No Country For Old Men (Coen Brothers)

[Frax]

I think that sums it up better than I could ever hope to make an attempt at doing.

[chaos]

I think it tries to dumb down the characters to fit certain roles, and that they are far more complicated than that. But that's me, and that's also incorporating my understanding from the book into my interpretation of the movie.

[Arbitrary]

I have one response to all of this pretentious bullshit.

[Brutul Tarew Marr]

I like the quotes Fammaden, very good stuff.

[True Love]

Originally Posted by Arbitrary

I have one response to all of this pretentious bullshit.

Great clip, but movies are not swords in fields. Not every event is meaningless, especially when it's a story by people who aren't known to be complete wingnuts. That said, good stories have lots of room for more or less valid (and interestingly personal) interpretations (you can read mine in the spoiler space below, although the one in Fammaden's first quote is probably better). I don't think they are necessarily pretentious, or bullshit, even if they do smell like responses to inkblot tests. That's what makes them interesting!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

One thing a lot of reviewers seem to miss (in general, not as much here) is that this is not really about Bell's inability to deal with a new and more violent world. As has already been pointed out here, Ellis puts the kibosh to that: the world has always had psychopaths like Chigurh. I tend to agree that Bell is a more central character than Lewellyn (or Chigurh) and I think that he probably understands Ellis's point, but gives up anyway. The key difference between him and both Lewellyn and Chigurh is not intelligence or competence (they all seem to have a lot) or the willingness to kill people willy nilly (I argue below that this isn't Chigurh's real strength), but what I would call focus, or mental toughness. Bell just has too many doubts about his ability to understand the world or people like Chigurh, and when he comes to the end of the case, where he handled the parts he understood with a great deal of skill and still failed to make much of a difference, he decides that his time is up and bows out, despite the guilt he has from knowing that Ellis is probably right. If he was more sure of his principles he would be more determined to figure things out, but part of him doesn't think it's possible to understand or stop some things, and the subsequent sense of fate and futility undermines his ability to do so. But deep down he also knows that he's wrong. And that's all the closure I think you need for him.

Chigurh doesn't seem to have any doubts about what his purpose or principles are, and it gives him a level of focus and mental toughness that puts him a notch above everyone else in the movie. He methodically anticipates most things but has no problems dealing with chance, and when he literally gets blindsided, visibly shaken, and badly wounded, he still has the strength of will to start patching himself up and get away from people who would prevent him from doing what he wants to do. It'll take more than that to knock him off his game. That scene gives you all the closure you need for Chigurh, in my opinion.

Lewellyn has a lot of focus and determination and he doesn't give up, but he also shows why this does not give you a "WIN AT LIFE" button. He sees the chance to jump into a new situation and gain a big advantage, but the classic problem with making a big commitment right away is that you don't know what you don't know. Lewellyn makes a pretty darn good run of it, but the viewer can see that Chigurh is better and the Mexicans more determined and resourceful than he thinks, and when he stops to talk to the woman it should not be terribly surprising that this turns out to be his last mistake. This is a movie about a bunch of different characters who are all interesting for different (but interlocking) reasons. Lewellyn is not the hero and the story is not obligated to keep him around to learn something by overcoming the bad guy. Not everybody learns their lesson in time.

This is where I may depart more from the book (and maybe less so from the movie), but I don't think the movie necessarily endorses Chigurh as a sort of Nietzschean superman who rises above everyone else because he's super-rational and willing to kill anyone, or says that the future belongs to such people whether we like it or not. This is the usual tack that movies take in basically deifying psychopaths - see Silence of the Lambs for a movie that I actually like quite a bit that is sort of the canonical example of this - but I don't think No Country for Old Men quite goes there (the book may go further). Chigurh can and will die eventually from some event that he didn't anticipate or cannot prevent, whether it's a person who is directly trying to kill him or not. He is very very smart and has no mental hangups or compunctions to get in his way, but he is not omniscient and he is only one person. All it takes is one person who can understand him and marshal the resources of the 98% of society that view serial killers as a bad thing. I will have to watch to movie again to be sure, but I think Ellis alludes to this.

