Comments on: Movie Critics Discuss No Country For Old Men Ending

By: Christopher

Christopher — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:02:49 +0000

@Melly: It must not be as obvious as you think because actually Anton wound up with the money. He arrives after the El Paso shootout. After the police left, Chigurh went back into the room and got it. He knew where it was because he saw the track marks inside the vent of the Del Rio motel room where Moss orignially hid it. When TLJ arrived, he saw that the vent was opened.

Not only that but it is also implied in two ways:

One, the police, though they would have done a thorough investigation of the hotel, wouldn’t have thought to look in an air vent for the money, Anton is the only one who knows that’s where Moss had been hiding it.

Two, Anton offered the kid at the end a one hundred dollar bill which implies that he got the money.

By: Dozirulf

Dozirulf — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:42:03 +0000

You people (everyone who wrote before this post) put WAAAAY too much effort into trying to give this movie some sort of special meaning or message.

It’s a movie about a drug deal gone bad that leads to a guy stealing the money and getting chased by a hitman.

It’s just a vehicle for watching and enjoying a creepy bad guy. Duh.

By: Procyan

Procyan — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:43:54 +0000

Loved it because…its about darn time…its got to be said. It was about the new, contemporary evil. At the end, when youth instantly sized up the situation and started dickering with the mangled man for a few extra bucks. Remember? for his shirt. Now here was someone with whom Anton could do business. They understood each other.

That chilled me right down all the way. Because i believe it.

To understand that bizzo, you’ve got to get so immersed in it you hazard your soul

By: Melly

Melly — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:34:27 +0000

Its obvious what happened to the money. whats his face stowed it in the vent again, in his new room..before he was killed. Anton was gunna get it, but was interupted. so the sheriff guy showed up, saw the vent, and took the money. happy retirement. Then he gets all deep, because he is rich. rich people can sit and ponder those types of things.

By: brandon

brandon — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:34:07 +0000

I think the film symbolizes death with Anton’s character, he is seemingly an unstoppable “grim reaper” that takes every life he comes in contact with unless chance tells him otherwise…sort of a “its your time” aspect. It even seemed that the victim in the car crash did not survive. It speaks of the randomness of death…the coin travelling from many different places in many different years, and the randomness of it landing on heads or tails. TLJ’s character realizes he is up against a force that is much to strong for him and intelligently elects to live (not a dumb character). The ending I believe is one of the greatest parts of the movie because it does not adapt the formulaic ending of the protagonist defeating the antogonist…and in the end its not about evil prevailing over good either…its simply about man’s inability to contain evil, and acting on a real human emotion of understanding its a fight he cannot win. This ending connects a tone of reality through an otherwise fantastical film. I challenge you to come up with an alternate ending that does not make the film more cheesy, or status quo. On another note, I absolutely adored the fact that lewellyn (sp?) was just all of the sudden gone, and didn’t go out in a “blaze of glory” for all of the same reasons (connection with reality, randomness of death, not status quo-protagonist glory). I feel these are some of the greatest characters ever created (especially Anton), and since the film is so much more character-based then plot-based (the plot is more symbolic and the characters are very straight forward) it makes it one of the best films ever created. I think a lot of people who enjoy films should embrace more of these non-status quo endings and not always expect a grand finale of fireworks or a heroic protagonist. Why does the protagonist have to be heroic? Why does this have to be a quality he/she posesses? In life the “good guy” doesn’t always win, nor go down in a blaze of glory. For the same reasons I enjoy endings of movies like “There Will Be Blood” in which a man achieves everything in life that he believed equalled happiness, only to find out he was chasing the wrong dream (Oil made him happy, and his dream was to live in a mansion…money). It has deep roots in reality, rather than sacraficing the qualities of a realistic character and the lessons that can be learned from that to live up to the demands of the history of cinema.

