A fresh, and somewhat experimental, comeback

Rating: 10/10 (19 November 2007)

Alright, so here's the deal: The Coens often work with plots involving bungled crimes that are the inevitable conclusion of many different and sometimes perverse personalities' decision making processes. This time the crime happens before the plot occurs, and the story is slightly post-apocalyptic: what has happened has already happened and its up to the characters that manage to survive to pick up the pieces. It's dark (everyone in the movie either dies or gives up), and it's also really good.
This movie I compare to being slowly pressed in the gut with a knife until it ends, at which point you realize you've just been hit by a train you didn't see coming. This approach is uncanny and uncomfortable, and the Coens also risk a lot by leaving many real plot elements up in the air and letting the audience figure stuff out for themselves. This approach, though it's been done many times before, has a fresh use in their movie, but it's still risky because to this day audiences still have problems with it. Lucky for the Coens, they're well used to film-making and have the skill and narrative powers necessary to make it work despite (or perhaps literally in spite of) audience expectations.
This movie is also somewhat philosophical, but I haven't yet really seen that as part of a comment that the Coens are making, but merely a transliteration of McCarthy's book. Apparently the filmmakers stuck very close to the story and dialog of the book, and no matter my tendency to prefer to read texts as singular and separate, my familiarity with the Coen brothers tells me that they took up the adaptation much more as a matter of telling the story and making the characters than keeping with the message of Ed Tom Bell's ruminations. In fact, they use his speech at the beginning and end to lend more understanding to the decisions made than the development of a fate vs. free will theme (one that I think is getting a lot of attention, which may in fact become derogatory to people's enjoyment of this film as it is). To me, it's more important that Javier Bardem's character both bleeds evil and is also pitiable and careworn than that Tommy Lee Jones says Smart Things (tm).
I do think, however, that this is the best film that's been released so far this year, and a great return of the Coen brothers from their slump of the past two films (the worst of which can be said that they were merely pretty good instead of utterly fantastic).
--PolarisDiB