Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

No Country For Old Men
Landmark E Street Theater
Washington, DC
35mm
11/9/07

First, a note on moviegoers. At movies like this there's almost always some asshole at the end who has to announce to the crowd that he just didn't get it. Then there's the girl who had no idea what she was getting into who got dragged in by boyfriend, husband, etc. She's the one who goes "awwww" every time a puppy or kitten shows up on screen and gets audibly upset when something bad happens to said animal. She was sitting next to me tonight. And I'm sorry, but if you've just been chased across the desert and had a pit bull sicced on you that is about to rip your throat out and you have a gun and the ability to use it... you shoot the fucker. You shoot it dead. You do not go "awwww."

So, how's the movie then? It's great. It's the best thing the Coens have done in years. Possibly the best thing they've ever done. It's a note-perfect adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel and at the same time definitely a Coen Brothers movie. Tonally it's closest to Fargo, but it's got the trademark weird haircuts, satchels full of cash, big men of power behind big desk, and so on, and so forth. And they're all from the novel.

The novel is probably the best thing I've read this year. It's brutal and gruesome. The movie is not quite as violent as the book. In particular, there's a death in the novel that sticks with me. There's half a hand held up with half a head behind it and blood and brains splattered on the wall behind. In the film it happens off screen and it's no less effective.

Which is one of the things that's so brilliant about the film. It follows the book nearly word for word (There's a few excisions and a couple of changes, but nothing major) and having read the book I knew exactly what was going to happen in any given scene. And it's still intense. There's a sequence that begins in a hotel that's one of the most perfectly constructed suspense scenes I've ever seen.

And having read the book I was ready for it to veer into anticlimax in the last third of the movie. The end of the book, the long conversation between the Sheriff and his cousin (who we've never seen before) struck me as being completely wrong. But McCarthy knows what he's doing and so do the Coens and the last scenes with the Sheriff cap the story perfectly. If you listen to him through the story he spends most of the time wearily regretting how times have changed and how he cannot understand the new ways the world is slipping into senseless violence. And then he's told at the end. This isn't new. The world has always been this way. It doesn't change.

There's going to be a lot of argument about the last scene and the Sheriff's last speech. It seems similar to the coda to Blood Meridian and I can't recall if it's actually in the book. It's odd and doesn't quite seem to fit. But to me it's simple. It tells us we haven't just been watching a chase movie, or a crime movie about a drug deal gone wrong. We have been watching myth.