I’m still waiting for the Cohens to make a movie that isn’t absolutely amazing.

TGGeko, I have to disagree. The point of the film is that the good guys don’t always win like they do in the ‘movies’.

Notice how Llewellyn, Sheriff Ed Tom and Carson all wear white cowboy hats? Like the invincible cowboys of yore? All of them (except Ed Tom, he realizes he’s in over his head & quits) think they have everything under control? Well, it’s like the story that Ed Tom tells Llewellyn’s wife about the guy slaughtering the cattle. Nothing is certain.

This point is driven home several times, but you have to be paying attention. All the things you think are important in this film aren’t. All the things that subtly slip by you are actually the crux of the film.

And then at the end, when Ed Tom is talking about his dream, you start to drift off. Just when you stop listening to what he’s saying, he says “And then I woke up.” And there’s the credits. And you go “Holy shit, that was fucked up.”

I think everyone here has some good ideas as to what themes are represented in the film. I don’t think it’s necessarily a black and white thing, as the whole film is one metaphor after another. Even the phonetic similarity between Anton and Ed Tom’s names, with their characters being polar opposites.

There was no need to show the demise of Llewellyn, as that reinforces the idea that what you thought was important actually isn’t. The off-hand handling of his death helps shock you out of the happy idea that the good guys had a shot at winning.

Again, no showdown between Ed Tom and Anton, because that’s not what this is about. Ed Tom has accepted his fate, and his fate is to let the world move past him.

Remember when Anton is about to shoot Carson? He challenges his white-hat ideology. Something about ‘If the rule you followed has only gotten you here, what good was the rule?’ Anton is tying together the two themes mentioned right here. He is demonstrating both that he is the master of his own fate, unlike those that follow the rules of society, and that the good guys don’t always win.

In regards to fate versus chance, also notice that Anton wields the very tool that Ed Tom mentions at the end of his anecdote about slaughtering cattle. The tool that adds more certainty to the contest between man and steer. And yet we see Anton struck by a big helping of random chance, as he is broadsided while passing through a green light, looking back at the innocence of children.

Many conflicting themes, all of them coming together to create one of the most thought provoking films by the Cohens yet.

Having not read the novel, I can only pass along my thoughts on the Coen brothers’ interpretation.

However, having read The Road, I am urging everyone I know to read it before anything on the film adaptation makes it’s way to the mainstream. Without any reference for the characters it’s easy to make them who you want them to be. After you know who’s being cast, it spoils it. When I read it, it was me & my son on that road. Kind of hard to do that with (name withheld for those who haven’t found out) cast as the father already in your mind.