I just watched No Country For Old Men for the second time (spoiler warning)

[Radical Activist]

My friend and I argued for an hour about who ended up with the money and we never did come to a final conclusion. I realize that not answering that question was an intentional choice by the director. But after watching it again I think I didn't see the answer because I didn't want the bad guy to end up with the money.

We know Chigurh was at the motel looking for the money again after everyone was dead, which means he believes the Mexicans didn't get it. But did he find it? I say yes for two reasons. One, he didn't ask Carla Jean Moss where the money was. He only came to kill her because he promised he would. If he didn't already have the money he would have asked her if she had it.

Second, he gave a kid a large bill for a shirt after getting wounded in the car crash. It suggests he had money to burn and it's the exact same thing Llewelyn did at the Mexican border when he payed someone for their coat after getting shot. Llewelyn didn't mind forking over a large bill for a coat because he had 2 million in cash. So did Chigurh when he did the same thing.

It seems kind of obvious now but I didn't want to admit that Chigurh got it in the end.

[flvegan]

1. This could be an epic thread, friendo.

Considering that is your lucky quarter, might want to keep it safe.

[Radical Activist]

2. I'm waiting for someone to disagree with me.

But maybe the movie is too old and everyone who cares is done arguing about it.

[cemaphonic]

3. In the book, it's not remotely ambiguous.

He gets the money from the motel (the final non-confrontation between him and Bell is handled quite a bit differently) and returns it to its original owner, another unnamed businessman in a high-rise office.

Even in the film, I think the evidence leans toward Chigurh getting the money. Doesn't Bell find the screws from the ventilation duct when he enters the motel?

I don't think the Coens were trying to be ambiguous. I just think they know a McGuffin when they see one and figured that wrapping up the fate of the money really wasn't that important.

What *I* want to know is: Who won the bowling tournament match in The Big Lebowski? Especially as Donny appeared to be their best bowler.

[Zomby Woof]

4. And...

Did the Dude ever get a new rug that tied the room together like the old one?

[cemaphonic]

6. I've wondered about an aspect of that

Since the money wasn't actually *stolen*, merely embezzled, did he still get his $100,000 reward?

Yes, I've watched that movie too many times. But not as many as "Miller's Crossing."

[deutsey]

10. It may be nihilistic of me, but

I wonder even if the money was embezzled. "You have your story, I have mine," the Big Lebowski says. He never admits embezzling.

In a larger sense, I think that's one of the themes of the movie, this uncertainty. Most viewers, for instance, take it as truth that Walter is right when he says Jesus is a pederast. But Walter isn't always a reliable source of information. Also, the Dude speculates that Bunny kidnapped herself (which wasn't true) and Walter embraces it as the absolute truth. Etc.

This kind of thing permeates the movie (which is what I love about it). It's not nihilism (which is just another form of delusion in the movie), it's just a commentary on how we often assume something is true without having much reason to do so. In my interpretation of the movie, I believe the Coens are intentionally playing with the audience and our need to "make sense" of things even when we have little information to go on. The Coens throw out a lot of sketchy details about characters (how does the Dude live without a job or money? What led an SDS radical to being a roadie for Metallica? etc.) and where there are holes, we fill them in with our own embellishments.

That's just my opinion, man.

[cemaphonic]

18. Have you seen "The Big Sleep?"

The general plot and character types are based on it (very loosely, but obvious if you are familiar with both) That movie (and the book) are so famously convoluted that there is a story that Howard Hawks called Raymond Chandler to clear up a plot point in the story, and Chandler claimed not to know the answer. I think this story is probably not true, as the point in question was answered pretty clearly in the book, and at the climax to boot, but it is a story that is not really hard to believe.

It worked much the same way - most of the characters were either withholding vital information, or outright lying, and you have to constantly reinterpret past events in the movie as new information comes to light.

The Coens' "Blood Simple" is kind of an interesting inversion of this. The characters have no idea what is going on, or who to trust or believe, but the *viewer* pretty much knows who has done what throughout the entire movie.

On the money - are you suggesting that *Maude* is lying? Assuming she is telling the truth, the money was missing and TBL was responsible for withdrawing it from the trust Lying about something like that doesn't really seem in her character to me.

