No movie for the incurious

There are movies that are so bad, they’re good (Joey Gosiengfiao’s Temptation Island), and movies that are so bad, they’re just bad (the Madonna project, Swept Away). There are movies that you like so much, you feel compelled to drag everyone you know to the cinema (Superbad). Then there are movies that take up residence in your head and start moving the furniture around. They disrupt your peace by leaving too many questions unanswered, and you’re not even sure you liked them in the first place.

Such movies require serious discussion, preferably with food.

We’d already had a good Greek dinner before the movie, but after seeing No Country for Old Men, we needed a pre-midnight snack to clear our heads.

WARNING: This column contains spoilers.

“I enjoyed it very much,” I said, “But I don’t know about liking it. I found it exciting and disturbing.” No Country for Old Men is Joel and Ethan Coen’s finely-crafted, much-lauded adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel. The story is quite simple and straightforward. It is Texas in the early 1980s. A Vietnam vet named Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is out hunting when he discovers the scene of a terrible crime. The corpses of unknown Mexicans and their dog, the drugs in the back of a pickup truck, and a satchel containing two million dollars all point to a drug deal gone wrong.

Moss takes the money home to his trailer. Before long someone comes looking for it. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a ruthless killer with a pageboy haircut that only makes him scarier, slaughters everyone who gets in the way of his pursuit. Moss goes on the run, and turns out to be a very resourceful man — he’s the closest thing to a hero this movie has. Meanwhile, the Sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) tries, but not very hard, to find Moss before Chigurh does. So the story is basically about a manhunt featuring an implacable Terminator-like hunter toting some overly conspicuous weapons (You’ll have to see them for yourself). Initially it looks like a thriller.

Then, it chucks the thriller idea out the window. There is almost no music. The killer does not bother to conceal the fact that he is a killer: he strides down the street carrying his gun for all to see. The Coens never bestir themselves to speed up the action: it proceeds slowly and excruciatingly. Close attention is paid to the preparations of the hunter and the hunted. “The scene between Chigurh and the storekeeper was so tense, I stopped breathing,” said Ernie.

My main problem with No Country was that the way it built up Moss as a worthy adversary (Look away now! Spoiler!), makes the audience expect a final confrontation between Moss and Chigurh, and then, pffft. “That’s unfair,” I said, “Leading us on and then leaving us in the lurch.”

“I think the filmmakers are saying, ‘We’re not interested in what becomes of Moss,’” Telly said. “This is not his story.”

“Then whose story is it?” Ernie asked.

“Nobody’s,” Telly replied. “They make us expect something, and then they dash our expectations. We expect a grand narrative, but there is none.”

“What I want to know is, Did Chigurh kill the wife, or didn’t he?” Ernie asked.

“You know how in the scene with Carson (Woody Harrelson) he puts his boots up on a chair to keep the blood off?” I pointed out. “When he leaves the wife’s house, he checks the soles of his boots. Meaning he killed her.”

“Or not,” Ernie insisted. “Since our expectations are always being dashed, maybe we expect him to kill her, but he doesn’t.”

“The wife tells Chigurh, ‘You don’t have to do this,’ and he says, ‘Everyone says that,’” Telly noted. “People cling to comforting notions which are in fact false. He doesn’t have to do it, but he always does it.”

“What distresses me is that the fate of humans is reduced to a stain on someone’s boots,” I said. “Yes, life is cruel and short, but there has to be more to it. I refuse to accept that that’s it. Holy crap, does that make me a humanist?”

“So what is the point of the movie?” Ernie continued. “And does Chigurh live? He walks off, but we can’t really be sure.”

“Maybe the filmmakers are saying, ‘There is no point,’” Telly concluded. “They’re asking us why we need to see a point at all when human existence doesn’t seem to have one.”

“Eek, too nihilist for me,” I said.

“So the point is that there is not point?” Ernie asked.

“Yes,” Telly declared. “Consider the character of the Sheriff who isn’t really looking very hard. All he does is talk about the old days and how times have changed, how cheap human life has become. How he no longer understands what’s going on and wants to retire. The movie echoes his resignation.”

A lightbulb went on in my head. “So the Coens are saying, whatever you’re thinking, that’s not it. You think this is Moss’s story, but we dispose of him casually so that’s not it. You think he brought this all on himself by performing an act of mercy, but the druglords would’ve found him anyway, so that’s not it. You think it’s about the money, but we don’t even see how it’s retrieved, so that’s not it, either. You think it’s the tale of a chase, but many ends are left hanging, so that can’t be it. And it’s not about Chigurh, either, because we don’t know if that scary psycho gets out alive.”

“The pointlessness is the point!” Ernie declared. “I have to watch it again.”

“I’ll watch it with you, Friend-O.”

No Country for Old Men is showing at the Ayala Cinemas.

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