I rate this up there with Pulp Fiction for its masterful understanding of narrative structure. Cormac McCarthy understands genre better than anyone else. He knew how to subvert the audience's expectations in a way that was entirely unexpected. And you know, there were and are plenty of idiots who didn't get the ending, and that's perfectly ok that they hated the movie. Go live with yourselves.
The good news is that The Coens saw what Cormac did, got it, and knew that it could work EVEN BETTER as a 2 hour film story.
My wife to this day loves to tell the story of how one night she asked me what book I was reading because I really seemed to be taken with it. I told her, this is one of the most incredible books I've read in years. There's several highly memorable characters, including an aging sheriff looking carefully around his world and NOT digging what it has to offer, and it has this other guy in it who could be the devil himself, or I guess he's the grim reaper himself, but he's an unbelievable creation. And it's so cinematic, if the right people make this it could be a real home run. This whole epic morality tale is veiled in a potboiler about somebody stumbling upon the worst drug deal gone wrong of all time. And the author springs this trap door on you, and then you're done for and now you're in the middle of the oldest story of them all. And it is just so devastating and overwhelming and it just destroys.
I really liked it I said. LOL.
She read the damn book, and we talked about it for days on end. I think we read it again soon after.
I think it was several months later when we heard that the Coens were going to do it. We smiled at that. We were huge fans, and it felt just right. Boy was it.
You know, it was quite a year, between Bardem winning supporting actor and DDL winning actor for There Will Be Blood! But in a perfect world, Tommy Lee Jones would have won an Oscar too. He gives one of the all time great performances in a motion picture. He is really something else in this movie. I mean, WOW. I still think about how it must feel to be Barry Corbin, no matter how it's going for that guy, every day he can look back on that scene at the end with Jones and think, "I did that. That happened". Jesus, can you magine? And Josh Brolin. He gets to carry the "main" storyline ha ha. And he is just perfect in this. Dead on. Great casting in the film, every supporting role is just bliss.
I will always be pulling for some kind of huge Criterion type package for this film, something that dissects this film left and right. I mean more special features than Hallmark's got cards. I would digest it all several times over. Please somebody out there, give them the rights to do this masterpiece justice.
I find this to be as close to a perfect movie as I've seen in my adult film life. It's right there with the other greatest screenplays, Chinatown, Pulp, and I would argue for Zodiac as well. All films that completely turned the movies upside down with narratives that surprise within well worn genre tropes.
Beautiful things.