I would say that the paragraph beginning with “Suspense aside….” pretty much summarizes the entire review the standpoint of a unifying element–which is poetry–the poetic qualities of the dialogue.

The “in the part of Texas” paragraph is simply marvelous. The description of Bardem is particularly striking.

The summary appraisal of the film within the Coen’s oeuvre is notable as is the urging of readers to see the film–50/50 chances or as Anton says “call it!” Nice–a nifty little rhetorical icing.
In the end, what Craig saw in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN in terms of “texture” is exactly what he imbued this truly outstanding review with.

They seem to go hand in hand.

Anyway, not having read the book until after the movie, I think the Coens did a remarkable job of translating it, remaining true to it, but also being themselves.

Much detail had to go of course, but they did such a great job of including the important bits and letting you fill in the blanks yourself.

***Spoilers*****

Here’s how the pool scene goes down in the movie:

Woman: Hey Mr. Sporting Goods.
Moss: Hey yourself.
Woman: You a sport?
Moss: That’s me.
Woman: I got beers in my room.
Moss: Waiting for my wife.
Woman: Oh. That’s who you keep lookin out the window for?
Moss: Half.
Woman: What else then?
Moss: Lookin for what’s comin.
Woman: Yeah but no one ever sees that. Beer. That’s what’s comin, I’ll bring the ice chest out here. You can stay married.
Moss: Ma’am I know what beer leads to.
Woman: Beer leads to more beer.

And that’s the last we see either of them alive.

I think the scene has mulitple purposes that don’t necessarily parallel with the hitchhiker scene in the book. First of all, in the prior scenes, The mexicans have discovered that Moss is in El Paso, Carla Jean has just told Ed Tom and Chigurh has stolen the chicken truck and is headed to El Paso himself.

Everyone is converging on El Paso for the big (offscreen!) climax. The last time we’ve seen Moss he’d just gotten out of Mexico and he’s telling Carla Jean what to do.

We need a scene placing him in the motel in El Paso and this scene is kind of a diversionary tacting and it also acts as a pause or a breath catching before the shit hits the fan. It’s also a little moment where Llewelyn can prove his ultimate decency in case we had any doubts before he dies and it forshadows what’s about to happen a little bit:

It accomplishes much of what the hitchhiker scenes accomplished but much more economically.

The Coens were on Elvis Mitchell’s The Treatment (KCRW.com) this week and I think it was there that they mentioned that converting the book to the film meant they had to find the elements of the book that worked together thematically, alter them to focus on the themes they wanted to invest into with the film and leave the rest. I got the impression, not having read the book, that the Coens were deeply respectful of McCarthy’s work but wanted to trim it down to its essence. I don’t know why they made the changes you mention, but I got the impression the pool scene was reinforcing Llewelyn’s fidelity and concern for his wife. It also places him outside his room when the Mexicans arrive, creating the plausible scenario for a bloody confrontation.

My take was that the shoot-out occured with him by the pool, hence the beer-drinking woman is killed in the hail of bullets and Llewelyn dies headed back into his room to retrieve the money and leave. He doesn’t make it.

But then the Coens also mentioned that they were concerned about not breaking their record of never having a film longer than 2 hours in length, so maybe that’s the reason for the changes from the book.

Or maybe it was Utah.

Why they condensed the hitchhiker scene in the book into the lady-by-the-pool scene in the movie remains a bit of a mystery to me. At this point, things happen so quickly in the movie, I almost always overlook it, but lots of people have wondered about it.

I don’t think he actually did anything with the woman in the pool. She died in the pool and he died in his room still fully dressed. The question is, why have her in the movie at all? I’m still not sure what to take from it.

The Mexican asked Carla Jean’s mother where they were going in El Paso but the scene cuts before she actually tells him.

Even though I already knew the story, I don’t think I’ve ever been so fully absorbed by a film. It combines some of the best elements of Blood Simple, Touch of Evil, and countless other films. The long chase sequence at dawn was captivating, as was the shotgun behind the hotel room door, the briefcase full of money in the air vent… I could go on and on.

And I think the conclusion captured exactly the tone McCarthy had created for the novel. It leaves you with an indescribable feeling. You can’t stop what’s coming, and maybe you never could. And, sometimes, even knowing the future won’t change your actions – won’t stop you from making a stupid mistake. It’s something intangible, it just is.

