Respect, yes; love, no.

Rating: 7/10 (16 May 2009)

The Coens' scattershot approach to film making means that you never know what's coming next: good comedy, bad comedy, torpid thrillers, electrifying, genre-busting thrillers or perfect, ice-cold artworks like No Country for Old Men.
In many ways it's a work that reminds me of Cronenburg's A History of Violence in its subject matter, its emphasis on the arbitrary, inexplicable nature of existence and its deliberate withholding of information from the viewer.
And it's this last point, the withholding of information, that truly reveals the Coens' greatness. In his recent book How Fiction Works, James Wood states that this is exactly the strategy that Shakespeare uses to raise his plays above the level of other revenge tragedies. Essentially it is because we don't know why Lear and Othello and the rest do it that they remain compelling figures.
In No Country, we are also faced with characters who seem to have the word "INSCRUTABLE" written on their foreheads. And not only that, these characters are then put into situations that are deliberately withheld from us - the shootout that precedes the film, the shootout at the El Paso motel, the conclusion of Xavier Badem's visit to Kelly MacDonald at the film's end.
Lesser artists would have wanted to tie up the loose ends and resolved all the open questions, but the Coens, while perhaps not of Shakespearean vintage, honour the tradition of serious film-making in which the ending staying open, the threads hang, and we hang too, wondering when we will finally fall.
Which doesn't necessarily make for a feel-good movie. And the film's most sympathetic characters are not treated kindly: Llewelyn Moss is shot off-screen and found dead, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell fizzles out of his police role, broken by what he has seen, and what happens to Carla Jean Moss remains unclear.
There has always been an icy streak in the Coens' films, from Blood Simple to Fargo, to the Man Who Wasn't There. You could say that they're like boys pulling wings off flies just to see what will happen. And then they pull off another one and another one...
Despite these doubts there's no denying the brilliance of the work. You may not like it particularly, but you've got to respect it.
However, if you're looking for a film that packs as visceral punch while also speaking to the heart, go and see Let There Be Blood.