Fatally flawed- possible spoiler

Rating: 7/10 (29 January 2008)

A perfect, beautiful flick for 4/5ths of its runtime. No Country... marks the time (even moreso than Fargo did) when the Coens stopped being cartoonish and let all of the pretty, flamboyant paint that represents most of their stuff seep in like woodstain. And it is totally satisfying to see it... Then they follow the written narrative off of a friggin' cliff.
This thing goes to show the dangers of a movie trying to trace the lines of a book too carefully. The film's ending may work in print, and I actually like stories that sort of zig off course and cause me to wonder about what I've actually been reading to that point. Raymond Carver does that very well. The same can't be said for movies, however. A film is first and foremost a visual experience, and the brain is not going to (at least mine won't) forgive a flick when, in this case, the movie magically turns from a very VERY good suspense thriller into some sort of existential manifesto on greed and man's place in the order of things by way of a surgically removed climax. It is just too jarring a change in the world of sound and vision to pull this off. There are limitations to the form, and the ending of No Country... shows one of them.