*Spoiler*
To conclude this rambling, though, there was one change from the novel which I’ve been trying to process. In the novel, Moss dies with a young, female hitchhiker he picked up on the road. Before that, they have a deep conversation in a fast food restaurant. He isn’t attracted to her sexually, but their being found together must have troubled Carla Jean. In the film, Moss seems to entertain the idea of taking up the pool girl on her offer right before the fade out. It’s not integral to the plot, but I was left wondering if anything had actually happened between them and why Moss, who seems otherwise faithful and concerned for his wife, would do such a thing. Also, how did the Mexicans find him so quickly? El Paso isn’t a small town and I don’t recall Carla Jean’s mother telling the man which hotel he/they were staying at. The vagueness of Moss’ death kind of bugged me and my friend said he hated the ending.

I’m hoping to post something new about it, talking about some of the thoughts I’ve had since this original review.

and ***Spoiler*** You’re right. Carla Jean is a goner. There’s no doubt about it. The Coens showed you everything you needed to know except the act itself. ***End Spoiler***

*SPOILERS*

About Carla Jean, I didn’t see that part as open-ended: he killed her, that’s why he checks his shoes for blood on her porch. I thought it was refreshing how much the Coen’s let the audience connect the dots here: for example, we KNOW, when Llewelyn wakes up, that he’s thinking about the one guy left alive, without an annoying voice-over needed to clarify the point. I think Joel gave the perfect description of Llewelyn’s character: “tempted by opportunity, ruled by morality, undone by both”.

This is such a hard film to get your head around… but the Coens are at the top of their game.

I absolutely see what you’re both saying about the mom and I’ll be thinking about that when I go back for viewing #4

“I was saying the Sherrif imagined Chigurh just before he walked into the motel room. Are you saying the Sherrif didn’t go in at all?”

Craig, I’m saying that once Bell checked out the room he realized that Chigurh was probably there. Because Chigurh had stared into Llewellyn’s TV screen earlier – connecting with him telepathically or existentially or something – we can see Bell doing similarly by connecting with Chirgurh on the motel set. Having done so, Bell knows what he’s up against but senses that if he leaves quietly he can survive. I’m referring to his particular survival right there in the motel room and also to survival in a broader, metaphorical sense.

Thanks to those who mentioned the shopkeeper scene, the “guns drawn” moment and others. I’d say the maturity in the former scene also shows up in the scene with the trailer park office clerk. Even though she’s quite a character, the audience is not invited to look down at her but, rather, with and for her. Her human worth comes through despite the color of her character.

SPOILERY!!:

As for Ed, I also picked up on his uneasiness. There are a bunch of limited moments that hint he is not prepared to ever face Chigurh. These include sending his deputy into Llewelyn’s trailer first (“Gun drawn?”), his distinct hesitation to re-enter the motor hotel crime scene, and his mention of the “mess that is coming” at the fracas crime scene. Before he has that conversation with the retired deputy, it’s clear that the whole business of Chigurh’s rampage is weighing heavily on him.

As for the shopkeeper scene, you’re correct: it’s definitely not played for laughs. It’s actually quite terrifying and the growing, numbing fear in the shopkeeper is palpable. Both audiences I saw the movie with were stone-silent during this scene…you could have heard a pin drop in a packed theater. You know what’s coming long before the shopkeeper fully grasps it and when he wins the coin toss, you’re desperately hoping he won’t slip up and give Chigurh a reason to change his mind.

I had the same feeling with the lock Joel as you did. For me it was kind of like the ‘blue box’ moment announcing that we’re going into Ed’s head for a minute.

Ellis is not Ed’s father, when Ed is talking about his dream at the end he refers to his father having died younger “So in a sense he was the younger man”…or something to that effect.

Part of the story for me was how Ed was not the typical Sheriff hero you’re expecting. He’s smart, but he’s old and afraid. He’s way out of his jurisdiction by the end and he only wants to protect the two young citizens of his county. The rest of it, the drugs, the mexicans, Chigurh, he doesn’t understand and he doesn’t want a part of it. But he fails even in his small mission and he feels guilty about it. This is part of why people are rejecting the ending I think. It just doesn’t fit the mold of the mainstream american thriller the Coens were so massively successful at playing in the first 3/4s of the movie.

As an old man, he tries to take consolation in his dream where his father is waiting for him by the fire….”And then I woke up.”

Damn, that ending still haunts me.

