No Country For Old Men

So late? Can anyone still care about this film? Are there really people who need a "review" of this venerable, perhaps already-dated film?

Because I try to see every movie the week it comes out, these were my questions when I went to see No Country for Old Men a second time. (My first viewing of the movie predates this blog--has it been so long?) Surprisingly, the show was nearly sold-out, and my cavalier attitude ("The theater will be empty!") resulted in some crappy seats. Anyways, enough about that, but I am as surprised as you are that some people wait more than a month to see the best-reviewed movie of the year. And in New York! Well, as Derek pointed out, maybe they were all re-watching it, too. Let's pretend that's true. Enough throat-clearing.

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No Country for Old Men:
*is a period piece
*does not make me want to read the novel it is based on
*has no score/soundtrack
*contains gut-turning violence
*improves on second viewing
*is simultaneously an action film (a la The Terminator) and a genuinely philosophical thought-piece

All of that deserves a lot of print, especially the first two bullets, but the only interesting question for me right now is,  is this a better film than There Will Be Blood? For many viewers, this will come down to the endings. No Country ends with Tommy Lee Jones, who is underutilized through most of the film, relating a very poignant dream about his father. It is an abrupt ending, though I'm not sure why, because it is such a classic "modernist" ending. There Will Be Blood's ending alienated many viewers, because it neither concludes the story happily, nor gives a precis of its "meaning," nor shows character growth, and is petty, brutal, and tonally abstruse. 

One has to ask, how would we feel about Oedipus' freak-out at the end of Oedipus Rex, on a movie screen today? Or, worse--Oedipus at Colonus? If we don't think about "story," and focus on...affect? irony? catharsis-- There Will Be Blood ends much better than it first seems. Compare the final shot of the Godfather, Part 2: the flashback to the complete family around the dinner table---that is not "part of the story," you see? Not that the film succeeds at the high level of those masterpieces, but I think this is the logic.

No Country For Old Men, however, is philosophically more troubling, and its refusal to take itself as seriously as There Will Be Blood lets the dialogue breathe more--it is less didactic. If the monster in There Will Be Blood dooms himself, there is no satisfaction in No Country that we are walking out of the theater into a safer world than that onscreen. As a defunct blog remarks, "this is the real virtuoso shit." That could be said for both films, but No Country for Old Men is positively Shakespearean, while There Will Be Blood is ultimately only Faulknerish. If PT Anderson wants us to "unblinkingly" observe this nightmare life, the Coen brothers have put more thought into their "world." And, I think it bears saying, our world.