In real life it turns out that being a psychopath doesn't necessarily make you much more rational or focused, and most serial killers and other psychopaths get caught at about the same rates as other criminals. It's not being a psychopath that makes a person scary competent, it's mental toughness and focus. The ability to kill people without compunction is relatively minor. Ellis's point is not just that psychopaths and other people have always been around, but that society has survived and thrived in part because they can be dealt with. To believe either that modern evil is new or that it is completely unstoppable is vanity; otherwise we wouldn't be here. Bell knows it and deep down we all know it, but there is always the temptation to let our fascination or incomprehension (two shades of a basically similar response) fool us into thinking that there's nothing we can do about it. The failure to see beyond that is what I view as the real failing of the old man.

[Druixx]

Movie was great until the swimming pool, like many have said. Super letdown of an ending. And yes I understood everything that occurred and none of it went over my head. Still a letdown. If I want imagery and allegory, I will read a classic book. Having said that, the director(s) could have still achieved the same effect and given the audience a satisfying/acceptable ending.

Fuck him/them. 6/10

[Blumpster]

Originally Posted by Druixx

Movie was great until the swimming pool, like many have said. Super letdown of an ending. And yes I understood everything that occurred and none of it went over my head. Still a letdown. If I want imagery and allegory, I will read a classic book. Having said that, the director(s) could have still achieved the same effect and given the audience a satisfying/acceptable ending.

Fuck him/them. 6/10

. . .

[hootie2]

After careful consideration, i have to agree with the last two posts.
The movie was great, i completely understand what the directors were portraying. Having said that, i think the Coen's missed a great chance to make an all time movie with a more traditional ending.

Having one of the main characters dying offscreen is ridiculous.
Almost having a confrontation between the two main characters of the book is
NOT, I REPEAT NOT as satisfying as if they did have one.
No matter the allegory, yes i understood the whole scene where bell enters the motel.
Heck in the theater i was thinking to myself at that moment the only way the sheriff lives is if he doesn't see Anton.

Wouldn't you have liked to see anton kill everyone, even bell, then himself taken out by pure chance? Perhaps by Bells rookie sidekick who accidently stumbles onto anton by chance after the car wreck.

Many endings would have been better then the real one.

[Jedah]

Originally Posted by hootie2

After careful consideration, i have to agree with the last two posts.
The movie was great, i completely understand what the directors were portraying. Having said that, i think the Coen's missed a great chance to make an all time movie with a more traditional ending.

Having one of the main characters dying offscreen is ridiculous.
Almost having a confrontation between the two main characters of the book is
NOT, I REPEAT NOT as satisfying as if they did have one.
No matter the allegory, yes i understood the whole scene where bell enters the motel.
Heck in the theater i was thinking to myself at that moment the only way the sheriff lives is if he doesn't see Anton.

Wouldn't you have liked to see anton kill everyone, even bell, then himself taken out by pure chance? Perhaps by Bells rookie sidekick who accidently stumbles onto anton by chance after the car wreck.

Many endings would have been better then the real one.

Bearing in mind the movie ends exactly like the book does, no, no I didn't want another ending. If Chigurh had died, then the entire movie would have gone to shit, everything, every last little thing that mattered in the movie would have been shit on just so people could feel closure. No, it would have been horrifically bad, and it would have taken horrible liberties with the source material.

EDIT: Reading all these criticisms of the ending, the only thing going through my head is George Carlin and the fucking Buddy Christ; you're all asking for the Buddy Christ.

[Blank]

Originally Posted by hootie2

Wouldn't you have liked to see anton kill everyone, even bell, then himself taken out by pure chance? Perhaps by Bells rookie sidekick who accidently stumbles onto anton by chance after the car wreck.

Thank god I'll never have to watch a movie you've made.

