to call the coin. She refuses to leave something up to chance that 
should be decided with human compassion, and Chigurh is oblivious to the 
implications of chance, thus he is nearly killed by random chance."

You also saw this kind of amateur screenwriting from fans after the 
final episode of “The Sopranos” when the scene fades to black just 
before an ominous looking figure at a diner counter may or may not be 
about to whack Tony Soprano. People wrote their own conclusions with 
Tony going into the witness protection program, his son taking over the 
mob, etc. I didn’t mind this lackluster ending because I had enjoyed 
“The Sopranos” for over four years and was happy to see it end with a 
whimper rather than a bang.

The Coen brothers’ defenders also make the point that the movie’s ending 
was more “lifelike” because life is filled with random, pointless 
occurrences as this comment demonstrates:

"Again, I do not think who got the money is important. The movie is 
about unfairness, chance and uncertainty in life. It is about morality, 
and choices, and the partially random nature of the universe. This is 
not a simple drug and money tale…

"Life often has nothing to do with morality, goodness, or evil. I 
personally do not think that this is bad. The nature of chance makes 
life way more interesting than if everything were pre-ordained, from the 
beginning. There is no plan, get used to it! You can still have your 
beliefs and live life according to your morality. I wish I had realized 
this earlier in life. I think the philosopher Nietzsche would have loved 
this movie."

When I read this, I was reminded of what Jeeves told his young master 
Bertie Wooster, who had begun to read the German philosopher in an 
effort to impress the young intellectual he was infatuated with: “You 
would not like Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/02/06/no-country-for-old-men-a-follow-up/