Socks for Christmas

Rating: Null/10 (28 November 2007)

Or Kissing your Cousin. Use whichever cliché best describes the final thirty minutes of this film. Some of the most deflating and frustrating minutes you will have on this earth. But let's start at the beginning so you understand why.
No Country for Old Men is Set-up as a taut, B-movie thriller with a mad man on the loose trying to track down his stolen money from a guy way in over his head. The killer Cigurgh even has a gimmicky way of getting into people's houses and a cool gun. That it aspires to so much more in its first 3/4 is a true testament to the style and wit the Coens display when they get behind a project. The problem is that the excitement and promise of a final showdown is put aside literally in order to make some points about world weariness. According to a friend who read the original book -that's how the novel ended too. Yet after watching the mind-blowingly awesome set-up, you wish the Coens would have realized what their movie needed and not what the novel demanded they do. Because it wasn't just a matter of choosing the ending, the problem lies in how it was executed and how they integrated switching narrative perspectives.
What starts as a thriller eventually becomes a campfire story about the boogeyman and the people too tired and too world weary to stop him.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. But there are far worse things to be than daring and ambitious. And nothing the movie does wrong is a deal breaker. I still recommend it.
No one but the Coens can make a candy wrapper look so menacing.