Two movies in one day - utter indulgence!

I went to see a film screening with my roommate today. It was the oscar winner for 2007 - No Country for Old Men. You know, I have a strong stomach in general and the blood and gore rarely get to me. So I can't say this film was too bloody or gory for my tastes. Yet, perhaps it's my current state of mind. I still had trouble stomaching it. In the same way There Will be Blood filled me with tense utter dread in its entirety, this film had me similarly gripped, trapped, enthralled in its horrificness.

The backdrop of this film was 1980 Texas. The landscape is desolate, barren, a wasteland. It complements the theme of the film perfectly, the hardships of living in a place like this, the pain of existing in a world becoming increasingly mad. The main story is of a hired gun, who kills for a living perhaps, but appears to be overly eager to kill for no reason at all. Like most psychopaths, this one thrives on the thrill of power and control over his hapless victims. They live or die entirely according to his whim. What is particularly scary about him and creeped me out was his page boy like hair, oddly incongruous with his stony, cold, broad face. He moves slowly too, deliberately, never in a hurry. He walks like a man who knows he has all the time in the world to kill and kill he usually does. I kept waiting for him to show a sign of weakness, anything to denote that he is anything other than a pure unadulterated demon. It appears that character complexity was not the high point of this film. Yet it occurred to me that this character later on began to become larger than life, and he represented not just himself, just another lonely serial killer with big guns, but that he was metaphorically speaking, another example of how this world has become increasingly senseless. The horrors that can take place within it, collectively, it is embodied by him.

The other guy in the film, a protagonist who stumbles on some major loot and decides to take it (as most normal people in a fit of weakness might have done) earned the audience sympathy readily enough. He is shown to have a soft spot for his family. Ironically, it is another fit of weakness that ultimately led to his demise - a momentary feeling of guilt perhaps and a stricken conscience. In any case, after he took the money, he essentially started living on borrowed time.

I watched the film with great dread. There were times when I could do nothing but wait in agony as I prepare for yet another victim to die a grisley death. It is actually, truth be told, quite tiresome for the mental psyche. I wanted to like it and I certainly had not been this tortured in a while. Still, in the end, it gave me the same feeling that I had earlier experienced in Ringu, The Grudge, There Will be Blood, and other such movies, which takes bleakness, dementia, murdering sprees to a whole new level.

Thereafter I came home from this film and in order to cleanse my mental palate so to speak, I watched Life is Beautiful and appreciated once again the beauty, the lush and glorious and iridescent hue that life can take on. And my world became a little brighter once again.