[deutsey]

26. No, the money is apparently missing, it just isn't conclusive to me

that the BL embezzled it. There's no solid evidence that he did. It could very well have been that the BL really believed Bunny had been kidnapped (given the ransom note and the toe). The money may have been lost when the Dude's car was stolen or when it was abandoned. We know Larry probably doesn't have the money, or at least we assume he doesn't based on the fact that the car in front of his house wasn't his. But there's nothing conclusive to me, just a lot of opinions, man.

I think the Coens intentionally left it that way because the movie seems fraught with such ambiguity. But as Brandt says, well, Dude, we just don't know.

[Radical Activist]

5. Not only does

Bell find the screws but there's a coin on the ground, which is how Chigurh unscrewed the other vent too. It was all tossed on the floor in a sloppy fashion, suggesting that it was done by Chigurh, who would have known to look there.

It surprises me that Chigurh returns it to a businessman. That changes my opinion of the character. I thought he was motivated by greed and his insanity. hmmm....

[cemaphonic]

7. Well, Chigurh adheres to a pretty strict code of conduct. and world view

An evil, weird and highly idiosyncratic one (not to mention a lot of it seems like self-justification for the fact that he's a ruthless psycho that likes to kill people), but he's pretty consistent about it. He views himself as a total professional in a business full of amateurs - returning the money (mostly) intact establishes his credibility and reputation to future employers.

More importantly, I think the whole affair offended his sense of destiny. The drug deal *should* have gone of without someone getting greedy or stupid or whatever and triggering that bloodbath in the desert. Third parties, like Moss *shouldn't* have involved themselves, further complicating the situation. Since they did, he takes it upon himself to fix the problem by returning the money to its rightful owner. Everyone who gets in his way is just collateral damage.

[deutsey]

8. Yeah, there's a kind of cruel, legalistic sense of "justice" with him

It's warped, but Chigurh has a code of right and wrong of sorts that he adheres to.

I've only seen it once, but I think I assumed he got the money in the movie. I want to watch it again so I'll keep this question in mind when I do.

[Radical Activist]

11. that makes sense.

Each character has their own moral code they're sticking to, or don't stick to, and it takes them down different paths. The story would have been much shorter if Llewelyn had just let the Mexican die in the desert.

[jobycom]

16. He was never motivated by greed.

The movie was pretty clear, he was motivated by his sense of honor. That was a major theme of the movie, how Chigurh's sense of honor and ethics required him to chase the money, and kill the wife in the end. He thought it was unethical not to chase the money, and was angry whenever anyone questioned or interfered with him.

I didn't think there was any ambiguity over who got the money. The scene in the motel room shows Chigurh hiding from the sheriff, and when Tommy Lee Jones comes out of the bathroom he sees the open grate, the screws, and the coin--heads up. The implication was that Chigurh found the money, and that he had flipped the coin to see if Jones would live, since he had no orders or reason to kill him. It also went along with the other theme of the movie--to each character, everything seemed random and unexplainable, but everything was actually triggered by connected events and made sense to anyone who could see the big picture. Even so, some events were still random, like the coin flips and the car accident.

Freaking brilliant movie. And remember, the coin was special, but it was just a coin.

[Radical Activist]

17. what left room for doubt

for me initially, is that we knew Chigurh was in the room looking for money in the vent but that doesn't mean he found it. It also meant he didn't get the money on his first visit to the hotel and had to go looking a second time. I wasn't willing to assume any more than what the movie showed, which is that he looked for it in the vent.

But for the other reasons I stated, I agree that Chigurh must have wound up with it.

[jobycom]

20. When did he visit it the first time?

After the drug dealers killed wazzisname, the cops had the place covered until Jones visited it and found the door lock punched out by Chigurh's gizmo. I thought that was the first time he visited, but I could be wrong.

[Radical Activist]

23. The local sheriff

when talking to Bell mentioned that Chigurh came back to the scene of the crime a second time and killed more people. That's when Bell decided to go back to the hotel. Which, now that I think about it, suggests that he was there three time before finding the money. It must not have been in the room he was expecting.

[deutsey]

9. I sure hope they made it to the finals.

:-)

[crimsonblue]

12. I didn't think it was a very good movie....

but that's just me. Probably doesn't help that I watched it for the first time in my car as I was driving to Denver after Christmas.

[Radical Activist]

13. yeah..

I think its a movie you have to see as an experience and let it consume you with all its subtleties in order to enjoy it.

