1. In the opening narration, Sheriff Bell talks about sending a boy to the electric chair. In the book, he sends him to the gas chamber. I assume the Coens made the change in order to link the criminal to Ed Crane and George Nelson, both of whom die in the electric chair in their movies (or perhaps to more accurately reflect the reality of Texas executions in 1980).

2. When Moss stumbles upon the suitcase full of money while trying to track down his wounded antelope, for some reason I was reminded of Jed Clampett. And it occurs to me that The Beverly Hillbillies would have been a better show if Jed was forced to flee his home to a number of dingy motels, outrunning ruthless killers every step of the way, in order to protect his family, before finally losing everything. Although obviously that would involve a title change. (It also occurs to me that There Will Be Blood, in its final 20 minutes, becomes a deadly serious take on The Beverly Hillbillies.)

3. I was impressed with Josh Brolin’s performance in No Country, as I’ve been impressed with his performances in Grindhouse and American Gangster this year as well. The kid’s come a long way since The Goonies.

4. The movie Carla Jean is watching when Moss comes in with the suitcase full of money is Flight to Tangier, a 1953 thriller about, yes, a bunch of people pursuing a large amount of missing cash. The movie was made in 3-D and three-strip Technicolor, but Carla Jean seems happy enough to watch it on her black-and-white TV — a comment on the diminished lives of the characters of No Country?

5. If I haven’t done so enough before, let me now again praise the Coens for the shooting style of No Country. For directors who know more about cool cinematic tricks than just about anyone else out there, the Coens pare back their vocabulary in No Country to the bare essentials, to match the spare, no-quotation-marks-please style of the novel. Most of No Country consists of uninflected shots of men performing simple tasks — picking up a shell casing, walking through the desert, sawing off a gun barrel, cutting the hook off a wire clothes hanger, driving a car, so forth. There is little narrative beyond the recording of physical activity (another thing No Country shares with There Will Be Blood). The Coens had faith that the story would contain enough novelty and suspense (I cannot see how it could contain more than it does) that they would not have to resort to flashy technique to “sell” it.

6. When Sheriff Bell goes to see his Uncle Ellis in order to get some perspective on this madness, Ellis reminds him that extreme, senseless violence has been with us since the country’s conception and counsels him against thinking he can stem the tide of blood. “You can’t stop what’s comin.’ It ain’t all waitin’ on you,” he says, “that’s vanity.” This line is not in the book, although it could have easily. And then I note that, in the very next scene, when Carla Jean comes into her bedroom to find Chigurh there, she says “I need to sit down.” In the book (and in the screenplay), she sits down on the bed, but in the movie she sits at, yes, the vanity.

7. Carla Jean, while fleeing her home with Moss, says “I’m used to lots of things — I work at Wal-Mart,” another reference to the “breakdown of mercantile ethics” that the movie sees as the central cause of the escalation of violence that informs its narrative.

8. For a movie about hunters and trackers all pursuing and eluding each other, its odd that no one in the movie seems concerned for a second about fingerprints. Moss leaves them all over the place at the crime scene (in the book he takes time to remove all his prints), and when Sheriff Bell sees that Chigurh has left a milk bottle sitting on Moss’s coffee table, he sees no reason not to pick it up and have a drink himself.

9. For a movie about a breakdown of mercantile ethics, there seem to be damn few customers around. The cafes, the stores, the shopping districts, they’re all hugely devoid of people. The sporting-goods store where Moss shops has a gun clerk and a camping-supply clerk, but no customers. Moss asks the clerk at the clothes store he patronizes (twice) if they get many customers without clothes, but he might as well ask if they get any customers at all.

10. In the book, when Chigurh shoots Moss during the fracas at the Eagle Hotel, Moss is shocked and wounded but still takes the time to stop, examine his wound and say “Damn, what a shot,” a marvelous character moment I am surprised didn’t make it into the movie.

11. It’s worth noting that, for a movie so bleakly, relentlessly violent, the Coens leave out a substantial number of killings that are in the book, a good twenty or thirty by my count. Think of that.

12. I see a thematic link between Moss’s body and the Dude’s car in Lebowski — each gets insulted and damaged repeatedly, in novel ways, until finally both are destroyed.

13. The Coens’ narratives often involve conflicts between talkers and non-talkers. No Country features a narrative between three non-talkers, all kind of challenging each other to a non-talk-off. The one talker, Wells, is insulted by Moss for talking so much even as he’s trying to save Moss’s life. This is, I’m guessing, why Wells has to die.

