I saw this a few weeks ago. I simply cannot wait to see it again.
I also have trouble imagining a more satisfying ending. Nearly flawless.
And on that subject, at the screening I attended, Josh Brolin was there for a Q&A at the end. (It was a film festival thing.) He was, of course, asked about the unusual structure of the last act.
Audience member: “I didn’t really like the way you died.”
Brolin: “You’re not supposed to like it.”
Sold.
Can someone who liked the ending explain why they liked it and why they found it appropriate? What did you think the movie was about?
I’m one of those that was loving the movie right up until the ending, and I typically enjoy all manners of endings. I just didn’t feel like anything was wrapped up…but perhaps I missed what the film was about.
it’s been a while since I’ve seen it so you’ll have to forgive me if I miss a scene or a few details - I’m seeing it again sometime next week…
I suppose I’ll start with Ed Tom showing up at the Llewelyn moss crime scene. Personally I don’t think they showed the death because from this point on, it’s Ed Tom’s movie. Plus, it isn’t particularly important. We’ve seen Anton kill before and there’d really be no reason for it.
Does Ed Tom visit his friend here? I don’t expect this scene needs much explanation, but essentially his friend helps Ed Tom realize that things aren’t really any different than they have been throughout the rest of human history. I believe he tells a violent story from the turn of the century (1904 or thereabouts).
From here we make our way to Anton and Carla Jean. This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie and what the Coens did here (in my very humble opinion) is brilliant. We leave the scene with a stalemate between Carla Jean and Anton. Anton wants Carla Jean to pick a coin and she flat out refuses. We know enough about Anton at this point, without seeing him wipe blood off of his boots, to know that he will damn sure kill him. He has a moral code that Woody enlightens us to. He made a promise to Llewelyn that he’ll kill Carla Jean and if she doesn’t choose he absolutely will and we know Carla will be no match for him - noone else has been. Not showing the death was especially powerful because at this point we begin to realize exactly how inescapable Anton is.
The sudden car crash that would have killed anyone else on the planet left him with a broken arm that he patches up himself and goes on his way. Making him appear to be almost indestructible.
I’m having trouble remembering the first dream that Ed Tom had but the second dream is the one that stuck with me. Essentially the whole scene is Ed Tom coming to terms with his mortality. (his father waiting for him…)
I suppose the whole movie is about the fate/inevitability of death and how people struggle with it. That’s why I like Ed tom at the end so much.
That explanation is probably a lot more crude than others can provide, but there is my interpretation.
I have a somewhat different take from drm. See my post here (on another message board).
ETA: And yeah, I inadvertently misidentify the Barry Corbin character in that post. I correct myself a few posts later.
Your answer is certainly more eloquent, lol.
[spoiler]I certainly agree with the last paragraph, that is essentially what I was trying to say, however clumsily, about the Llewelyn Moss death.
I’m going to pay a little closer attention to the steer conversation the next time I watch, along with the Barry Corbin scene and the dream convo at the end.
[/spoiler]
I’ll probably see it again either tomorrow or tuesday. Like you said, I might come up with something entirely different then.
This is what’s so great about art.
I haven’t the movie, but when I heard of it I immediately thought of this thread:
It’s a conspiracy I say, the writer must be a Doper! Did anybody say “asshat” in the movie?
I saw the movie last night, and I agree that it was really good. Definitely one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. It didn’t have the ending I was expecting, but after reflecting on it (and reading what other people thought of the ending) I have to agree that it was perfect for the movie.
I also have to say that all the actors were amazing. Josh Brolin was great as a stubborn guy in way over his head, Javier Bardem was great (and terrifying) as the hitman, and Tommy Lee Jones was great as the sheriff. All the supporting actors were really good too. Also, as a native Texan, I have to say that all the accents were really well done.
Heh, after seeing the movie (and watching the show Journeyman where the protagonist also ends up with a bag of stolen money), I’ve been thinking about what I would do if that ever happened to me. And to be honest, if I ever found a huge amount of money, I would probably start behaving very stupidly.
Whatever you do, be sure to: Check the money for a transponder!
I really enjoyed this, other than the ending, which left me scratching my head. Gorgeous cinematography, quote-worthy dialog, and a guy getting chased down a river by a pit bull…what more could I ask?
See my link above. The key is to recognize that
[spoiler]the movie is not “about” Moss, the guy who finds the money. The movie is “about” Sheriff Bell. Moss is in the movie, yes, and plays a substantial part in the storyline, but the movie is not about him. The movie is about Sheriff Bell having a crisis of awareness and confidence, as he realizes his true place in the world. In a strange way, despite the fact that they never meet, the central relationship in the film is between Bell and Chigurh, or more specifically the force that Chigurh symbolizes. It is significant, in Bell’s final scene in the hotel room where Moss bought it and Chigurh is hiding somewhere in the shadows, that Bell has the opportunity to confront this force, and chooses instead to walk away.
The movie is structurally unique in that, superficially at least, the protagonist of the film (in formal analysis, the protagonist is the character whose choices drive the plot) does not have the film’s point of view. This is extremely unusual, and is what is throwing most viewers for a loop, I think. Moss acts as the film’s protagonist (again, superficially) for the majority of its runtime, and according to convention we should therefore buy into his viewpoint: why is he taking the money, what is he going to do with it, how is he going to get away, etc. None of that matters. What is important is that, simply, he did take it, and now he and those he loves will inevitably be destroyed by forces beyond his reckoning, so that Sheriff Bell can have yet another piece taken out of his soul. In the end, Bell is the true protagonist, because it is his choice at the moment of confrontation that determines the outcome of the story.
