[Thug Bubbles]

Finally saw this film, and I'll probably watch it again this weekend. The sound was AMAZING. Not just how it had little to no music, but how that added the tension by allowing every small noise to signal something to the viewer just as it did for the characters.

Everybody is raving about Bardem and Brolin, who were
phenominal, but Jones came out on top, IMO. He seems similar to Eastwood, in that he's not very multi-faceted in the realm of Brando or Depp, but when he settles into his kind of roles he sinks deep. There was so much expression in his performance while he physically did very little. Just looking at his face when he was talking with Brolin's wife was remarkable.

One of the best Coen movies. Right below Lebowski and tied with Fargo.

What do you all think the movie was 'about'? There were some great themes floating around: self-determination, destiny, etc.

The ending was a perfect fit, with the fateful tidal storm of Bardem moving on, even after chance hits him, like he is the inevitability that nobody can have any control over.


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GTL what are your thoughts on this(taken from comments section on blog in regards to Jones final speech)


"One of the things I most love about the end of the film is the ambiguity of Tommy Lee Jones' final monologue. I'm not referring to the film suddenly ending and some not understanding the point the film is making. Instead, I'm referring to the final line of dialogue that Sheriff Ed Tom Bell tells his wife about his second dream.

"I continue to think long and hard about that final line. And I ask myself how I'm supposed to take that line coming from that man.

"Is the story of the second dream supposed to provide a ray of hope, a sense of eventual contentment of a full life lived to its fullest being finally rewarded? Or am I supposed to take the final line as an admission that this kind of hope has been completely, irrevocably taken away? That the good sheriff had that dream of a hopeful place there in the dark, a warm place made by his father waiting for him out there in all that dark and all that cold.

"And then I woke up".

"And that the events he's recently seen have removed any possibility of that hope coming to pass?

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In the beginning of the movie, Jones' character says,

I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job - not to be glorious. But I don't want to push my
chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. You can say it's my job to fight it but
I don't know what it is anymore. ...More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. ... He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

When talking about his dream at the end of the movie, the warm place he refers to seems to be the world he has fancied himself a part of, the olden days when times were better. He does not want to be a part of the new cruel world that doesn't make sense to him, and tries to escape by retiring. However, his wheelchair bound friend tells him that times haven't changed that much by telling him a story of a bunch of outlaws killing a sheriff. In his dream, Jones' character wakes up and realizes that is a part of this new, cruel word not the warm and cozy days of yester year.

Edit: In the screenplay I just read, it says the final line is " Out there up ahead", not " And then I woke up."

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I think my interpretation was heavily influenced by missing pieces of dialogue through mutter and accent, but I was left with completely different feeling. Looking back at the actual dialogue, what you and others say fits perfectly. I still think that there is a darkness to it. Maybe I'm reading too much into the words, but Jones seems shaken with the dream when he re-tells it, and coupled with the scene directly before it (Chigur [Bardem] continuing on), I walked away thinking the dream was symbolic of death, and our inability to determine our own. Will have to watch again to really dig into this, because I like the duality between wanting/hoping for the better times against the cold present. That interpretation lifts up the ending quite a bit.

Here is the final few lines:

"...and when he rode past I seen he
was carryin fire in a horn the way
people used to do and I could see the
horn from the light inside of it.
About the color of the moon. And in
the dream I knew that he was goin on
ahead and that he was fixin to make a
fire somewhere out there in allthat
dark and all that cold, and I knew
that whenever I got there he would be
there. Out there up ahead. "