Never understood the antipathy toward the ending. The story concludes, all loose ends are tied, and then there is a sort of grace note at the end. Odd? Sure. It in no sense diminished my overall impression of the movie. It’s a masterful thriller morally grounded by Tommy Lee Jones’s profound weariness, and featuring what is probably one of the ten best villains in movie history.
This is their best movie apart from Fargo, in my opinion. Next would be Inside Llewyn Davis. These are the three films that, for me, transcend the technical immaculateness that can be found in all their work but that sometimes overwhelms it.
Sometimes you just don’t like something. It’s fine. For example, I have a complete indifference to the Beatles. Never took to Hitchcock either, aside from Shadow of a Doubt and that was mainly for Joseph Cotton. I say this because I don’t think your reading of it is all that different from mine. However, I like this move and especially this ending. I can explain my interpretation that I like that makes me appreciate it, but that doesn’t mean it works for you. I’m sure this is, if not the majority, a common reading, which, again, I suspect you basically share in fewer words. Also, I haven’t seen this in a while so I could be wrong about some details.
Anyway, the ending is a letdown. But, for me, that’s part of the appeal. The movie is titled No Country for Old Men. One of the core themes is that Jones’ sheriff is essentially out-of-touch with the modern world (the country as it were) to the point where he can’t do his job properly (he’s a sheriff that can’t solve or prevent murders or protect people). Before the final monologue, he talked with his uncle (older and thus even more left behind). His dreams are about his father. He looks to both men for answers, but they can’t give him any. They’re too old. The sheriff even notes that he is now older than his father ever was. I’m thinking the first dream he loses money he was entrusted with, but there’s no lesson to be learned here that can be applied. Maybe it’s reinforcing that he can no longer do his job since he was supposed to protect the wife and failed, just as he failed keeping the money in the dream. Even so, there’s nothing here to help him. The second is the snow pass where his father is ahead of him and the sheriff is walking toward him, but the sheriff wakes up before he reaches his father. Again, no lesson here. Perhaps had he reached his father, he could have learned something, but probably not. They’re both old men and, as we know, there’s no country for them. So, there’s no place for any of them anymore. They cannot understand the evil/violence of the modern world. Of course, the uncle mentioned senseless violence in the past as well. So either violence was always meaningless and there’s nothing really unique about it now making the issue simply that the sheriff is too old to handle it. Or perhaps that the violence he’s investigating really is worse and he can no longer comprehend what it means enough to understand it. Either way, he was always a few steps behind Chigurh / death / violence. Regardless of interpretation, there’s no place for him anymore and perhaps there never was.
So when you say this:
That’s the point of the film, at least how I see it. If you don’t like that—which is totally understandable—you won’t like the ending.
The title of the movie is taken from a line in a Yeats poem, Sailing to Byzantium. I’d be curious to hear how the poem somehow informs the movie. It’s one of my favorite poems but it’s not an easy poem to talk about. It’s just intriguing and lovely and heady. I’ve heard the poem explained and the explanation when given makes sense, but I have trouble trying to explain the explanation, which may simply be due to my lack of scholarship.
Notably, tying in a bit to the theme of the film, sailing to a place that no longer existed. Isn’t that poem about (or at least can be interpreted as) the end of Irish / British agrarian lifestyle after the onset of industrialization? If so, it seems similar thematically. I think I wrote a comparative paper in an English Lit class in college comparing it to a pastoral poem by Keats, but I could be thinking of some other Yeats poem considering how long it’s been. Though, maybe I was stretching it a bit back then.
Edit: Having read it again, it would have to be stretched pretty far to apply explicitly to the end of agrarianism, unless you read the pastoral past as part of the soul of the people / nation I guess. Although, my shaky undergrad interpretation aside, it does compliment No Country for Old Men nicely.
I still feel this way, ending aside. I know that sounds strange. It’s not a bad movie at all and done very well. There are parts that I don’t like, but the movie itself was clearly a work of very talented directors. In fact I’m not sure that I even like Fargo better. We’ve had a thread on that I believe. @Navaronegun started it. I forgot what the final vote tallies wore for Coen brothers movies.
And to that point:
I appreciate you writing out this take on the ending. I think the book probably covers more of the sheriff and probably cements this even more as his narrative of the story and THAT he couldn’t do anything about it. Things changed around him and he’s no longer the lawman he was and there is not place for him.
My failing, and perhaps some of the movie itself is that the Coen’s pulled that narrative out of the book and expanded upon the visualization of that so clearly and powerfully that we don’t get the framing of the sheriffs tale quite as much. I certainly didn’t and even a few small changes could have reshaped the movie around the sheriff telling the tale. Like, perhaps him actually narrating a bit in the beginning, or and ending monologue that circles back to the tale. That part of the movie is disjointed to me and your understanding certainly helps that, I just wish it was done better. The narrated story is so action packed, tense and visceral that you completely forget the sheriff’s framed narration of events as part of the story. He only slows it down.
Still not sure I want to read the book, however. The Road was so, so depressing. I liked the writing but I’m unsure how that will translate to McCarthy prose that drove this movie.