And the shopkeeper scene is the biggest example I keep thinking of when I think of this as the most ‘mature’ Coen movie. In all the other scenes, it’s played for laughs, but here the laughter is uncomfortable and it’s not directed at the shopkeeper. You end up feeling sorry and scared for the fellow, especially after you’ve seen the movie and you know the full breadth and depth of what Chigurh is capable of.

Here’s my one complaint about the movie, the only false note in the whole 2 hours: Carla Jean’s mother. She’s a cartoon that would’ve been more at home in any of their other movies but not this one.

In the book’s ending we receive a back story for the Sheriff that helps make sense of why he is so emotionally weighted down by the case. Something happened in the Sheriff’s past that left him fundamentally doubting his moral and physical courage/mettle. Particularly as measured against that of his Sheriff father. In many ways he tried to find redemption through the choices he made to be a sheriff and the kind of peace officer he sought to become. At one level his whole professional and personal life was shaped by his desire to disprove what he feared himself to be. The current case disconcerted him so much not just because of the scale and nature of the violence alone (as depicted in the film). But also because he instinctively sensed that something was coming towards him – in the form of a showdown with the perpetrator of these terrible crimes – that would test his moral and physical courage/mettle again. He feared that he would fail that test. In the book he does, in a manner of speaking. The Sheriff makes the choice to stay hidden in his car and to not pursue Chigurh upon the villain’s motel exit. It was the smart move – why senselessly sacrifice yourself? But for the Sheriff it was the test that he knew was coming and that feared he would again fail. In line with the book’s theme with respect fate and free will, one can’t change who we are. And he was always going to act in the way he did when tested in this way. This is why the Sheriff is experiencing an existential crisis by the story’s end. He can’t accept without terrible judgment that he is the person who he is. Not in the way that the psychopathic Chigurh can accept himself and others.

I understand that dispensing with the back story meant also dispensing with the self-preservation element in relation to the motel scene. But I’m curious to find that Pierre has still picked up on some hint of this dimension in the film.

So if Chigurh is indeed a spectre haunting Ed’s psyche, what does that end up saying about Ed?

In a sense, the crime scene scene is the most overt moment in the movie where the Coens are clearly manipulating our perception of reality in the film, and the one scene that strays heavily into David Lynch territory. I say that because the close-up of the punched-out lock, surrounded in blackness and glowing with a smoky light from the cruiser’s headlights, reminded me a LOT of Lynch’s visual style. A very mundane inanimate object suddenly becomes infused with terror and dread, almost a dream/nightmare-like quality to it.

They do the same thing with the wrapper unravelling during Chigurh’s conversation with the store owner earlier in the movie. Such a simple thing suddenly becomes weighted with symbolism and terror.

And is just me or does the shot of the truck on the hill remind you of Close Encounters…a lot? Love that whole setup.

One other thing…what is it with the Coen’s and quaint owners of the little rural stores? Raising Arizona, Oh Brother, and now No Country all have brief but memorable scenes where a main character interacts with the owner of a small store, the owner always behind the counter. It’s a very small, insignificant thing but it keeps happening. From “unless round is funny” to “I don’t want FOP, I’m a Dapper Dan man!” to “I need to know what the stakes are”, they keep having these little idiosyncratic moments in their films. One could argue that in a sense, Billy Bob’s Ed from Man Who Wasn’t There was an extension of this minor supporting character, this time as the unwitting star of the store(y).

I dunno, I could be reading too much into it. Maybe it was Utah.

That scene confused me, too. I couldn’t tell where Chigurh was hiding — it could’ve been a closet or the air vent. Because of the locked window, I sorta wondered whether Bell thought Chigurh might be in there but decided to leave anyway ‘cuz he knew he was a sitting duck if Chigurh actually was there. What I’m suggesting is that this might be seen as the moment where Bell realized he had become obsolete as a law enforcement officer — the catalytic moment where he decided to retire while he still had the chance. Bell’s looking at the TV screen might be interpreted as his seeing things the way Chigurh sees them — getting into his mind — and therefore convincing him to cut his losses.

Craig, your belief that it was Chigurh was there in Bell’s imagination is interesting and plausible. I do wonder, though, why the Coens would want to add any more question marks by injecting an abstraction into a screenplay they must’ve known would be confusing to audience members unfamiliar with the book.

