I think the impotence of the Tommy Lee Jones character is an important part of the film. It contributes to the overall lack of justice in McCarthy's universe. I think it's this dark vision of an amoral universe that makes the film so powerful.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

That sounds just like something a philosophy professor would say.

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Paul S.

2001 E430, Bourdeaux Red, Oyster interior.
79,200 miles.

1973 280SE 4.5, 170,000 miles. 568 Signal Red, Black MB Tex. "The Red Baron".

I was just about to start up a similar topic. Yesterday, intrigued by all the Oscar noise, I went.

The movie's top notch, a crime story to rival anything Elmore Leonard's ever done -- until the last 20 minutes. If you leave when Josh Brolin's welder/cowboy, Llewellyn Moss, arrives at the El Paso motel, and go home and write your own ending, it's likely to be a heckuva lot better than this. Moss, who we've followed since the first frames of the movie, just vanishes from the story.

Wha??? If you set up a battle like this between two antagonists, you need to have a payoff! The good guy doesn't have to win, of course, and the villain doesn't have to be killed. But you need a payoff of *some* kind for your audience! I mean, suppose Og, the Cro-Magnon tribal storyteller, climaxed his exciting story of an epic mammoth hunt by saying only, "Oh, the mammoths got away, so we came back home." The rest of the tribe would stone him.

Maybe I missed something; maybe Moss *is* killed; but it's murky and unclear to me. I thought it was the mother-in-law who was killed at the motel. If Moss was killed there, okay; but why not show his face in the morgue when Sheriff Ed Tom (Tommy Lee Jones) is alone there with the body?

I suspect I wouldn't like the novel, either -- I hear it's full of long digressions, and doesn't have quotation marks, which always makes me claustrophobic.

That said, Anton the psycho cattle-gun killer is as creepy as Hannibal Lecter or Harry Roat Junior, and Brolin and Jones just plain inhabit their roles.
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-- Paul W. (The Benzadmiral)
('03 Buick Park Avenue, charcoal/cream)
Formerly:
'97 C230, smoke silver/parchment; '86 420SEL, anthracite/light grey; '84 280CE (W123), dark blue/palomino