Interesting but disappearing up its own arse

Rating: 3/10 (7 January 2011)

Well, the Coens always make "interesting" films and I'd have to say this is no exception. They make very good vignettes I think, and some scenes in this film make nice little stand-alone pieces of cinema but, overall, they don't give a damn about the film as a whole. It has been put together clumsily and without feeling. The characters are essentially 2D, the plot has big holes in it and many plot lines, big and small, just peter out or are not resolved. Stupid things like the hero deliberately leaving his car half-a-mile away from the death scene in a pitch-black desert and walking the rest of the way merely so the next scene with the bad guys can take place. The killer seen waiting in the motel room for the sheriff to create tension but then, oh, he isn't because it was, what? a flashback? the sheriff's imagination? a cinematic artifice? The philosophizing of the characters, especially the sheriff, is supposed to be deep and meaningful I guess but is more like Monty Python dialogue. Following the hero intensely and then having his final scene off-camera may be 'clever' film-making but it is deeply unsatisfying. It is very contrived, especially they way they flag-wave it as an 'intellectual' film but not answering any questions the viewer may have such as what happened to the money, what happened to the wife, what happened to the bad guy, etc.. Scene-after-scene, from beginning to end, was deliberately left without a conclusion; it became tiring after a while and you begin to think "why am I watching this scene? I know there isn't going to be an ending or any kind of resolution or denouement". Not a good film for popcorn-eaters but an interesting artifice for auteur geeks perhaps