Don’t ask me how Bell knew what Chigurh looked like in order to imagine him in the first place. I don’t think it was that literal of an imagining.

***Book Spoilers***
In the book, Chigurh is in a car in the parking lot when Bell goes into the motel room. Bell feels like he’s being watched, calls for back up, drives off and then waits to see if anyone leaves when help arrives. No one does, they search all the cars and there is no Chigurh.
****end book spoilers****

I had the same response you did to the image of Moss running with the satchel and the gun.

One other thing. The poster for the movie depicts a moment that never occurs in the movie. Llewellyn is never seen running with his rifle or the water jug and he never has the two together in the same scene. When he returns to the scene of the fracas, he carries only the .45 he takes off the Mexican under the tree. And he puts down the water bottle long before he begins running.

I’ve been seeing that poster for months, so it just jumped out at me that the moment never occured in the movie. I hate when promotional materials aren’t consistent with the film.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When Sheriff Ed enters the crime scene at the motor hotel in El Paso, we briefly see Chigurh hiding with what appears to be his rifle in a dark corner and it’s clearly implied that he’s inside the hotel room, waiting for the sheriff to enter. But after the sheriff enters, he turns on the lights in the bathroom of the small hotel room and it’s (apparently) highly unlikely that the sheriff would not have seen him were he hiding in the open closet. The sheriff sits down, notices the grate has been removed from the AC system, and fade to black.

So was Chigurh in the room? And if he was, why doesn’t he kill the sheriff? He’d have no reason not to.

It’s possible you all discussed this earlier and it was explained and I missed it because I skipped a bunch of posts to avoid the There Might Be Blood comments. If so, then just cut and paste the relevant info. This scene is really bugging me.

Otherwise, I really enjoyed the movie a second time through. I love how a good Coen brothers movie can really reward repeat viewings.

sartre: I try to avoid the book before the movie simply because, like you, I can’t divorce myself from the expectations of the written word and how I mentally interpreted it vs the film version. Which inevitably leads to the “book was better”…although not reading the book first sure wouldn’t have made DaVinci Code any less mind-numbing.

As for the ending and the Coens, I could be wrong but I’m guessing they hate having to repeatedly answer simplistic questions on these press junketts, but I always figured they don’t mind confounding audiences for better or worse. I’ve never seen them ever explain the meaning of The Man Who Wasn’t There or Barton Fink and they have always deftly deflected questions on the hat in Miller’s Crossing. I don’t think they went out of their way to make it oblique…it’s just that the themes of the movie are equally open-ended and unresolved. Their interviews do indicate a deep respect for the novel and McCarthy though.

Just my two cents.

You have a point, Pierre. Maybe Anton was being extra-cautious. But then again, the Police didn’t seem to have anything to link him to the earlier crimes.

It’s very hard for me to interpret the film’s open-ended elements without bringing to them my knowledge of the book. This is probably the only film I wish I’d seen before reading the book. Instead of being blown away by what must be a powerful story to have unfold in front of you for the first time – I was a little removed from it. I knew every thrilling aspect of characterization and plot before it came up. And for me the book’s strengths in terms of ideas and emotional resonance were greatly diluted by the film’s closing sections. As I’m sure you would anticipate Pierre, I feel that if the Coens were going to have the courage to go so far towards the book’s ending, then why didn’t they go a little further and nail the fucker? I still thought it an amazing film, but for these reasons it didn’t quite capture my heart.

Don’t die, thread! Fight, damn you, fight!

True enough, sartre. But, just to split hairs a bit, why would Anton want to stick around? He’s already wanted by the police for multiple murders — including a cop — and if I’m not mistaken he was driving a stolen pickup.

I tend to think the Coens slipped in some tipoffs to those familiar with the book, but maybe they left it vague to placate film audiences.

I read an interview with the Coens about the ending, and the reaction was “not this again.” But I really wonder if they regret doing the ending they did. And if they do, I wonder if they’d rather be MORE faithful to the book rather than less so.

maybe he enjoyed killing someone that stood up to him.even more…

he may have got thrown for a loop because he may have been getting paranoid.he re checks his mirror for kids…on a bike.

you figure with all the killing and killings he’s done.someone got to have friend that wants to even to score.and it may be hard to stop what’s coming.if you *don’t* know what’s coming….

also i wonder if wal mart is going to complain ?????

you know..they live in a trailer park…..and and L. tells carla she doesn’t have to go back to wal-mart….