Blood and Guts - Page 4


In my favorite movie of the year, Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, Tommy Lee (The Fugitive, Men in Black) Jones is a burnt-out Western sheriff, narrating a tale of blood and guts centered on a drug deal gone bad. Throughout the story, he tells us what he's learned about evil in the world, and what he'd learned from his father and grandfather, both of whom were sheriffs before him. The film also focuses on an enigmatic killer named Anton Chigurh (pronounced "sugar"), played by Javier (The Sea Inside) Bardem, who emerges from the desert after a bloody shootout in search of a cocky loser, Josh (American Gangster) Brolin, who's made off with $2 million he found after the carnage of the failed drug deal.

The film doesn't just slap us awake with violence: it brings violence to life and personifies it. The violence captures our attention and creates such anxiety we don't dare drop our guard. We come to feel what Jones has felt all these years as he dealt with the relentlessness and inescapability of human evil.

Taken from a Cormac McCarthy novel, the movie comes from the Coen Brothers, and is, therefore, brilliantly surprising and quirkily funny. It isn't even clear whether Chigurh is intended to be real or the embodiment of all the pointless evil the old sheriff has seen. The Coens, literally, shock us with violence, reminding us of the greed and evil of which we're capable.

In sharp contrast to these violent films about people who spill the blood of others without compassion or remorse because they're vengeful or greedy, is one about people who unwittingly kill the things they love. In the award-winning novel Atonement, Ian McEwan tells a story of great love ruined by a confused child's lie, thus changing everyone's life forever.

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