[crimsonblue]

15. I thought it was a bit long to develop, and then the climax

was underwhelming. Kind of like sex. lol

[Forkboy]

19. errrr.....k.

:)

I felt the ending was a bit of poetic brilliance, but I can understand why it left some people thinking, "What?"

I had to think long and hard about this, and then watch it again, to finally get the ending and Tommy Lee Jones' monologue about the dream he had.

He says that in the dream that he heads into the snowy mountains, (representing his life as a sheriff), and that a man goes on ahead of him (the killer awaiting him). And then he wakes up and realizes he's in the process of acting out the dream. So, instead of having that dream come true, he chooses the safer life of retirement, no doubt influenced by the handicapped friend he visits in the movie, a former lawman who paid a heavy price and is now confined to his wheelchair.

The new breed of criminal that he encounters (circa 1980 Texas, which the movie is set in, when drug smuggling was really taking off) shakes his faith in what he does and whether he's good enough to match them, and the dream he talks about at the end is a way of him saying he finally recognizes that he's out of his league now. Hence, "No Country For Old Men".

I honestly feel this is one of the best American movies in the last decade. It's a rich, deeply textured film that studies the nature of violence, much like The Dark Knight does, only in a far less flashier, and thoughtful manner (not that The Dark Knight wasn't awesome, though).

[cemaphonic]

24. The ending comes off a bit better in the book too.

Although I agree that the Coens did an incredibly great job with the adaptation.

The book has a structure where each "plot" part of a chapter is preceded by an internal monologue by Bell. Near the end of the book, the plot sections get shorter and the monologues get longer. It's pretty clear by the end that it is Bell's story, and Moss and Chigurh and the money and all the rest are secondary.

The Coens ditched this structure, although they did use a bunch of the material from them in conversations and the like. It was a good move since lengthy voiceovers constantly interrupting the story wouldn't have worked very well in film, but it does make the ending a bit jarring. (although some of that was on purpose - The Coens said that they liked the way that the book started out feeling like a pure genre crime novel, and wound up subverting most of the expectations of that genre, and they were trying to keep that feel)

[Forkboy]

25. I like the comments about them subverting the expectations of the genre.

Because that's exactly what the movie does. The same pieces are in place that we've seen before, but they get moved about in totally unexpected ways, whether it's Brolin's character getting aced, or the low key, vague ending.

This would be my favorite Coen movie if it wasn't for Miller's Crossing. I love that damn movie. :)

I'll have to track down the book and read it. It can only compliment the movie for me at this point, and I can't imagine not getting a lot from the book as well.

[cemaphonic]

28. In the book, his death is even more offstage.

There's a scene with him talking to a hitchhiker, and then a few pages later, some anonymous police officer is talking about finding his body (without naming him even.) The first time I read it, I thought I had just zoned out for a few pages, and had to reread it to make sure I didn't miss something.

The book is pretty good. It's not McCarthy's best, but it is among his most accessible, and it is quite a bit deeper than it appears at first. And it does compliment the movie in some interesting ways. For one thing there is a pretty significant aspect of Bell's characterization in the book that the Coens left out completely. The bit where Moss and Chigurh get injured is very different, and I've been curious why they changed it, since the book version is pretty cinematic.

Miller's Crossing is my favorite of theirs too.

[jobycom]

22. It's a brilliant film, but not easy. If you don't get drawn into the themes from the beginning

you won't really get drawn in. The climax and plot is confusing on purpose, to tip the viewer that the real story is the theme of the movie--the interaction of chance and cause, the theme of perception, the concepts of morality and duty, stuff like that.

You've got to get into those themes, or it's not that interesting, but it's a brilliant film.

[deutsey]

27. It is brilliant, but it haunted me for a few days like "Apocalypse Now Redux" did

Something about the sheriff's dream at the end just stuck with me...it was a perfect, if unsettling ending.

[EastTennesseeDem]

14. I don't know why anyone would give a kid a C-note

for giving him a tied up shirt unless he had a lot of cash. Especially since the kid initially refused it.

[cemaphonic]

21. I think he didn't want the kid to talk, at least for long enough to escape.

Nice helpful kid like that would probably run home and tell his Mom, or call 911 or something. Give a kid that much money, and he will wrestle with his conscience for awhile, since it is obviously some sort of shady deal, and he might lose the money if he involves the authorities.