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No Country for Old Men -- 7/8ths of a great movie

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by TigerVols, Nov 6, 2007.

  1. Simon_Cowbell

    Simon_Cowbell Active Member

    Chigger gets under the skin
     
  2. STLIrish

    STLIrish Active Member

    Finally saw this yesterday. Great movie.
    And personally, I loved the ending, with Jones essentially finally admitting that he can't stop the evil out there, the way they could in the old stories when the sheriff didn't even need to carry a gun.
    And, yes, DD, "carrying the fire" is a direct echo of The Road. Did McCarthy use that line in the book? I read No Country a while back, don't own a copy and can't remember, but I assume he did.
    I was a bit thrown, though, by Chigurh's car accident. What was that supposed to be saying? Just that not even fate can stop evil?
    Also, why didn't he have his air gun when he left the wife's house?
    And I guess we do never find out what happens to the money, but the movie wasn't really about that, then, was it?
     
  3. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    STL, the monologue Tommy Lee Jones gives at the very end is pretty much word-for-word from the book. Here's how McCarthy says it at the end of the book. Now that I read over it again, I'm convinced that "carrying the fire" is abosolutely echoed in The Road.

    I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past and he kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. I then I woke up.
     
  4. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    Thought I would give this thread a bump now that NCFOM won Best Picture.


    We'll ask the most important question once again: Does the ending work for you?

    Even though I've stated why it does work for me, I'm willing to concede that I might feel differently had I not read the book.
     
  5. John

    John Well-Known Member

    It works for me but, like Double Down, I read the book.
     
  6. Buck

    Buck Well-Known Member

    I haven't read the book, and the ending is perfect.
     
  7. Dedo

    Dedo Member

    Ditto.

    I posted something similar to this earlier in the thread, but I'll ask again -- for the people who didn't like the ending, what did you want to happen? What else was there to say? What loose ends needed to be tied?

    I'm not trying to be a wine-sipping elitist dick about this. I'm actually curious.
     
  8. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    I don't really want to speak for those who didn't like the ending, but I had a conversation with a friend about the film and he said, even though he knew it wasn't going to be a suspense film with a tidy resolution, he still felt himself, in the theater, wishing that it was. We're trained, by years and years of movie watching, to be entertained by these kinds of scenarios. He said it's not even a feeling of wanting the good guy to win, and for the bad guy to be caught. It's more that we're raised to expect a resolution. A pay off. And we want to see it happen. In literature, we have more time to process the fact that the story is more about the nature of good and evil. And in a book, if you don't get something, you can go back and read it again until it makes sense. In a movie theater, we want to be entertained. I do think it's something that will hold up better and better over the years, but I think a lot of people left the theater bewildered because:

    1. They expected something else.

    2. By the time they realized it was something different, it was too late to go back and digest it as something other than a thriller. The movie was over. The character you most identify with is dead, and you didn't even see it on screen.

    Not everyone thinks it works. Slate's Dana Stevens, who is my favorite movie critic, thought the film was way overpraised. (She loved There Will Be Blood.)
     
  9. Steak Snabler

    Steak Snabler Well-Known Member

    I was much more surprised/dismayed that Brolin's death took place off screen than I was about the ending.

    Just figured it was the Coen brothers fuckin' with us in both cases, but as some have said, the book ended that way, too (haven't read it, but hope to get around to it at some point).
     
  10. novelist_wannabe

    novelist_wannabe Well-Known Member

    I came to this thread hoping to gain some insight, and I've concluded that as best pictures go, if I have to come here for insight it failed on some level. I rented it today and frankly, I didn't get it. It felt like a Quentin Tarantino flick to me.
     
  11. ArnoldBabar

    ArnoldBabar Active Member

    Yeah, me too. They got us heavily invested in that cat-and-mouse story and just yanked it away with no satisfaction. That was my one real issue with the film.

    I think the problem (or I should probably write it as "problem," because I'm not sure it really is one) about the ending is that much of the film was built and flowed like a traditional thriller, so we expected a more traditional resolution. There are movies you go to where you know it could well end with a soliloquy by one of the characters. This didn't feel like one, so it caught people by surprise.
     
  12. I'll ask what I asked on the other thread, when I didn't realize one already existed:

    If it had just ended with Anton limping away, would you have been more satisfied than having the last scene after that?
     
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