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The Coens’ No Country For Old Men is a hoot and a half. No, it’s a veritable hootenanny. This adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel is riveting, impeccably-crafted, and often horrifyingly funny. The tension builds to an almost unbearable degree. You cannot tell where this movie is going—the filmmakers are constantly kicking the chair out from under you, so you may choose to remain standing.

Much has been written about Javier Bardem’s performance and his character’s hair— the ruthless assassin in a pageboy cut. The killer Anton Chigurh is a cypher. We know nothing of him other than his brutality and his bizarre choice of weapons: a compressed-air device used for killing cattle (Wouldn’t a bazooka have been easier to carry?) and a sawed-off shotgun with a humongous silencer (What’s the recoil on that thing?). So the hair becomes shorthand for Chigurh’s history, motivation, total lack of humor. It IS his character: anyone who looks at it has a 90 percent chance of dying. Occasionally he’ll flip a coin to illustrate the randomness of fate. Basically Bardem is playing Death.

Considerably less has been written about Josh Brolin as Llewellyn Moss, the Vietnam vet (the movie is set in 1980) who finds the satchel of money at the scene of a drug deal gone wrong. This is not fair, as he IS the story. Moss takes off with the money, pursued by Chigurh, and to our surprise, he’s a worthy quarry. He’s a sharp guy and he’s familiar with violence. Meanwhile, Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff is also tracking Moss, but he’s more interested in making pronouncements about the bleakness of the human condition as mirrored by the Texan landscape. (Someone once said, If I owned Texas and Hell, I’d live in Hell and rent out Texas.)

So the scene is set for a climactic confrontation between Moss and Chigurh. And then. . .

Question: Did the Coens set out to subvert the conventions of narrative, or are they just mucking with our heads? Are they being revolutionary, or mean? Or both? Bonus questions: Is this movie saying anything, and if so, What? How much of a factor is “universal critical acclaim” when you form an opinion?

P.S. 2007 was the year of the sudden ending: No Country, The Sopranos, even Endo cut to black. We live in an age where the clear resolution is no longer possible.
P.P.S. Filipino movie about the discovery of a satchel of money that triggers hair-raising violence: Misteryo Sa Tuwa by Abbo de la Cruz (1981).