Bell is a good man and a good cop, but he eventually decides to withdraw from the frightening chaos wrought by the Chigurhs and Mosses of the world, and the movie's very last scene depicts Bell, now retired, recounting a haunting dream to his wife (Tess Harper).
Because "No Country" contains some action/suspense sequences that honor not just the best of Hitchcock but the best of latter-day violent blockbusters (Chigurh's seeming indomitability sometimes brings to mind the first "Terminator" film), this contemplative and seemingly abrupt wrap-up inspires certain action-movie mavens to scratch their heads and shout obscenities at the screen -- and on the Internet, where so many movie conversations now take place. ("It's because there's no music," "No Country" producer Scott Rudin notes. "The norm in scenes like this is to provide some sort of emotional cue with the music.")
The message boards about the film on Yahoo are teeming with subject lines such as "The critics are on crack!" and observations such as "Yeah a lot of people get killed but the acting is terrible."
But, truth to tell, even more putatively thoughtful viewers have been thrown off by the road less traveled "No Country" takes. In the Nov. 26, 2007, issue of the New Yorker, writer-director Nora Ephron contributed a humorous piece in which a couple ponder, among other things, the fate of Brolin's Moss. Where he ends up, as it happens, is not unambiguous at all; it's just revealed in a way that's totally counter to audience expectations.
Ephron's piece, along with a good deal of other online speculation about the movie's ending -- including a couple of posts by this writer at the Premiere.com website -- is being collected at the movie's own official web- site, www.nocountryforoldmen- themovie.com, under the heading "Notes on the Ending."
"One of the things my partners and I decided early on it was to not try and dance around it," Rudin says. "To say, yes, there is this ending, it's this extraordinary thing, we love it, it requires work on the part of the audience, it's challenging, it's complicated, it's ambiguous. And that decision was a big part of how we tried to make it work for audiences."
The more one examines the differing parts of "No Country" -- starting from its title, which is from the Yeats poem "Sailing to Byzantium" -- the more its seemingly off-kilter ending makes sense, revealing itself as the only possible ending for the picture.
Not only that, but the more it relates to other Coen brothers' movies and to sources the Coens have cited as influences such as the Dashiell Hammett novel "The Glass Key" -- an uncredited inspiration for the Coens' "Miller's Crossing" -- which also ends with the recounting of a dream.
Mere moments before his own date with destiny, Moss tells a young lady who's chatting him up that he's just got an eye out "for what's coming." After Moss has met his fate, and Ed Tom Bell is grappling with a case that he could not, or would not, close, a trusted relative tells him: "You can't stop what's comin'. It ain't all waitin' on you. That's vanity."
The dream Bell recounts in the film's denouement is a place where safety and warmth are assured; that world, this movie understands, is not the one we're living in today. The actual nature of the killer Chigurh is . . . open to question. As is much else.
