"no country for old men"

What I found with No Country for Old Men was exceedlingly well-paced and made, and, as with David Fincher's Zodiac, the film with the least amount of stylistic flair in the Coen brothers' career, similar to Fargo in that respect and in terms of the plot points concerning murder, highways, and bags full of money that must go unfulfilled (a cruel joke as well as a rejection of genre rules and a criticism of the act of theft rolled into one).

It is, in artistic terms, perhaps less successful than Zodiac (a film I didn't like) in pushing audiences into new territory, as that film did with its unusual, unjointed narrative style. Like the majority (all?) of the Coens' films, this one comes as a pre-mixed packet: that doesn't mean that the considerable amount of tension it musters is any less thrilling, or even that the film feels hermetically sealed. (And if it does, it's due to the sparse, controlled style of the film.) But you could never accuse the film of being messy -- it has a craftsman's specificity, but not an artist's heart. Expressions of feeling have never been a Coen strong point -- even heightened feeling, even feeling generated from artiface or from the point of view of character. They attempt to make big points by avoiding points at all, letting them suggest themselves by the film's sparseness; it's a movie that works on themes that you're not quite sure you understand. The idea of plot points involving money and violence and queer senses of nobility (even when it concerns fate as random as a coin-toss) seem to me hopelessly quaint, no matter how futuristic the murder weapon.

You're left asking yourself if the Coens (or McCarthy) are honing in old tropes for the prepackaged acclaim such quasi-philosophical notions will give them, or if it's their attempt to comment on genre (here, essentially a Western). No Country for Old Men may be the most thoroughly American film the Coens have made, and it exhalts itself on those big, hard ideas given to us through Westerns. It skimps on the details that matter and instead focus on plot-related visual details, and even when they're funny and important to the story that's being told (as in the the relation to keeping boots free of blood) they don't give us much to cling to outside of their formal elegance.