Actually, if I’m not mistaken, she calls heads, and it ends up being tails. This is important because it suggests that she might get the same luck that the cashier at the store in the beginning of the book got by calling the flip the same. It didn’t work out for her. Frankly, I think it wouldn’t have mattered if she got it right or not. I still think he would have killed her. I think he allowed her the coin flip more for his benefit rather than her own. I honestly think killing her was more difficult for him than the others. I think he did the coin flip to work himself up to it. I know that sounds absurd given what we knew of his nature, but killing her was not for sport or pleasure, it was just a shitty part of his princples that had to be done.
I was referring to the book in the above post and specifically got my gut feeling on the matter from the fact that he apologized to her over and over again and tried to confort her as much as possible before doing it. There was no pleasure in it for him.
Correct. In the book, she lost the coin toss.
Which is what I said, but I had the opposite call/result. I read a library copy, so I can’t consult it, but either way, she called the toss and lost.
I do disagree with your interpretation, though, Euthanasiast – I think if she’d won the coin toss, Chigurh would’ve let her live. No way to be sure, of course, but that fits my interpretation of his code of ethics.
Either way, I preferred her refusal to call it in the movie.
I read my library’s copy and so don’t have it at hand, but I think I remember her calling heads and it was tails.
OK. But why is it significant to the movie at that point? I loved the movie, but the car crash seemed somewhat random.
Like the flip of a coin?
Just wanted to add that I saw this over the holiday and loved it. Best new movie I saw all year, without question.
To me, it all made perfect sense and was entirely satisfying. I had to contemplate the ending monologue a bit–I didn’t realize it was going to be the end as I was watching–but the imagery of the sheriff’s dream is perfect for an ending.
I’ve started seeing posters for it over here. Should play soon.
Upon a second viewing (I bought a copy), I noticed a lot more about the sheriff, his words, his reactions, his views…and they all add up to the ending in a way that makes perfect sense.
He has a real sense of propriety; he values respect, courtesy, manners, honesty, and believes (believed?) that good can overcome evil in the end.
He finds the milk bottle left on the table to be “aggravating” because it was a rude act. He is unhappy with the man assigned to haul away bodies from the original crime scene because the fellow did a rather sloppy job. He yearns for the days when people said “sir” and “ma’am.” He mentions his father a few times long before the end/dream. He sits in his office or in a coffee shop and shakes his head at the increasing terror and chaos in the world, personified by Chigurh and spreading all over like a cancer.
At the end, the line “And then I woke up” is perfectly clear in its meaning. He’s finally getting it. He had to retire.
If I may, a few words on Chigurh: he is a fascinating and terrifying character–a pure sociopath, with no emotional connections to or empathy with others. He kills as quickly and easily and casually as the rest of us would turn off a light or close a door. Meaningless acts, without passion. He has no backstory (“What business is it of yours where I’m from, friend-o?”), and this adds to his beyond-human status. As one character puts it, Chigurh is a “ghost.” His name seems vaguely French but he doesn’t strike me as a person who came from France–or anywhere on Earth, for that matter. He is relentless. You can’t talk him out of what he’s come to do–remember the scene with Moss’s wife towards the end–because he cannot be reasoned with.
Okay, I’m done. But I plan to watch it again. It gives one a lot to think about.
I saw this last week and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. My favorite part was when Llewellyn found the money at the beginning. One of my friends announced “I would giggle and run!”
He changed his mind quickly after a while.
I loved that part. It’s always bothered me in movies when someone dives into a river and the dogs don’t follow. Dogs aren’t stupid. They can swim.
There seem to be three different classes of people that interact perilously with Chigurh: Those directly involved in his quest for the cash (i.e. trying to thwart him; e.g. Harrleson’s and Brolin’s characters), those who are not aware of his quest but inadvertently get in the way (e.g. the driver he stops with the police car, various motel clerks), and those who just happen to meet him in a more than casual way (e.g. the gas-station attendant, the accountant and Carla Jean). This distinction is important because he reacts to each group differently; the first are mercilessly hunted down and exterminated, the second are often spared due to circumstance (the trailer-park manager was saved by the sound of a toilet flush) and Chigurth is routinely kind or at least polite to them up to the moment of their death.