By: Gus Constantellis

Gus Constantellis — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:26:22 +0000

Well, I really did enjoy this movie, and reading all these interpretations of the movie’s obscure ending helps me a lot in my enjoyment. It was one big giant metaphor. Jones’ character said he wanted to find God in some way by this age, and he did when he retired. His dream was exactly what he wanted from God or from some higher being. That dream showed his conscious and metaphysical acceptance with retiring from killing evil. This is not a country for old men because old men can’t kill evil forever and God wanted him to see that and so did his father. It was only that one very last scene with the dream I didn’t understand but now do. But I must argue that this movie is not a drama, and it is not a crime drama as Yahoo! says it is. It is a horror flick. Plain and simple.

By: 1hotmommy

1hotmommy — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:13:30 +0000

The sheffif TLJ got the job when he was 25years old.I am sure that every decade of his tenor he saw more and more meaningless bloodsheed He is tired now.After 4O years of serving society has only gotten worse.His uncle warned him about vanity.He is only one man that has been fighting the same fight. As for Luelyn he wasn’t cut out for the game. Anton is all of the ignorant evil that we see plastered over the news every night but rolled into one body.

By: J4R

J4R — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 07:45:24 +0000

i think the title just refers to the beginning when TLJ’s character says that in the olden days the sheriffs didnt even carry guns, and that this is no country for them

but i dunno

By: doug

doug — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:31:09 +0000

The movie ending was fine but there was no orgy

By: A. J.

A. J. — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:00:37 +0000

I agree, this was a good movie but hardly Oscar worthy.
If this movie had a huge action shoot out at the end
and we could see how these characters ended up it
would eventually become forgettable, but would have
had closure. The most memorable thing about this
movie is when I was waiting for Tommy Lee Jones to
end his babbling so we could move on and get back
to the story, little did I know, the story had ended.
Lousy ending even if that is how the book concluded.

What I learned is everybody thinks the world will end
in a bang. They were wrong, it will end while Tommy
Lee Jones is rambling incoherently.

By: jonjon from kettering

jonjon from kettering — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 02:37:00 +0000

look you guys!!!! all i wannaknow is who got sho at the end when the mexicans drove away at the hotel… Was it the guy with four L’s in his name or the sherrifs friend? help a lost teen out

By: S

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:54:00 +0000

I thought the ending sucked. I love the Coen brothers films but the best would have been if Chighur had been killed in the car wreck. He had gone through all what he did in the movie and then something stupid like getting t-boned by a woman in a station wagon and dying would have been better. IMO. Good movie but LAME ending.

By: Lauren Glenn

Lauren Glenn — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 17:10:43 +0000

I watched the movie for 2 hours and thought it was very good. Near the last 1/2 hour of the film, I had to keep rewinding it just to see if I missed something. The part with the father really just seemed out of the ordinary and now that I know it was a dream, it made little impact on me.

Did it deserve to win for Best Picture? Maybe. It was well done and there were parts in there that could’ve been edited out, but Tommy Lee Jones was the sheriff and didn’t really do anything in the movie except for talking.

The ending made me think about it for a few minutes and then I just deleted it off my iPod. It wasn’t a waste of money for me, but I don’t really see myself watching it again to figure out the ending. The ending seemed like it was meant to foster a debate, which it has, but in the end, it’s not something that I really want to see again.

Did the ending bother me that it didn’t really close anything to many people? A little. Am I glad I only paid a few dollars to rent the movie? Yes.

I consider myself to be fairly intelligent, but if I have to sit and ponder an ending to a movie, it makes me feel that I’m doing the work that the director(s) should have done. Not to say that I don’t like movies that make me think, it’s just that I like movies that end in a way that I can justify my time in watching it.

The beginning and the middle were fairly good, and this is one of my first Coehn brothers’ movies. Maybe they do this all the time….. I don’t know and honestly, I’m not going to go out of my way to find out. It was a decent movie, but there were better movies I’ve seen last year that I would watch again and felt moved by more. And I watched about 200 movies last year while exercising or travelling on a train or bus. It’s not to say that I’m an expert at movies; it’s just that this movie was good, but I have no plans to make it part of my movie collection. Critics may have given this rave reviews because it’s their job to see movies, so they may have gotten more out of it than I did. All I know is that they’re not my favorite directors at this time.

