Aimless Directors Leave Plot Threadbare

Rating: 1/10 (5 July 2008)

The following is a semi-spoiler...A hunter named Moss (Josh Brolin) in the Texas desert discovers a drug deal gone bad and decides to try and keep the $2Million cash he finds, which as expected, entangles him in the mess of those who want to recover the money. Seems like a promising story, except that, while suspenseful, it veers sideways into meaningless subplots/characters and gratuitous murder scenes--the point was amply made that Chigurh (Javier Bardem) was a psychopathic killer, so I suppose the Coen brothers were using additional killings as filler material. The anti-climactic conclusion of the story amounts to nothing other than the retiring sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) reflecting that this is no country for old men like himself (i.e., times have changed, and he needs to pass the torch, but to no one revealed--he's beaten and is giving up--The End). Some say this is an artsy "realism". Umm, no. Reality would have involved more police/SWAT, etc. and not have happened in apparent isolation, would not be so stylized, and it would have been more conclusive (i.e., things would not end well for Chigurh). As for the movie's artistry, I'll just say that anything passes for "art" these days, with enough hype behind it. Those audience members titillated by Chigurh's cold-blooded murders of innocent bystanders have their own issues. This is not a philosophical film about fate (but I'll address fan boys' assertions below), so please don't try to elevate it beyond bloodsport and greed and those caught in their path. The overall tone of the film suggests terror, gloom, and helplessness and falls off with a lack of resolution, which simply becomes tiresome. There is no real point to this story. Apparently, while very dark, the novel was much better and less disjointed and incomplete--bad editing on the directors' part. Jung and Danusha make good criticisms of this pretentious drivel. Don't waste your money or your time on this film, which belongs in the trash heap. Laughably bad comic-book antics.
To understand why Coen brothers films, such as Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and No Country for Old Men, resonate with many members of the Academy and some audience members, start by browsing Wikipedia for nihilism, post-modernism and deconstruction-ism, which all begin with elitism and moral relativism and employ sophistry to further muddy the water. Methods used by these self-crowned elitists include undermining common values by attacking the words used in their reasoning, by dissecting words, in isolation, like the implied "fate" or "free will" in this story, and not in their proper context--check definitions of a word in the Oxford English Dictionary, and you'll see that language is necessarily contextual. In essence, the "common man" (or average American, in this case) and his morality is regarded as no better than cattle (see Chigurh's heartless execution of innocents with a slaughterhouse piston, and the stylized attention given by the movie's directors to the executions) (also see how they similarly dehumanize normal people by using caricatures in Fargo and O Brother--the directors apparently sneer down upon average Americans, given their movie choices and screen writing, direction and editing). In No Country, Chigurh is challenged at the end by Moss' wife, who insists that the coin toss is not a matter of fate, but rather that it is Chigurh's decision to use the coin toss that determines whether he shoots her or not. He understands this perfectly well, but rejects this because it spoils his executioner's game, using sophism (a diversion/non s e q u i t o r) to explain that the coin arrived there the same way he did--sorry, but he had the choice to come there, and the coin did not. Dumb argument (illogical, but convenient for the executioner). O Brother, Where Art Thy Brain? People may not control every outcome (there are external factors, of course), but an individual's outcomes are largely determined by an individual's choices.
A quick Google search for articles on how violence is used in films and Hollywood's and elitists' double-standard for the appropriateness of violence yielded this: http://stkarnick.com/blog2/2008/02/ (add the following to the web address) the_violent_hypocrisy_of_mains.html
Raise your standards for entertainment. You'll be glad you did.