What No Country for Old Men means to me

Rating: 10/10 (28 January 2008)

I don't mean to seem condescending by explaining this movie, but it bothered me how bothered people were over it.
I think this film can mostly be explained by the dream the sheriff had in the end. The dream about riding at night with his father. He mentioned that he was 20 yrs older than the age at which his father died. In the dream his father rode ahead of him and he imagined that his father would be setting up camp for them somewhere in the distance. The point is that we all expect our future to happen a certain way and we are comforted knowing this. The fact is the future hasn't happened yet and its stranger than you can ever imagine. The world had turned into something the sheriff didn't recognize or expect and he felt lost in it. When he is speaking with the man in the wheelchair who had been shot while on duty, the man in the wheelchair says something to the effect,"you try hard to get back what you lost or what's been taken from you that while your busy worrying about it you lose so much more". He goes on to tell a story about their uncle that was killed on his own porch maybe 50 years in the past. The point of his story is not that the world is an awful place, but that it didn't just change before the sheriff's eyes, or despite him or because of him and that it is egocentric to believe so. Its about growing old. Hence the title. The Sheriff is the protagonist. Its quite beautiful actually. Assign whatever symbolism you want to the rest of the characters.
It makes perfect sense to me.