I wanted to like it, but I felt that Zodiac was a better film.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 08:14:51 +0000

A Latin phrase comes to mind; Deus Ex Machina

By: Darryl

Darryl — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:14:12 +0000

One thing that just came to me regarding the whole “chance/choice” argument mentioned by many here is the idea of confidence and persistence when making a choice.

The sheriff never seems sure of himself in the movie. woody harrelson sees the money off the bridge but chooses to wait before getting it… which leads to his death…. the main character who found the money seems to be indecisive/worried/looking over his shoulder the whole movie with no clear plan…. and what he did get … it was by luck/chance (the guns he took at the scene, the money, etc)…and luck eventually runs out…. where as anton always was clear about what he intended to do and what he wanted…and was confident in himself…regardless of what he was faced with….he was a man of action (Anton) instead of a man of dreams/hopes (sherriff at the end) ….. so with choice comes actin… with action comes experience…and with experience comes confidence… and ultimately victory (whether evil or good).

Sorry .. was totally thinking out loud there..

By: Darryl

Darryl — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:04:11 +0000

Hi guys,

I just want to say thanks to the people who took the time to put up intelligent responses in this discussion.

I watched the movie last night… and the ending really thorugh me for a loop. I caught myself “seeing” the major points throughout the film (like the tv glaring of anton and the sherriff, the checking for blood on his shoes after leaving the wife, the money at the end for the shirt, the constant ‘you don’t have to do this’ references, etc)…. but in the moment.. i was unable to put them all together and felt kinda empty with the ending.

But after spending some time thinking through all these things … and tying it back to the title of the film… and reading through some of the discussions here… it has really helped clarify some of the deeper meanings of the movie for me and I can totally see why its best picture now.

I am going to rewatch it in the next couple days and continue to build on my understanding of it.

Thanks again to everyone…. this why i love the internet.

By: Ted M

Ted M — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:01:54 +0000

This movie is highly overrated. The ending is a hopeless attempt at art. Furthermore, it’s amusing reading some of the previous posts from the various dilettantes feinging some deepr understanding of this film; implying that those who disliked it are simply not intellectual enough to get it. Yes, very amusing indeed.

Believe me, there’s nothing deep, clever or difficult to understand about this film. It simply bad, period.

By: Lydia

Lydia — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:39:46 +0000

what happened to the 2 million? Llewellyn was waiting at Desert Sands for his wife. He was going to give it to her, but obviously he didn’t because by the time she got there, he was dead. Why didn’t they at least show the scene that killed him? That would have been relevant. Instead they show a completely boring scene where the Sheriff rambles to an old man with a ton of cats about Uncle Max and about the fact that he was retiring. Well, who cares? What happened to the money? Obviously Carla Jean didn’t have it. Did Anton kill her? She didn’t call the coin, so I am assuming he killed her. Did Anton have the money since he paid that boy $100 for his shirt after he had been in the car accident? The whole movie was awesome. But the ending sucked. At least with the Sopranos, even though the ending was just the family eating at a diner listening to “Don’t stop believing,” you know HBO can start another season if they wanted to and just pick up where they left off with Silvio in the hospital.

By: McRorie

McRorie — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 22:09:23 +0000

Empathy kills.

By: Nessanurse

Nessanurse — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:31:57 +0000

I loved this movie right up until the ending, which was like “what the hell just happened?!” I think we get used to having a tidy ending handed to us when we watch a movie and it is rare for a movie to end like this. It ruined the movie for me at first, but after I thought about it…what really is the big deal? It is just a movie after all and it makes it even more interesting because you can interpret the ending however you like. I would like to think that Anton didn’t kill the wife and that she was the driver of the car who ran into him. The fact that he didn’t die is unfortunate, but oh well, it is just a movie. I think the movie is just a fun, cat and mouse type of movie entertwined with western, comedy, horror, and action themes which makes it fun to watch. It does also have deeper meanings if you want to think about it hard enough :)

Oh, and by the way….those weren’t elk, Jim, those were antelope.