No Country for Old Men

***SPOILER ALERT***

I watched this movie over the weekend and absolutely dug it. Best movie I've seen in a long time. I had seen previews for it months back and wasn't impressed enough to try and get a babysitter lined up to see it in the theater. When it won Best Picture and I heard the Coen brothers made it, I wasted no time queueing it up for rental.

First things first, if you saw the Sopranos series finale and hated the ending, you won't like No Country's any better. It's deliberately vague, open-ended, and most importantly, anti-Hollywood. A long history of trite Hollywood endings set this movie up for one that felt real even if it shed the previous hour's action and indulged its character's in some near-perilous fate and quiet self-reflection.

The movie surprised me at most every turn. I couldn't believe Llewelyn returned to the drug-deal scene. I love that moment when he wakes up in the middle of the night with a "ah hell" expression on his face and then proceeds to drive back, all so he can relieve his guilty conscience and give a dying drug-runner some water.

I was equally surprised when Llewelyn dies suddenly at the end of the movie. The Coens fooled me but good. When Llewelyn tells Anton he's making him his "special project," I had it in my head that these guys would have some spectacular showdown. Instead, the last scene we see Llewelyn alive, he's flirting with some woman who's trying to convince him to join her for some beers. Next thing you know, he's dead.

My favorite dialogue of the movie? It's at the very end, when Anton appears in Carla Jean's house just as she's returned from her mother's funeral. She knows he's there to kill her. Yet she calmly sits down and talks with him. At one point she says, "You don't have to do this." Anton almost laughs and says, "People always say the same thing."

"What do they say," asks Carla Jean.

"They say, 'You don't have to do this.'

"You don't."

"Ok."

At which points Anton launches into his trademark snare of flipping a coin and asking his victim to call it. He never explicity says what for. A store clerk he flips a coin for earlier in the movie even asks what he stands to win. Anton only responds with "everything." The store clerk called it right. Carla Jean didn't.

The film bears something in common with an earlier Coen brother's masterpiece, Fargo. Similarly to how they showed the culture of Minnesota residents, the Coens captured the people of East Texas. I laughed when Llewelyn tries to get additional hotel room adjacent to the first. The elderly desk clerk hassles him about it though, pointing out the room he wants has a double bed and he's only one person. I'm sure the people of East Texas will disagree with their depiction in the movie. I know the residents of eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota got really pissed off about Fargo (if you meet or know someone from that region, ask them if that's really how people talk in Minnesota and then brace yourself for a minutes-long diatribe). But you know there's a grain of truth in both movies. If there weren't, I doubt anyone would get much riled up.

The similarity between the two movies really stops there however. Where Fargo was darkly funny, No Country is sober and serious. Fargo is a great example of a black comedy; I laughed and laughed when Sam Busemi got stuffed into that wood chipper. I was mostly horrified when Anton pulled that random man off the side of the road and killed him with a captive bolt pistol. I can't explain why I fine one to be sickeningly funny, the other not.

I think that's the way the Coens meant it to be.