coen-brothers

Spoilers. This is a difficult movie. I laughed pretty hard through a lot of it, except where I was wincing. Sympathetic wincing, not angry wincing. The Coens are not in the business of making movies that are easy to figure out, and they don’t do open access. This is like that. A lot of the criticism of this movie revolves around how unlikeable the characters are. Filmspotting talked about the Coen tendency to mock stupid characters. There’s no doubt that most of the protagonists are dumb and/or cold and/or malicious, but I don’t think I can write the movie off as an exercise in mockery. ...

I saw No Country for Old Men weeks ago, and it’s taken me this long to come to grips with it; or to at least find an entrance point for discussion that made sense to me. I spent a while musing on the nihilistic nature of the movie. My first draft of this noted “family counts for nothing except danger, and the monsters are not destined for jail time.” But that’s not true. I’ve seen nihilistic movies. A truly nihilistic movie ignores consequences; the crop of Tarantino/Besson-influenced movies come far closer to nihilism than No Country for Old Men. Consider Snatch, in which the protagonists are pretty completely immoral but walk free at the end. I liked Snatch but there’s about zero morality in the whole thing. ...