this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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No Country For Old Men.
I was actually really enjoying the whole cat and mouse thing until the main fucking character died off-screen.
How does nobody ever talk about how shitty that "plot twist" is? It's not clever. It's not entertaining. It's just bad storytelling. They don't even show you a good shot of him to convey what actually happened. My girlfriend and I had to rewind it twice because it was so fucking stupid and made so little sense.
That's actually how I feel about most of the Coen Brothers' movies. The classical narrative structure exists for a reason. It's a good framework for telling a story that makes sense.
Sometimes there's a good artistic reason for diverting from that and telling the story in an unconventional way. Other times it's just pretentious auteur garbage.
This might come off as pretensions, but you should trust the writers more. The movie, and book, are very well written, and if something doesn't make sense, you should consider that you missed something.
I'll say this, Llewelyn Moss is not the main character. The movie doesn't start or end on him. He doesn't change or evolve as a character. How he died isn't the point.
It helps to focus on what Anton Chigurh said about rules, and what the Sheriff says about what he is willing to die for.
If you want me to just spell out the theme, I can do that to, but I think you would enjoy it more if you trust the movie.
Yeah, I've heard that before, about how Llewelyn isn't the main character. Not trying to be rude to you, but that sounds like bullshit. He's the character I'm rooting for. If the main character isn't the character I'm rooting for, then that doesn't sound like an enjoyable movie.
If you're saying Chigurh is the main character: he doesn't grow either.
If you're saying Tommy Lee Jones is the main character (which I've heard before), then I'm going to strain my eyes from rolling them so hard. He doesn't at any point interact with the plot. That's not good writing.
I get the Coens are doing it differently. They're not following the rules for how stories should be told. But different isn't the same as good, and the way they told the story was needlessly confusing and pretentious.
I always find it useful to use food as a metaphor to describe how I feel about movies. If No Country For Old Men were a meal, it would be expertly seasoned and cooked, with one extra ingredient that doesn't belong there and detracts from the whole thing, like if you made a perfect steak and drenched it in liquorice sauce.
And it would be served on a scrap of driftwood, or in a fishbowl, or on literally anything other than a plate. Everyone around me would be raving about the side dishes while I'm wondering why my meat tastes like shit.
You can include themes in a movie and still tell a coherent story. Try this: remove the theme. Is the movie any good? Is the plot entertaining, and does it make sense? No, it'd be really awful, and the inclusion of a theme doesn't excuse that.
Do you not like any movies or shows where the main character is the bad guy? The Sopranos is my all time favorite show but I've never rooted for Tony. Breaking bad is great too but I still never rooted for Walter White.
You really never rooted for Walt? You didn't hope that he'd make the right decision? You didn't find a little guilty pleasure in the satisfaction of a bad deed done well?
If not, then why did you even watch the show?
I'm fine with rooting for a bad guy. But no, I don't enjoy stories that only have irredeemable characters that I can't root for.
Besides, Javier Bardem won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, which doesn't usually go to main characters.
But ok, even if Llewelyn wasn't the main character, he's the central character of the plot. His death resolves the main storyline in the movie, and it happens off screen. That's not good storytelling.
Main character as the bad guy is very common and many great stories are told this way. If you can't find a way to enjoy any of them then idk what to tell you, restrict your viewing habits to marvel movies I guess