“Get away a curiosity! If the rules that you have followed have actually brought you to this point, what those rules served to?”
In the most merciless Texas three sinister individuals fight for getting a handbag full of money.
The first one is a serial insane and inhuman killer, the second a professional engaged by the organized crime to stop the first. There is then Llewelyn Moss, the protagonist, a hard man ended by casual circumstances in stories that do not concern him.
To contour an old sheriff, true soul of the film, tired of the cruelty of the world. It will be him through reflections on the generational differences, on the old age and on the good and the evil, to give a key of deeper reading to the thriller.
The characters are delineated in a perfect way, but only from the point of view of their personality.
Their essence is immediately perceived by the spectator, but some empty spaces stay in their stories, in tendency with a film that leaves more than a question standby.
The four creates a climax from the most merciless to the most human on which the filmmaker plays a lot.
Between them there is a clean discrepancy that is found even among the most similar characters, both in ideological and practical terms.
The killer’s actions in particular way are contrasted to the reflections of the old sheriff. He himself (the sheriff) in an initial scene suggests: ” He has seen what I have seen, and it has impressed me.” The reaction has evidently been different and it has brought to the construction of two opposite psychological profiles but derived by the same evil. It is as if they were two sides of the same coin.
The tone of the film is dark and chaotic, relieved from the raw goodness of the sheriff and from the numerous comic scenes with his deputy, of whom mock is made.
The plot, simple and straight in some passages, and the absent of soundtrack, exalt the superb photography and the power of the dialogues, often hermetic and without a particular logic, but surely of impact.
The only thing that the locations, in the desert first, and on the border with Mexico after, and the shortage of secondary characters do is to go in this direction and to add further pathos to the opera.
The final product is a film of pure aesthetics in which the masterful interpretations of actors are highlighted, as the Academy Award to Javier Bardem confirms.
Amedeo Sebastiani