WHERE’S THE MONEY, LLEWELYN? The Coens’ movies rarely have anything good to say about capitalism, but there is nothing in their oeuvre that is quite as scorched-earth in its criticism as No Country. And you could say “Well, it’s just a movie about a drug deal gone wrong, let’s not read too much into it” but Cormac McCarthy’s novel makes the criticism of capitalism explicit; Sheriff Bell describes the rising tide of drug-related violence as “a breakdown in mercantile ethics that leaves people settin around out in the desert dead in their vehicles.”

Let’s review the plot of No Country from the point of view of The Man Who Hires Wells. The Man Who Hires Wells (Stephen Root) is a Texas businessman involved in a dope deal with some Mexican drug suppliers. He sends some men down to the Rio Grande to give $2.4 million to the suppliers in exchange for a truckload of brown heroin. The deal goes bad and everyone winds up dead. The suppliers send some men to recover the heroin. Those men happen upon Moss as he’s trying to give one of their dying compadres some water. They try to kill him but fail and Moss gets away. The Man Who Hires Wells hires Chigurh to recover the money. Two of his associates take Chigurh down to the “colossal goatfuck in the desert” to show him around and give him a tracker to trace the location of the money, which has a transponder hidden in it. So far, so good.

Chigurh takes the tracker and kills the associates, then takes off after the money himself. This is what is called The Entrepreneurial Spirit; Chigurh is, seemingly, going into business for himself. This makes The Man Who Hires Wells very angry and he, um hires Wells, a bounty hunter, to find Chigurh and kill him, and also recover his $2.4 million.

Chigurh finds the money, but it turns out that there is a second team of people looking for it, Mexicans who are not as skilled as Chigurh but who are far more numerous. That is to say, The Man Who Hires Wells has also hired a small army of unskilled laborers to compete with his expensive specialist. No doubt, it is his hope that his cheap laborers will kill his expensive specialist and save him a healthy chunk of cash.

There is a scene later on where Bell’s deputy says that the dead men in the Regal Motel “were Mexicans” and Bell asks if there is some question as to when they stopped being Mexicans. At first I thought this was some kind of morbid joke on the part of Bell, but when you look at it from the point of view of The Man Who Hires Wells, there is a political aspect to his decision to hire cheap laborers to compete with his cold-blooded assassin. Did The Man Who Hires Wells promise citizenship to his army of Mexicans, or were they already Americans? When did they “stop being Mexicans?” Or were they Mexicans up until the end of their lives, merely an example of management trying to replace American workers with cheap foreign labor?

In any case, Chigurh has to kill the Mexicans in order to eliminate his competition. (In the book, there are a whole lot more Mexicans that complicate the plot — they show up at the Eagle Hotel, tap Carla Jean’s phone line and show up at the Desert Sands Motel to kill Moss.)

Chigurh finds Moss, who, it turns out, is unwilling to part with the money. In addition, it turns out that, to Chigurh’s surprise, Moss is a pretty skilled laborer himself, trained by his country to kill (in the book we learn that Moss was a sniper in Special Forces in Vietnam). Moss wounds Chigurh and Chigurh, after healing up, kills Carson Wells as well. Then he travels to the city where The Man Who Hires Wells works, goes to his office and shoots him in the face.

(In the book, as the man lies dying on the floor of his office, Chigurh explains that he used birdshot to shoot him in the face because he was concerned about breaking the window behind him. How appropriate that our own Vice President, Dick “Chigurh” Cheney also used birdshot to shoot a man in the face, even though the man hadn’t double-crossed him in a drug deal.)

Why does Chigurh kill The Man Who Hires Wells? Because he disapproves of his hiring cheap foreign labor to compete with skilled experts for domestic jobs. “You pick the one right tool” is the way he puts it to The Man Who Hires Wells’s Accountant.

(When Chigurh has Carson Wells in his sights, Wells says “You don’t have to do this — I’m just a day trader,” an attempt to place himself in a different job category from Chigurh, a distinction Chigurh sees as irrelevant.)

After killing The Man Who Hires Wells, Chigurh travels to El Paso to get what he now considers his money. More Mexicans (subordinate to someone named “Acosta” in the screenplay, a name not found in the book) have already killed Moss, but they have failed to recover the money, leaving Chigurh to waltz into the Desert Aire Motel and fetch the money where Moss has hidden it.

