Re: No Country For Old Men (no spoilers)
SPOILERS
I disagree. The little I know of McCarthy's writing tells me that he works on a highly symbolic level as much as on a real one. Bardem's character is something larger than human, he's a one-man slaughterhouse who comes into people's lives, lets them gamble on their fate, then dispenses justice according to the contingencies of the situation. He can gain nothing from most of his kills. They are people whose time has, in his eyes, come. At the same time he's a serial killer on his way to find the dough within the structure of a kind of chase movie we're all familiar with. Those who stick with that paradigm find the ending unsatisfying.
I personally didn't. Like all apt endings it had the lingering aftertaste of the inevitable.
Tommy Lee Jones is a small-town sheriff with a philosophical bent who understands the nature of life and death in the wide-open spaces of West Texas, and who, in a sense, surrenders to the inevitability of where his own life is going. One day his chronology will intersect with Death, and whether it's dispensed by cancer or Javier Bardem is a matter of a coin-toss.
Originally posted by Adam Isaac
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I disagree. The little I know of McCarthy's writing tells me that he works on a highly symbolic level as much as on a real one. Bardem's character is something larger than human, he's a one-man slaughterhouse who comes into people's lives, lets them gamble on their fate, then dispenses justice according to the contingencies of the situation. He can gain nothing from most of his kills. They are people whose time has, in his eyes, come. At the same time he's a serial killer on his way to find the dough within the structure of a kind of chase movie we're all familiar with. Those who stick with that paradigm find the ending unsatisfying.
I personally didn't. Like all apt endings it had the lingering aftertaste of the inevitable.
Tommy Lee Jones is a small-town sheriff with a philosophical bent who understands the nature of life and death in the wide-open spaces of West Texas, and who, in a sense, surrenders to the inevitability of where his own life is going. One day his chronology will intersect with Death, and whether it's dispensed by cancer or Javier Bardem is a matter of a coin-toss.
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