I just got a new job as a hostess at Swanky Uptown Restaurant so I'm pretty busy nowadays. (Yes, I know I could do much better things with my degrees, blah blah thanks a lot for the support Mom. Also, where are my damn footslaves when I need them? 7 hours every other day of standing on hard wooden floors is really painful.) Sexy Englishman & I managed to fit in the movie on Monday, though. I like torture movies & lots of killing but this movie is ridiculous. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh is clearly an absolute psychopath. Not to mention his crazy-ass Beatle haircut, possibly the worst hair I've ever seen (including on real people). He does an amazing job of portraying someone on a completely different wavelength from the rest of us, who enjoys killing just for the hell of it. He leaves almost no one in his path un-butchered. The emptiness in his eyes is almost as horrifying as his favorite, though not only, murder method. He carries around a pneumatic cattle air gun which shoots a bolt several inches forward before retracting. So when he puts it on someone's forehead, it's like shooting them in the head without the messy backsplatter or ear-shattering noise. It's awful.
At first, I thought Llewelyn Moss was an asshole for robbing dead bodies of their guns & suitcase of money. But as he tried his damnedest to get away from the pursuing Chigurh, I found myself cheering for him. Tommy Lee Jones is laconic as the sheriff on whose territory most of the murders happen, & Woody Harrelson has a nice little cameo as an assassin. I thought Mrs. Moss was hilarious, almost a caricature of a redneck wife, but she became sympathetic by the end too.
Do not, I repeat DO NOT, see this movie if you're sensitive to blood or murder. I kept squeaking in fright & so did our other friend. She was so scared she spilled a giant soft drink on her boyfriend right at the beginning. (It starts with a pneumatic air gun murder.) I had to hide my eyes at a couple parts & even though I liked the movie overall, it was incredibly grisly. If you can stomach all that, it's a really good movie. It made me think about what money can make people do & how easy it is to start sliding down that slippery slope.
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Warning: Spoiler to follow
Anyway, there's a lot of meaning in this movie, even if it appears to be quite simple on the surface. One of the most important points of the movie was how people end up facing the consequences of their actions. When Moss took the money, he sealed his fate and likely his wife's, too. For example, imagine that he didn't go back with the water. Imagine that he just slept through the night. Well, the transponder in the money bag would have brought either Chighurh or the Mexicans to his trailer, eventually. In the end, the result was the same. He brought someone into his life that wasn't going to walk back out of it before killing him. Everything Moss did to try to escape death was futile. He survived for awhile using his own survival sense and also by sheer luck. But, there was a hell hound on his trail and running only prolonged the inevitable. I'm just thankful that the Coen Brothers let us tag along with him for awhile before his unavoidable demise.
As for the meaning in the Sheriff's final speech. I don't think it was more than just the simple realization that we can make a place for ourselves in this cold dark world for a little while, but sooner or later our flames will be extinguished. It can take 2 weeks or 80 years, but nobody can escape what's coming. For us, it is the end of all things in this world. We are only left to wonder if someone like Chigurh will bring us to our ends sooner than mother nature can.
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