i get the issue w/ the pool scene but to me that’s where the movie leaves the strictures of genre, heads into other territory quite brilliantly. moss has already sold out his wife (out of vanity you could argue, but sort of passively) and here he is again now willfully about to take up w/ another woman. i don’t think it’s coincidence that at this precise moment the movie leaves moss, shifting to the sheriff. the showdown w/ anton, and moss’ fate is all but certain at this point

NCFOM is the story of small town sheriff who has tried to live a good and moral life, not necessarily rooted in religion, an intelligent but simple man, coming upon forces of social entropy that disturb him to the point that he must question what good his life’s work has accomplished. He must also admit his is approaching the darkness, the void, his death, and he can’t solidly say he has made a difference in the world for good. Lewlyn is in there, Chagurh is in there, as well as the Mexican dopers, and others but it’s not really about them.

McCarthy tackles similar questions in ‘The Road’: how does one go on in the face of complete chaos and the devolution of civilization in the absence of proof of a benevolent force that might absolve “the good guys”? Ethics for their own sake, to carry on a lineage against madness, brute selfishness, and decay. A tiny flicker of flame carried in a horn through total blackness and crushing cold – that’s all faith might be.

Also- I took Charguh’s statement about the coin to be sort of a ‘physics joke’: “I came from the same place the coin did”, as in ‘it’s all carbon, babe, how much meaning can you really put in THAT?’

I didn’t read the book. I agree that the acting and characters excelled, and the dialog was phenomenal. I imagine most of the pithy nuggets were McCarthyisms and I’m thinking especially at the end when Tommy Lee Jones concludes with, “What you got ain’t new. Can’t stop what’s coming. Ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.” This revealing statement at the end sums up, in a much needed way, the themes at work, and it is a very theme oriented picture, the contingency of life and man’s place in that chaos, the uncontrollable nature of things, the powerlessness of the individual vs. destiny. Do what you will, but sometimes and quite often, things overwhelm you, and the situation rises up to destroy you. Indeed the evil Anton Chagurh embodies and is possessed by, the random brutality of contingency itself, as evidence by obsessive coin tossing, and his statement near the end to the effect that he was the same as the coin, there was no difference in the way they ended up there, at that particular crossroads, at that particular place in time. Powerless to history, powerless to nature, and therefore in almost religious devotion an instrument of it’s brutality. Of course the beautiful Kelly Macdonald tries to convince Chagurh that it is he who is making the decision, not the coin. But to no avail. This is further driven home in the next scene, where Chagurh, the man creating destiny, security, objectivity, by denying it, is nearly killed in a random car accident. Brilliantly done, it eggs one on to thinking perhaps he is on to something, or at least, explains a little of how he may have come upon such delusion.

The movie didn’t work as a whole for me because I thought it fell apart beginning with the pool scene. It doesn’t bother me so much that our likable protagonist is suddenly yanked out of the picture, it’s what we’re left with isn’t developed. I’m thinking they tried to stay true to the book but it just didn’t work out. First of all, I felt cheated without the finale showdown of Lewllyn and Chagurh, but I got over that. Still…the movie had been gunning for that showdown the entire time, teasing, and then pulled back. Ok, but now you better really work some magic…if you are going off the map… but they couldn’t. The pieces didn’t add up, maybe they just needed more of them, it felt sudden and random and prematurely over. The thing is, they were good pieces that with a little more effort could have fleshed out the overwhelmingly existentialist ideas.