If all of this is still opaque, keep in mind the title. Everything you need to know is right there.[/spoiler]
(At what point do we get to stop using spoiler boxes?)
Just saw the movie. Not sure how I felt about the ending; I appreciate going against cinematic conventions, it’s just that, even if you’re not thinking about the undertones and subtext and all that stuff, the earlier part just works so damn well as a suspense thriller.
Cervaise, thanks; I think my own feelings about the movie are more in focus now, and it works better for me. One plot detail I liked was that
what really gets Moss into the shit is an act of humanity – he decides to go back out to the scene of the gunfight and bring water to the man begging for agua. If not for that, he might have actually gotten away with the money.
Say, Josh Brolin is doing all right these days, isn’t he? Just saw him in American Gangster.
Boy, that Cormac McCarthy is just the voice of sunny optimism, isn’t he?
Great movie, though.
Have you seen Into the Wild? Just curious. I thought it was at least equally masterful.
One of the things that really stuck with me was Chigurh’s twisted sense of logic. What really did it for me was That he came back for Carla Jean because he “promised” that he would. Generally when someone says they’ll go after your family if you don’t give back the money in a movie, it’s accepted that going after the family is an incentive for the person to give back the money. In Chigurh’s mind, it’s a punishment for not giving up the money. So if Moss had given the money back, he would have been killed but saved his wife. Since he didn’t do that and was killed, Chigurh thought it was only fair that his wife die as promised.
I saw this movie last night and was blown away. A fantastic film and absolutely riveting. A lot of people in my theater were confused/upset at the ending, but hopefully someone explained it to them later. I, for one, enjoy a movie that doesn’t have a Scooby Doo/CSI full explanation ending. What happens to the money? It doesn’t matter because the movie isn’t about the money. It was really excellent.
It is, huh? I’ve definitely heard good things about it.
I’ve been putting it off for a bit as other movies have pushed it down the list. I see it’s still playing at one theatre near me so I should check it out before it leaves, especially because A.O. Scott likes it and we tend to agree most of the time.
Into the Wild is stunningly good, from the locations to the acting to the score to…well, everything. Highly recommended. Hal Holbrook deserves a nomination, as well as Penn, Hirsch, and Vedder.
Just saw No Country… today. True, it did not end where and when most people would expect it to. I thought it was going to end with Anton walking down the sidewalk after the car accident, further reinforcing the point that he gets to walk away alive after having left so many people dead.
However, I liked the unusual structure of the film’s third act.
I started to pick up on the existential meaning of the title when the sheriff talked with an older, heavyset man after the bloodbath at the motel–you know, the whole bit about how nobody says “Sir” and “ma’am” anymore. And again, with the sheriff talking with the man in the wheelchair; and later, when he relates a story to his wife. This man of law enforcement realizes that he can no longer comprehend what the world is becoming (“you can’t stop what’s coming”) and cannot hope to change it.
I must also note that James Brolin is fantastic in his role. Give that man more work.
Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh never blinks, as far as I could tell, and that creeped me out. This may also be the first movie I’ve ever seen in which a man kills with an oxygen canister but does so without beating people over the head with it. Another first: sending a vicious dog into a river to swim after a man. I don’t think we’ve ever seen that before. Nice touch.
spoke-: Have you read McCarthy’s novel The Road ? Talk about bleak…
JOSH Brolin. Not James. Oops.
Just got home from seeing it, and like numous others here, was riveted. I’ll say right away that on first viewing, IMO it is every bit as good as Miller’s Crossing, my previous all-time fave Coen flick, even though stylistically it is considerably different. Sorry if the following is a bit stream-of-conciouslness, but I want to get a few things down before I forget about them.
Firstly, this was one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen, both visually and aurally; in fact, the sound design may be second only to 2001: A Space Odyssey for its intelligent use of ambient noises rather than music to help carry key plot points. Secondly, I was struck by how much the Coens reined in their tendencies to push the quirkiness of their characters to their limits; most everyone, even Javier Bardem’s monstrous psychopath, came off as realistic and logical in their behavior and mannerisms. Thirdly, I’m constantly fascinated by the ways the Coens can echo scenes or plot points from other films that may have influenced them without blatantly copying from them: in particular, I was frequently reminded of the obscure Don Siegel masterpiece Charlie Varrick, yet the two films don’t duplicate any specific scenes, and have little in common other than general outlines of plot and a love for wide-angle views of the arid southwestern landscapes.
Listening to (suburban Houston) audience comments as the credits rolled, just about everyone seemed utterly baffled by the ending, and I have a feeling that the movie ultimately will fail at the box office because too many viewers demand a neat tying-up of the loose ends, maybe because so few loose ends manage to to be tied up in most people’s lives. I will not pretend to have instantly gotten why the films ends where and how it does, but I will say that in this case I found the open-endedness of it highly satisfying. Lastly, I pretty sure I’m gonna be having nightmares for some time about someone like Anton Chigruh, with his dead eyes, page-boy and his bottle of compressed gas. Eek.
Oh yeah. That and Child of God, too. Even though I’ve read several of his novels, I can’t say I’m a big fan. The guy’s a little too bleak for me. Talented writer, but boy does he have some issues.
I probably wouldn’t have seen No Country for Old Men if it hadn’t been done by the Coens. Even though it’s grim, the Coens make it mesmerizing.