The theme of this movie is how the world is going to hell in a handcart and old upstanding grizzled farts like Tommy Lee Jones can't do shit to save it. It's a grim-ass thing too - cause if Tommy Lee Jones can't save us, who the fuck can?
I actually read this book (amazingly, since I almost never bother reading, as you could probably guess by the "depth" of my insights). It was good. There was lots of hard-scrabble lyricism and descriptions of arroyos. I looked up "arroyo" and it means "a dry creek bed or gulch that temporarily fills with water after a heavy rain." "Gulch" is a good word too by the way and so is "creosote." Books filled with words like this always feel very poetic and spare and beautiful. Then Cormac McCarthy - guy who wrote the book; Oprah interviewed him awhile ago after apparently threatening to kill him if he didn't agree to do it - describes these horrifically violent shootings and stuff, and the thought that pops into your head is, "Wow, this would make a really great movie. Hell, you wouldn't even have to write a script, you could just use the book as your script."
So the Coen Brothers came along and made the movie, and I think they basically used the book as their script, cause I can't think of another movie that ever followed a book so closely, except for a few bits where they took some of the sheriff character's letters and wrote that into the dialogue to avoid having a lot of dopey narration. This is not one of those funny Coens movies by the way. This is more toward the serious, realistically-rendered end of things, like Fargo except without that little snarky wink caused by trying to be hip about people from Minnesota. There's lots of detail, like the boot-marks all over the tile floor after a guy has gotten strangled to death, his feet kicking as he struggled with the killer. And there's tons of grimly sardonic dialogue again lifted almost verbatim from the source. This is all in Tommy Lee Jones's wheelhouse. He plays this Texas sheriff who can only cope with how messed-up the world is by being bitterly ironic about everything. But Tommy really only trails the main story which concerns this dude played by Josh Brolin who finds a bunch of drug money and tries to keep it, and is hunted down by an incredibly evil, ethnically indistinct guy named Anton Chigurh, who murders people with an air-gun.
Chigurh is the creepiest character since Hannibal Lecter (I mean the original Lecter from Silence of the Lambs, not one of Anthony Hopkins's whorish subsequent Lecter performances). Javier Bardem plays him without a hint of human warmth; he's like a robot programmed to believe that all existence is pre-ordained and he's just some kind of instrument of fate who has no choice himself (he occasionally lets his would-be victims off by flipping a coin and letting them call it; this is his one concession to the notion that destiny can be altered). What makes this guy so creepy is how polite he is. He reminds me of certain bullies I knew who would get you to do what they wanted by speaking in a gentle voice, asking you to "please" do this or that, then when you did it some horrible thing would befall you and they'd stand there laughing. Except Chigurh doesn't laugh, but places his air-gun gently to your forehead and impales your brain with the little rod that shoots out.
Chigurh is supposed to be some kind of metaphor for an evil that has crept into the human world, that is going to systematically and dispassionately annihilate all the good folks. Nothing can stop Chigurh - he can't be reasoned with or bought off; he can't even be locked out because he'll just take his air-gun and pop the lock. His advantage over all us regular folks is his knowledge of human nature. He knows that if he talks to certain people a certain way they'll do what he wants, and then he can kill them. He doesn't operate this way because he needs to necessarily, but because it makes life easier for him. Evil, the movie tells us, likes things tidy and convenient. If Chigurh were a manager at 7/11 it would be the best-run 7/11 in the history of the world, and you can bet none of his employees would mouth-off.
I'm glad the Coens made this movie, cause honestly, after that piece of shit with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones I thought they were done. Turns out they only needed a good piece of material to get them going again. This movie makes you think good and hard about the evil in the world and whether there really is some great tide of blood and shit about to sweep over us and destroy us all. I don't know if it's true, but if the coming evil has as bad a haircut as Chigurh, at least we'll all have a good laugh before we're shuffled off to the death-camps. I have to give this movie four Chips Ahoy out of four because it's clearly a work of art and when it was over I felt icky about the universe for a good fifteen minutes.
