No Country for Old Men

I'm sorry, friendo, but I think less of this movie now than when I first saw it. It's okay, but there's nothing new or risky about it. And I don't buy the argument that the movie is faithful to the book. If that's the case, then there are failings in the book too. The movie seems to be about how little life is worth, but I found it more enjoyable and enriching to watch "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," a film about how much life is worth. Take the beginning, when Tommy Lee Jones muses on what it would take to understand a killer: "A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, 'Okay, I'll be part of this world.'" But the existential exploration and moral quandary this promises never comes to fruition. We don't see enough of Jones to see how he has put his soul at hazard.

I still don't like the ending. The sheriff talks to some guy named Ellis who we've never seen before; then we see Chigurh go on, same as ever, although with the parallelism of asking for someone's shirt when he's bloody, like Moss on his way to Mexico; and then Sheriff Ed Tom recollects his dreams of his dad, one about him riding through the pass in the mountains with his dad, his dad rides ahead to light a fire, and he knows "whenever I got there, he'd be there. And then I woke up." If we're not even going to see the climax, we should at least see a decent ending, and we don't.