[chaos]

Giving it a "satisfying" ending would have fucked the movie up and RUINED the book. The Coen brothers made one of the only good book translations I can remember, ever. If you don't like it, it probably just isn't for you. The book is the same, the action is skipped, because it isn't a "heist" movie or something.

[hootie2]

Hold on a minute. I also loved The Silence of the Lambs. I think it was one of the greatest book to movie translations ever, right up there with the godfather.

Now that movie had a more traditional ending and it also won an oscar.
Ive watched it probably a dozen times.
Ok, my ending does suck, but there has to be one better then what we saw onscreen. I couldn't watch THAT a dozen times.

I am going to have to get the book. I don't think i can fully love the movie without reading the book.

[chaos]

Originally Posted by hootie2

I am going to have to get the book. I don't think i can fully love the movie without reading the book.

I highly highly reccomend it, and I think it will improve your understanding and indeed, love for the movie.

I read the book first, and if they had fucked up the ending I would have felt horribly betrayed and angry. Especially is they had gone the super-happy-funtimes route of Chigurh loses, good guys win, Moss rides off into the sunset with the woman. It betrays everything the story is about. Honestly if that's the movie people want, go watch another movie, there are plenty of cliche action/heist movies like that.

[Jedah]

Originally Posted by True Love

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

One thing a lot of reviewers seem to miss (in general, not as much here) is that this is not really about Bell's inability to deal with a new and more violent world. As has already been pointed out here, Ellis puts the kibosh to that: the world has always had psychopaths like Chigurh. I tend to agree that Bell is a more central character than Lewellyn (or Chigurh) and I think that he probably understands Ellis's point, but gives up anyway. The key difference between him and both Lewellyn and Chigurh is not intelligence or competence (they all seem to have a lot) or the willingness to kill people willy nilly (I argue below that this isn't Chigurh's real strength), but what I would call focus, or mental toughness. Bell just has too many doubts about his ability to understand the world or people like Chigurh, and when he comes to the end of the case, where he handled the parts he understood with a great deal of skill and still failed to make much of a difference, he decides that his time is up and bows out, despite the guilt he has from knowing that Ellis is probably right. If he was more sure of his principles he would be more determined to figure things out, but part of him doesn't think it's possible to understand or stop some things, and the subsequent sense of fate and futility undermines his ability to do so. But deep down he also knows that he's wrong. And that's all the closure I think you need for him.

Chigurh doesn't seem to have any doubts about what his purpose or principles are, and it gives him a level of focus and mental toughness that puts him a notch above everyone else in the movie. He methodically anticipates most things but has no problems dealing with chance, and when he literally gets blindsided, visibly shaken, and badly wounded, he still has the strength of will to start patching himself up and get away from people who would prevent him from doing what he wants to do. It'll take more than that to knock him off his game. That scene gives you all the closure you need for Chigurh, in my opinion.

Lewellyn has a lot of focus and determination and he doesn't give up, but he also shows why this does not give you a "WIN AT LIFE" button. He sees the chance to jump into a new situation and gain a big advantage, but the classic problem with making a big commitment right away is that you don't know what you don't know. Lewellyn makes a pretty darn good run of it, but the viewer can see that Chigurh is better and the Mexicans more determined and resourceful than he thinks, and when he stops to talk to the woman it should not be terribly surprising that this turns out to be his last mistake. This is a movie about a bunch of different characters who are all interesting for different (but interlocking) reasons. Lewellyn is not the hero and the story is not obligated to keep him around to learn something by overcoming the bad guy. Not everybody learns their lesson in time.

