I desperately wanted to like No Country For Old Men when I saw it over the weekend. I really did.
For the most part, it is an above average movie. Javier Bardem absolutely deserved the Oscar he won, Josh Brolin played the part of the Southern tragic figure about as well as it could have been played, and Tommy Lee Jones is pretty great in his supporting supporting role of the sheriff who wonders where the origin of all of this evil comes from. The problem is with the Coen brothers as they just do not really know how to end a movie. This is apparently a shortcoming for which they will always be exempt from criticism of because the three movies of theirs that I really like—Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and Raising Arizona—really do not end strong either (but we all seem to forget this too).
One of the complaints about the ending (no spoilers coming) is that it is never shown who killed one of the main characters and that another character’s telling of a dream is the last scene. Also, it is never revealed what happened to the money. Personally, I think the ending makes sense because it does follow a linear framework—we do not know what happened to the money or who killed who but, then again, we have no zero back story on the drug deal gone bad that precedes Brolin’s arrival. Additionally, we are given no back story about Anton Chigurh, a man who represents the very essence of random violence and a decidedly absent ability to decipher right from wrong (unless, of course, a coin flip is involved). So to say that the ending is nonsensical is a bit short-sighted since the two cornerstones of the story’s mythology (random violence and the notion that things have changed so drastically within the context of crime) are advanced throughout.
The problem is that the ending just is not that strong. I have not read No Country For Old Men, the novel by Cormac McCarthy from which the Coen brothers adapted, but I have a feeling that liberties were taken. The movie’s dialogue is sparse and, as great as Bardem is, you get the feeling that the Coen’s are asking too much of his presence. Every scene Bardem is in is absorbing and oftentimes tense. So, when his last scene arrives it seems out of sorts. Again, the final scene with Chigurh in the book might end the exact same way as the movie but the movie went about it all wrong. Same goes for the character re-telling the dream at the movie’s final shot. It feels too forced and that is probably my biggest complaint about all Coen brother movies: when they come out and are critically praised it always seems to be for the wrong reasons.
There is a scene early on in No Country where Chigurh talks with a gas station attendant about life and death all while the attendant (who is an older man) is oblivious to the gravity of the situation at first. The visible discomfort that Chigurh causes by asking the most mundane questions (“What time do you close?”) is really phenomenal and if the movie was able to hold on to that level of film making then all bets would have been off as to its ceiling. Instead, you have a movie that simply could have been great.
Overall, the movie is definitely worth a rental if only to see Bardem unleash the terrifying Anton Chigurh on film but it is not worthy of a purchase. And it probably did not deserve the Oscar for Best Picture but, then again, movies with particularly weak endings definitely seem to be en vogue nowadays. Maybe I am not unlike Tommy Lee Jones’s character, except that I am lamenting about whatever happened to great movies with great endings.