Coen's most mature masterpiece!

Rating: 10/10 (4 January 2008)

It's almost like, after all their films the Coen brothers have finally had their "Saving Private Ryan". This film has none of the illusions of youth present in all of their previous work.
The characters make up the story, the plot is almost irrelevant. Each character has a small story to tell, and the plot just moves along between these little stories. The actors playing each character do a near perfect job. Not any one stand-out performance amongst such great performances.
The bitterness, joy, sorrow, greed, love, hope, despair in the lives of these people give way to the sort of randomness that life brings all of us. Everything that defines our journey left up to a coin toss. I can't stress how much this film showcases that life and death is often left to chance and luck.
Jim Jarmusch has been doing these kind of films for years, hopefully now those films will start to resonate with audiences as well as this film has. Somewhere along the way filmmakers decided that the story mattered more than the characters. Most of those filmmakers are wrong.
Maturity comes at a cost, however. The humor and absurdity so apparent in previous Coen films is almost completely gone. What's left is tragedy on a Shakespearen level. Don't expect a "Fargo" or "Raising Arizona". You won't feel good after the movie's over. There is no sense that justice is done and that "good" prevailed over "evil".
I've seen thousands of films, and I now have a new entry into my top ten. Go see this film, buy/rent the DVD. You will be in awe of this masterly crafted film.