After getting his money, and after an appreciable interval of time, Chigurh travels to Odessa to kill Moss’s wife Carla Jean. Why? He has his money, she has done nothing to him. He does it out principle — he had promised Moss that he would kill Carla Jean and feels honor-bound to follow through. Money is money, and that’s all nice and all, but to Chigurh there are things beyond money. There is his craft, and his word, which no amount of money can satisfy. In this way, Chigurh finally escapes the snare of capitalism and regains his honor. For his reward, he is creamed by a station-wagon in a freak accident.

(It is worth noting that, in the book, the car that hits Chigurh is being driven by a bunch of intoxicated Mexican teenagers — that is, Chigurh, a high-level drug dealer’s goon, is laid low by the ultimate product of his business — a carload of inebriated teenagers, and foreigners to boot. This was, apparently, a level of irony too leaden for the Coens to include.)

Here’s a question: why did The Man Who Hires Wells put a transponder in the money? The thing that comes to my mind is that The Man Who Hires Wells intended, from the very beginning, to get the heroin, hand over the money, then send people to go get the money back. In fact, it would not surprise me to learn (the book does not make it clear) that Chigurh, from the very beginning, was hired to recover the money long before Moss ever stumbled across it. In fact, I would be willing to wager that that is why Chigurh is in the area when the drug deal goes down — he was, I’d guess, on his way to the job when he got pulled over by the deputy at the beginning of the movie. (In the book, Chigurh deliberately gets himself arrested just to see if he can extricate himself by an act of will.) If that’s the case, it explains why Chigurh kills the managerial types — he disapproves of their immoral business code, the “breakdown of mercantile ethics that leaves people settin around in the desert dead in their vehicles.” In his own demented way, Chigurh is a moralist, an strict enforcer of sound business practices. You don’t build a business by ripping off your suppliers — that’s just wrong.

NOW THEN: Chigurh’s ultimate destiny, economically speaking, is quite different in the book. Yes he kills all those people to get to the money, yes he kills his immediate superiors, yes he kills The Man Who Hires Wells. But in the book, once all those people are dead and the money is in his possession, Chigurh takes considerable pains to locate The Man Who Hires Wells’s boss, a mysterious businessman who put up the $2.4 million for the heroin deal in the first place. Chigurh doesn’t kill this man — rather, he returns the money to him and they discuss forming a partnership. Chigurh in the book ultimately does not mind being an employee, but he can’t stand all these middlemen who gum up the works and screw up the job through their greed and double-dealing. Apparently to Chigurh,the smart businessman doesn’t just pick the one right tool, he picks the one right tool and then throws out all his other tools.

NEXT: Chigurh — man or superman?

Then there’s Gawain MacSam, who’s a skinny, trash-talking black kid, played by Marlon Wayans, who makes his living making fun of characters just like this. And I’ve got to say, I’m flummoxed. I’ve watched The Ladykillers three times now and I have yet to find anything original, interesting, fresh or specific about Gawain. He swears a lot, he’s bored, he mouths off, he thinks about sex, he’s a masher — in a movie full of characters we don’t see very often onscreen, Gawain is a character we see all the time, and is not rendered in any particularly interesting or original way. He’s that rarity in Coen movies, a generic character. (In Intolerable Cruelty the generic characters formed a whole substrata of the cast, and thus balanced each other out more.) There are odd moments of dead space and negative energy in The Ladykillers, something I’ve never encountered in Coen movies before, and most of them seem to revolve around scenes with Gawain. Where there should be some kind of spur there seems to be only regurgitation of cliche, as though the Coens weren’t exactly sure what to do with the character.

(The Coens perhaps sensed that they had dropped the ball with Gawain — he’s the only character who gets a flashback sequence, a move which, I think, is meant to give him three dimensions, but succeeds only in giving him two, because his flashback scene is actually just another cliche.)

(I know that Gawain’s lack ofinteresting characteristics is not the fault of Marlon Wayans, because Wayans can be a wonderful actor — his performance in Requiem For a Dream is revelatory.)

Facing this motley crew is antagonist Marva Munson, who, although a stock character her own self, is brought to vivid life by Irma P. Hall, who is smashing in the role and the number 1 reason for watching it. Reviewers for some reason never mention Hall, who gives, I think, one of the handful of great Coen performances. I think because she so perfectly embodies the part people consider her some kind of a found object, but for my money Irma Hall in The Ladykillers is as good a match between actor and role as Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski and Tommy Lee Jones in No Country For Old Men.