The third group IMO seem to fall into peril because they “see” Chigurth. He begins the terrifying coin flip with the gas-station owner only when he mentions the plates on his car (that’s the point of the line “What business is it of yours where I’m from, friend-o?”), he asks the accountant directly “Do you see me?”, and he advises the boys at the end “You didn’t see me.” “Seeing” here means recognizing him for who he is: A malevolent, implacable force of nature, the doom of certain death.
Even for this group he gives them a literal chance to escape, and I think the fact that the sherrif entered the dark crime scene and didn’t see Chigurth–even though the shot sequence seemed to indicate he was in the room–puts the sherriff in this group. When Jones sees the dime and screws on the floor, he knows Chigurth has been there, he knows the malevolence of the force he was tracking, and he knows he was powerless to stop it.
Given this, I think if Carla Jean had called the flip right, she would certainly have lived. The new wrinkle is that she didn’t call it at all, forcing Chigurth to be an active instrument of death rather than a passive instrument of fate. This clearly annoyed him because it challenged his perverse ethical system, and it caused her to be bumped up into the top category, her death at that point was inevitable.
I’ve also been wondering just how many people Chigurh killed during the course of the film. We know for sure that he killed
the two men in the car with him when he was sitting between them; Moss and his wife; the man on the side of the road near the beginning; the deputy; the man who was in an office building; Woody Harrelson’s character; a man who was driving Llewellyn in a car; several guys in a motel room; several more people at the end, including someone in a swimming pool…and that’s all I can remember right now.
Any number of murders might have taken place off-screen, however: Moss’s mother in law; the other man in the office building (the accountant); the man with the chicken crates in the back of his truck.
Also, when the woman would not tell him where Moss worked and got snippy about it, he gave her a look and then left. Interesting that he didn’t kill her as well.
Would he have killed the man in the convenience store (the infamous coin toss scene) if he had called it and lost? The poor old bastard wasn’t involved in the drug stuff at all, not even by remote assocation (like Moss’s wife).
Simulpost…You just answered some of my newest questions. Thanks!
I believe the Mexicans actually killed Moss at the hotel. They were seen speeding away amid gunfire as Ed Tom arrives to find Moss dead. Anton doesn’t show up at the hotel until after the fact.
edited to add spoiler box
This thread has been fascinating, and very helpful to my understanding of the film.
That said, did anybody else think it was cool when Anton closed the shower curtain on the Mexican so he wouldn’t get blood on himself? 
Oh, and I was thinking even if he was a “ghost,” the kids would be made to identify him and he just might get caught this time. After all, he had a compound fracture and was on foot. He might even be dripping blood.
He consistently avoids blood throughout the film. At the beginning, when he’s garroting the deputy, he turns his head to keep the spatter off his face; later, after shooting Wells, he picks up his feet as the pool of blood spreads on the floor; and at the end, he checks his boots on the way out of Carla Jean’s house. It’s an interesting contradiction that somebody so casual about murder should be so fastidious about one of its byproducts.
Thanks for the clarification, HN.
I’m glad I bought a copy of the film.
I’m still in eye-rolling mode when I think of one of my friends, who complained/ranted that the film has a “non-ending.”
I thought he found it aggravating because it was still cold – meaning they had just missed catching the guy.
Cervaise – I thought Chigurh avoided blood as a way of not being tracked. He took off his boots before attacking the Mexicans in the hotel, and then took off his socks once he’d killed them all. I thought he was just trying to avoid leaving bloody footprints.
I believe the only people Chigurh interacted with that he didn’t kill in the movie are the trailer-park attendant and the two kids at the end. The trailer-park attendant didn’t get killed because someone else was in the office (in the bathroom) – he was planning on killing her until that flush sound. The two kids didn’t get killed at the end because he was shaken and confused – not only by the car accident, but by Carla Jean’s refusal to call the coin flip, and her resulting murder. His own ethical and moral compass, sociopathic as it may have been, has stopped working at that point.
I thought the wheelchair-bound Barry Corbin character was Ed Tom’s father, although I could easily be wrong on that. However, I DID identify him quickly as Maurice from “Northern Exposure,” so I get double points for that, right?
Uncle, or great-uncle.