"No Country for Old Men" is many things, but it's not a complete film.

Rating: 5/10 (21 August 2008)

It's beautiful to look at. It has a lot of intelligence on display. But unfortunately, it just doesn't come together. I have no doubt this is exactly the film the Coens intended to make, and you could certainly mistake this for a profound and complete film, but it has one crucial problem: everything about it is completely disjointed.
The shots themselves are framed so beautifully that each one is a portrait, but the problem is that they don't cut together well at all. There's seldom a sense of place; characters exist largely in vacuums, either occupying a frame whose background is out of focus or is otherwise somehow confined.
Scenes have the same problem, as do character motivations and continuity, and I suspect this all stems from the film being an adaptation of a novel. The people I watched the film with were constantly impressed by the intelligence and cunning shown by the characters in the film, but the problem is that there are so many gaps that their foresight borders on precognition. People are places simply because the script says so. They cross paths because the script says so.
The film ultimately feels like a distillation of all the pieces we really like about films. The Coen brothers have burned away the "excess," leaving us with pure scenes and pure shots. The problem is that in the process, what's been burned away are the threads the connect these things and make an experience feel complete.
The ending is more or less what one would expect from the disjointed film that precedes it, but it feels like an exclamation point placed on the film's central problem: how arbitrary the whole thing feels as a result of its lack of cohesion. The ending is fairly arbitrary but perhaps most damningly, is the kind of hackneyed stuff Academy awards are made of.
It's enjoyable to watch, but like so many Academy sweethearts, "No Country for Old Men" falls apart under scrutiny.