MUSIC: The Ladykillers is, in some ways, almost a sequel to O Brother Where Art Thou. You can hear the pitch meeting, where the Coens tell the Disney executives “This movie will do for gospel music what O Brother did for folk! And that movie didn’t even have a plot!” It’s set in the same state, sixty or so years later, and in many ways it’s as though the Coens said “Let’s check in with that location of O Brother and see how those folks turned out, after the flood and the modernization and whatnot.” Or, rather, as some here have pointed out, maybe the Coens, looking at O Brother, realized that they left out a huge chunk of story in their portrait of the Deep South (namely, black people) and decided to set forth to correct that imbalance.

Gospel music is almost a second antagonist in The Ladykillers — it is music we associate with Marva, but also music we associate with the garbage heap in the middle of the Mississippi river, where most of the movie’s main characters end up. The garbage heap represents Death (the Coens underline the symbolism by having not just a raven on the bridge, and not just a gargoyle in the form of a reaper, but a raven perched on a reaper — as though they thought, for the sake of a studio picture, they had to triple-underline their symbols).

And yet the river below the bridge does not seem to lead to hell, exactly. The garbage island in the river glows with divine light in the title sequence, and all the bridge sequences are scored with the most lovely, powerful gospel music. The garbage island is, I’d say, something else — divine retribution. The God of The Ladykillers, in spite of being Baptist, is a very Old Testament kind of God, a God of vengeance and righteous anger. This God does not forgive, he attacks (he “smotes,” in the words of the Baptist minister, an authoritative, electrifying performance by George Anthony Bell). It’s not just Marva who’s against Goldthwait, it’s God. And his music.

The antithesis to the gospel music in The Ladykillers is what Marva calls “hippety-hop,” music seen by Marva to be profane, soul-degrading music. I think this is why Gawain is given so much emphasis in the movie — “his” music is the antithesis to Marva’s music, and thus they are natural enemies. And yet Gawain is not the protagonist, Goldthwait is — and he listens to Renaissance music (although he doesn’t really — he just spouts a bunch of long-winded gibberish about it and sounds authoritative — more on which later).

The idea of pitting Gospel against “hippety-hop” is a good one, in fact I’d say it’s the strongest one in the movie. But then why not make Gawain the protagonist (and interesting)? This is one of a number of places The Ladykillers presents a good idea and then fails to develop it, a relative anomaly in the Coen world.

(It occurs to me that perhaps Gawain was, at one point, the protagonist of the movie, an idea far stronger than having Goldthwait be the protagonist.  I wonder if that was their original concept, and then the studio people told them they could get Tom Hanks to play “the Alec Guiness part,” and also get themselves a budget of $70 million?)

Sociological,economic, racial and educational disparity among the characters gives the weight to all the conflicts in The Ladykillers, and the movie seems to be saying that, no matter who you are, no matter where you’re from or what your politics are, no matter what is the color of your skin or your level of intellect, everyone ends up on the same garbage island.

But wait, that’s not quite it either — it is only the heathen criminals who end up on the garbage island — specifically because they would, literally, rather die than attend a church service. This seems to support the idea of a New Testament God with a strict fundamentalist attitude — you must be a “good Christian” to avoid the garbage heap (The General, the movie explicitly states, is a Buddhist — so he must die). I find this facile, moralistic aspect of The Ladykillers interesting but unconvincing — like a lot of the movie, it doesn’t feel like it’s been thought all the way through.

(It is a sign of how fallen our world is that the garbage barges that service the island seem to run non-stop on a 24-hour basis, transporting corrupt souls to the afterworld.)

RACE: The racism of Mississippi that O Brother glided over is examined more closely in The Ladykillers, to intriguing but ultimately confusing ends. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s hangs over the movie like a ghost — Pancake lords it over Gawain because he fought Bull Connor and says that Gawain has a duty to improve himself since white liberals like Pancake fought so hard for his freedoms. The General comes from another area of the 60s, of course, Vietnam, and Lump is too stupid to stand for much of anything. Perhaps it’s symbolic that Goldthwait dresses like a plantation owner and quotes Edgar Allan Poe — Poe was the son of a slave-trader and, during his stint as a soldier, manned Fort Moultrie in South Carolina — the way-station for all incoming slave ships.

Does Goldthwait, with his weird clothes, backward ways and romantic manner of speech, represent some sort of ghost of the antebellum south? If so, why does he treat Marva with such respect and kindness? (It is not his idea to kill her in Act III, it’s The General’s — and Goldthwait never comes anywhere near to killing her himself.) Midway through Act III, he tries to corrupt Marva, talk her into taking a portion of the stolen money and donating it to charity — is that his function in the story? His he an antebellum ghost-devil sent to tempt Marva into a life of crime?

