This latest film by the Coen brothers lives up to expectations, offering to eager fans a visually-arresting, intriguing thriller that manages to be both suspenseful and thoughtful. Of course, some of the credit should go to Cormac MacCarthy, on whose novel the screenplay is based. Not having read the book myself, I now feel inspired to go away and read something by this author; surely the sign of a good film, that it returns us to literature, the older art-form.
Without giving too much away, the plot centres around the attempt by Llewelyn Moss, a backwoods welder, to escape the clutches of a ruthless assassin with his life and, if possible, the fortune he innocently came across. The action starts when Llewelyn stumbles across the corpse-strewn scene of a shoot-out and a truck-load of notes. Llewelyn wins our sympathy by his actions as well as by the affectionate bond that links him and his wife. To a large extent, it is the likeableness of this central character that stops the film from becoming too dispiriting, in spite of the extreme violence of some scenes and the nihilism that is displayed by the villain. The villain's mechanically ruthless behaviour seems to go beyond mere criminality and to be motivated by a deterministic philosophy of life that has been hard-won. On many occasions, he tosses a coin (or invites his victims to toss a coin) to decide whether he should let someone live or die, a detail that reminded me of the film adaptation of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Although some might say that the philosophical elements of the Coen brothers' film are pretentious, I would disagree: they add interest and an almost wistful, elegiac atmosphere. The end of the film is a good example of this: it closes ambiguously with the good cop - who's been chasing the killer throughout, but is now retired - recounting a dream to his wife. The meaning of the dream is not entirely clear but seems to hint at the cop's feeling that his career has been a mission to follow in his father's footsteps and combat evil in the world. This takes us back to the beginning of the film, which opened with a voiceover by the same cop describing how hard it could be to defend law and order in that county. The circularity of the film's structure is apt, given the theme of fate and inevitability running throughout.
The best features of the film are the dialogue (it reminded me in this respect of Pulp Fiction, but this is definitely slow-motion Tarantino) and the cinematography. The atmospheric landscape shots, panning across eerie desert scenery, were haunting. As usual in a Coen brothers film, there was also a quirky humour that added zest. The short snatches of dialogue between the killer and random (usually thick-witted) hapless shop attendants or concierges exemplified this humour best. Although the violence seemed a little over-the-top in places, this is no ordinary shocker.
