No Country For Old Men

My wife hated the movie No Country For Old Men. I don't think I'm overstating her reaction; I think honest unalloyed hate was pretty much her reaction to it. She thought it was violent, gratuitious, and essentially meaningless.

Maybe so, but I thought it was excellent. Maybe not as good as its hype, but still very, very good. I could have watched Tommy Lee Jones for hours, playing that character in a way that didn't turn him into a gimping, mouth-foaming stereotype. And the guy who played Anton Chigurgh (sp?) was brilliant in his soft-spoken, almost dainty, and deeply disturbing way. Anton is a nightmare and no mistake, but a nightmare I enjoyed watching. I liked the way he was amused by people always saying "You don't have to do this," because to him, he did always have to do that.

It's a movie that starts out full of dead stuff, and additional bodies pile up like cordwood as Anton makes his bloody way through Texas (though Anton is far from the only evil, he is the primary evil). Meantime Tommy Lee Jones drives around, giving voice to the ineffable and never quite managing to protect anyone at all. And that scene with Tommy Lee Jones and Maurice (you know who I mean) was so richly layered I feel that I want to watch it five or six times to fully grok what they were talking about. There's that line from Maurice, something about how sometimes a man can only hope to get a tourniquet on "it", whatever it is, but we believe it to be life in general.

Striking. Very striking. But I know better than to see if my wife wants to watch it!