Rarely will you see a good story SAVAGED to bits with such skill and cleverness

Rating: 5/10 (28 December 2007)

The woman three rows behind me gave the most pithy review of this movie I ever heard as the credits began to roll: She said "Ugh!!" The theme of this movie is that life is not a movie. There is no justice (poetic or otherwise) that ensures every bad act will be repaid in kind. Life does not foreshadow: Just because a revolver is placed on a table, does not mean it will ever be fired, and a villain declaring that a bag will be placed under his feet or a protagonist declaring that he will kill a villain does not mean those things ever happen. In life, stories are not solved. They go on and on become part of other stories.
Okay. But "No Country For Old Men" is not Life. It is a movie. The screenwriter is supposed to imitate life. But he must ride heard over that imitation to ensure that he produces a satisfying work of art. He must play a lawman. He cannot, as Tommy Lee Jones does, retire from his job and say "It's just too much for me." We get used to narratives making promises to the audience. In this movie, the only character that "keeps his promises" that way is a madman. Everyone in the movie recognizes him immediately as a madman. But that only proves that the SCREENWRITER was a madman. It does not mean that is madness for a storyteller to keep his narrative promises.
All these little references show that the Coen Brothers knew what they were doing. They knew darn well that they were committing a dirty little murder against this story. That is why they killed the protagonist off screen...it kept the audience "on the hook", waiting for the movie to reveal "the turn" where the protagonist was shown NOT to be dead and all the promises were actually kept. Had they killed him on screen, they knew most of the audience would have given up on the story entirely.
This movie shows the skill of the Coen Brothers as storytellers. That is what makes this profoundly *unsatisfying* movie, so frustrating. They didn't destroy the end of this movie as bumbling hacks. They committed murder by performing an autopsy on a living subject.