This is where I may depart more from the book (and maybe less so from the movie), but I don't think the movie necessarily endorses Chigurh as a sort of Nietzschean superman who rises above everyone else because he's super-rational and willing to kill anyone, or says that the future belongs to such people whether we like it or not. This is the usual tack that movies take in basically deifying psychopaths - see Silence of the Lambs for a movie that I actually like quite a bit that is sort of the canonical example of this - but I don't think No Country for Old Men quite goes there (the book may go further). Chigurh can and will die eventually from some event that he didn't anticipate or cannot prevent, whether it's a person who is directly trying to kill him or not. He is very very smart and has no mental hangups or compunctions to get in his way, but he is not omniscient and he is only one person. All it takes is one person who can understand him and marshal the resources of the 98% of society that view serial killers as a bad thing. I will have to watch to movie again to be sure, but I think Ellis alludes to this.

In real life it turns out that being a psychopath doesn't necessarily make you much more rational or focused, and most serial killers and other psychopaths get caught at about the same rates as other criminals. It's not being a psychopath that makes a person scary competent, it's mental toughness and focus. The ability to kill people without compunction is relatively minor. Ellis's point is not just that psychopaths and other people have always been around, but that society has survived and thrived in part because they can be dealt with. To believe either that modern evil is new or that it is completely unstoppable is vanity; otherwise we wouldn't be here. Bell knows it and deep down we all know it, but there is always the temptation to let our fascination or incomprehension (two shades of a basically similar response) fool us into thinking that there's nothing we can do about it. The failure to see beyond that is what I view as the real failing of the old man.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

I don't know if I would attribute it all to mental toughness; in the book, Bell's experience trailing Chigurh is juxtaposed with his experiences in World War II wherein he and his unit had been shelled in a house; Bell was the only conscious survivor and at dusk, he fled, leaving whoever was still living under the rubble to die. In his talk with Ellis, he makes plain that he's always felt guilty about it, like he was supposed to have stayed and died like his father had in World War I. Theres never any indication that Bell really thinks he could have changed things, he just feels guilty that he lived while others died. Ellis suggests he ease up on himself, and as such I can't imagine he'd be encouraging him to enter the fray with Chigurh: the whole of the conversation seems to center around Ellis' observations on loss: "You wear out Ed Tom. All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it." The message seemed to me to be that if you can't change, you can't change it, and don't go running fool in trying to, because you'll lose.

I agree with the analysis of Moss, but to me, the point seemed more to be that he never really got what it was he was up against; he went back to give the Mexican water, he didn't shoot Chigurh when he had the chance, and put his gun down when the Mexicans held a gun to the woman by the pool; he time and time again made himself vulnerable because he desperately wanted to be a decent person; he tried to play the game on his principles and it wouldn't take. It didn't for Wells either, and the implications in his conversation with Chigurh point to a divergence point between the two that ultimately led to Wells' death: the only thing that seems to make sense is that there was some rule Wells followed, like the rules Moss followed, that landed him opposite Chigurh.

As I see it, theres just too much about the characters and their decisions to say that if they'd been tougher, if they'd willed it, that they could have changed the way things went. The image I get is that every bad thing that happens to somebody in NCFOM happens because at some point, they made a choice that made themselves vulnerable and as near as I can see, all those choices stemmed from people trying to be normal, decent, and good. To me, Ellis' point was that the only thing you can do is pack up, and keep going; you can't get back what you've lost, you just have to keep on with what you've still got.

[Cathan]

"

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Spoiler text goes here I watched it again on Bluray a few weeks ago and rewathed the scene over and over scanning every detail in slowmo where Tommy lee goes into the hotel and chigur is shown in the room.

In the previous scene Tommy Lee says chigur is more like a ghost the way he keeps disappearing right before he is caught or stumbled onto each time.

I don't want to throw out some cheesy idea that Chigur is a ghost or demon or just has supernatural luck or wtf ever but I think symbolically... that's more or less why Chigur wasn't caught in that scene, because he is like Tommy Lee said, like a ghost. Infer what you want from what I said, watch those 2 scenes again yourself and see what you think but I don't think it was the author's intent for Chigur to be caught (duh yeah) but for him to be represented more as a ghost that can't be dealt with, or as a representation of the evil that can not be dealth with as a whole because it is elusive. That's my take anyway.

"