EDUCATION: Goldthwait puts Gawain in his place by saying he has a Ph.D. Gawain responds by saying he has a G.E.D. Education, who has it, who lacks it, and who has done what with it is a vital concern to The Ladykillers. Marva is, herself, uneducated, but she believes strongly in education, so much so that she donates money to Bob Jones university.

Now then: what is Bob Jones University? Funny you should ask. The movie never talks about it, but Bob Jones University was founded by, yes, Bob Jones, a fundamentalist Christian evangelist — and a straight-up racist, who helped put Ku Klux Klan members in high political offices and campaigned for segregation until the day he died.

Why does Marva support Bob Jones University? Because it’s a Christian evangelist school. She has no sense of history, she has only a pie-in-the-sky vision of divinity. The ugly little joke at the center of The Ladykillers seems to be that nice, sweet, saintly Marva Munson is, at the end of the day, just another ignorant southern black woman, too stupid to know what’s best for her. A fortune in stolen money lands in her lap, and she goes and turns it over to a racist institution. I have no idea what to make of this plot point, but it leaves a bitter, non-Coenesque aftertaste that I dislike.

(Is Goldthwait’s function, in fact, to manipulate events so that Marva ends up supporting a racist institution? Is that why he appears as an antebellum ghost?)

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: Law-enforcement personnel in The Ladykillers are lazy, cheerful and unhelpful. The fact that the sheriff is black and played by an actor named George Wallace has got to be some kind of cosmic joke.

I HAVE A QUESTION: It’s unclear when The Ladykillers takes place. There’s no overwhelming reason it can’t be taking place in 2004, except that the movie begins with Marva complaining to the sheriff about a neighbor who’s bought himself a “blaster,” that is, one of these. It’s not impossible, but it seems highly unlikely to me that any self-respecting young man would be listening to hip-hop or any other music on a ghetto-blaster in 2004. Especially when the song he plays over and over is “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” a 1990 song by A Tribe Called Quest. It makes perfect sense that a young man would purchase a ghetto blaster to listen to A Tribe Called Quest on in 1990, the year hip-hop exploded, but then, midway through the movie Gawain makes a pointed reference to Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her husband’s penis in 1993.

If, then, The Ladykillers takes place in 1993 or 1994, Bob Jones University would still be prohibiting interracial dating on their campus, a practice they continued until 2000. It is possible that, if the movie is set in 2004, that Marva has been won over by the new dawn of racial tolerance at Bob Jones University — but I doubt it. Partly because it is a rarity for a Coen movie to take place in the present day, and partly because no one has any cell phones.

(Marva also refers to the current day as “The Age of Montel” — Montel Williams‘s career was just breaking in 1991.)

THE MELTING POT: Goldthwait is a white southerner, Pancake is a white northerner. The General is, as mentioned, Vietnamese (who has no love for black people), Lump is white but very, very stupid, and Gawain is an uneducated, working-class black man. The sheriff’s department has two employees, one black and one white, both of whom seem nice enough. Marva is, of course, black, and so are all her friends.

Where are the Jews? Only one is mentioned by ethnicity — the “Jew with a guitar” who sang at Marva’s church during the 1960s (another reference to fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan?). But of course another Jew exerts his influence over The Ladykillers — Jesus, whom Marva loves dearly, but whose teachings are given a definite Old Testament sting (the Baptist minister goes out of his way to discuss the Israelites and God “smoting” them).

HOW’S THE MOVIE? Despite its flaws, I find much intriguing and worthwhile in The Ladykillers. In some ways I find it to be a more successful movie than Intolerable Cruelty, or at least a more “Coenesque” movie. There are a lot of interesting ideas that are evoked and examined. The trouble is, they aren’t developed in satisfying ways and they are saddled with some physical comedy I find quite lame in both concept and execution. I have little patience for Pancake’s Irritable Bowel Syndrome, the dead-husband’s-changing portrait is way too cute, and The General’s cigarette-hiding trick grows old fast.

Finally, I’ve got to say, I find the architecture of Act III of The Ladykillers woefully uninspired. Just as the movie is supposed to be charging toward a satisfying climax, it backs off and presents a bunch of lame, repetitive set pieces. It’s like the Coens set up a perfectly workable situation, then got to the end of Act II and ran out of steam.

JOEL: So they decide to kill the lady. And then what happens?
ETHAN: And then, I don’t know, I guess they all kill each other.
JOEL: How?
ETHAN: They, they, I don’t know man, they kill each other. We’ll think of something. We’re the Coen Brothers, man, we’re the greatest screenwriters working.