Well made, but why?

Rating: 7/10 (22 January 2008)

There's no doubting the skill with which this film was made, and if its intention is to send jolts through the audience at frequent intervals, it achieves it with ease.
However I question whether it's really as good as it's cracked up to be. There seem to me to be two fairly fundamental weaknesses.
The first is structural. The first half or two thirds of the film are a battle between two men: the likable, basically honest, self-reliant working class good guy, Josh Brolin, and the psychopathic, brutally efficient, almost superhuman bad guy, Javier Bardem. At this stage Tommy Lee Jones appears to be the character who is going to fix everything up in the end: the bad guy will die, the good guy will live, the wicked drug lords will be cleaned up and put away by Tommy Lee, and somehow the good guy will get to keep the money (or most of it). Everything is progressing very satisfactorily along this path until suddenly the good guy disappears from the equation, and it doesn't seem to be by the psychopathic bad guy, but instead by some of the wicked drug gang, who have hitherto done nothing except kill each other at the beginning and then disappear entirely from the film.
From then on the film doesn't really seem to know where to go.
Woody Harrelson in the meantime has very memorably appeared, making it seems as if there were going to be some kind of variation on the theme with him as an equally tough but slightly less lunatic and much more likable executioner battling it out with Javier Bardem; but Woody really doesn't get to do anything except sweat in a chair after he gets very easily taken by Javier. So much for the battle.
After Josh Brolin's exit, what does Tommy Lee Jones do? He retires. This is the cue for a series of scenes memorable in themselves, but leading absolutely nowhere. There's Tommy Lee's meeting with the old man in the wheelchair; there's the confrontation between Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin's wife; there's the motor accident complete with gory medical self- treatment by Javier Bardem; there's Tommy Lee's recounting of his dreams to his wife. Somewhere in the mix is the fat sheriff who bewails to Tommy Lee Jones the loss of moral standards in modern civilization; he's so fat and such a redneck that it's hard to know whether he's intended to be serious or comic relief.
So frankly, it's all a bit of a mess. It's not a satisfactory hunter vs prey film, which is what it appears to be for the majority of the playing time. With the kind of central flaws that this film has, there's hardly any point in mentioning more minor things, like the way there's always a convenient car passing when Josh Brolin needs a ride in a hurry, but two men can have a full-scale shootout in the middle of town, including the standard shooting at the truck cabin bit, without attracting anybody's attention, or the way a man can stand on a fence covered in blood and throw a case full of money over a fence also without attracting attention, or how the case can lie there for days, clearly visible from the street, without being discovered. If the basic plot were better structured, those sorts of things would be minor quibbles, but as it is, they really just serve as a kind of accompaniment or side-dish to the major flaws.
My second major problem is with the philosophy of the film. Its staging, right from the outset, tells us that while we are watching an action film, it's going to be a film with a point. Then, when we get to the end, particularly with the discussion between Tommy Lee and the old man, and the redneck sheriff, and Tommy Lee's dream, not to mention the coin-tossing scenes and Javier Bardem's utterly random car crash, it looks as if some great big point is being made. But what is that point? That society is in decay? That violent death is random and unavoidable? That we may as well give up the fight against evil because it's a hopeless cause? That we shouldn't give up that fight? That Javier Bardem is an indestructible angel of death?
God only knows. I certainly don't.
So those are the problems I have with the film. There's also a reason why I positively dislike it. Insofar as there's a philosophical or moral point being made by the film, it appears to involve some condemnation of the violence and lawlessness that seem to be overtaking society. In other words, the film seems to be saying that mindless, psychopathic killing is something to be condemned. However at the same time, the body count in this film is absolutely astronomical, and at least a dozen of the killings are shown in close, explicit detail. To be blunt, the Coens wallow in the gore. I don't mind a good old blood-fest, and I don't even mind it if it's accompanied by a bit of moralising about how bad all the violence is; with that sort of film, we know that the moralising is just for show, and we judge the film purely as a blood-fest. But I do mind it when film-makers as intelligent and skillful as the Coens, with the backing of truckloads of Hollywood mainstream money, make a big deal out of the philosophising and act as if they truly mean it, while all the time they are exploiting the gore-fest for all it is worth.