The Coen brothers. It brings up an image of Blood Simple and Fargo for me; two films that I felt were very, very good. This one won some Oscars, got nominated for a slew of things, and was just touted as the best film ever. I disagree. Here's why.
The short version is that the movie first, expects you to believe a series of events that just don't make sense to me. Are they remotly conceivable? I guess, but really feel like they're done for plot's sake. Then, for the ending, we're taken completely out of the original story to tie up some loose ends in a way that just doesn't make any sense either and I, frankly, get lost in. Details? Naturally. I don't complain without them.
To start with, it's setup all right. A hunter is out shooting a buck when he fires and they scatter. When he tracks them down, he discovers, instead, a dog limping away from something. Naturally and understandaly curious, he turns back to see what happened. It's a slaughter.
Bodies all over the place around trucks, both left for dead. No survivors...except one who wants water. Our hunter has no water, and looks around to see what else there is. He finds a truck full of drugs, and a dead man under a tree, some distance away. He goes there and finds himself a bag loaded with money...we learn it's two million dollars.
Ok, he takes it...obviously.He goes home with it, and hides the bag under his run down trailer where he lives with his wife. To note, he appears to be Mexican, and she's quite white, so the commentary there about her mother disagreeing with their union is understood easily. Then, we lose our belief. In the middle of the night, he is suddenly guilty over the water guy. He fills up a gallon jug and goes back out there.
Sorry, a truck bed full of drugs and a two million dollar booty doesn't go missed for long, and he should thank his lucky stars he wasn't caught before. Naturally, he's caught now, and barely escapes with his life but without his truck. Now, they can find his house, so he tells his wife to go to mom's, and he runs ith the money.
He hides out in a motel, but we learn that the money has a tracking device in it...however, by watching how that plays out, the tracker apparently only has a range of maybe a quarter to a half a mile at the most. This means that he's gone many miles away, no where near his home, and the bad guy finds him? What?! And then, to top that off, he gets into the wrong hotel room and runs across a bunch of Mexicans with a bunch of guns and he blows them away...but not our hunter. Who the heck are these other guys? It never says.
So our hunter checks into another hotel in a city, but it never occus to him to consider how he might have been located. While dumb luck is the real key here, he has to go to sleep and wake up later to think of there being a tracking device in the money. He finds it in short order, and then notices the room light next door on (since he's in a hotel with adjoining rooms). I would have dropped the tracker in a drawer and skipped out right then.
Nope. He turns the light back off and sits on the bed waiting for the inevitable, which happens. Our villain somehow got back in range and found him again. After a brief shoot out, our hunter jumps out the window...and runs back into the hotel (okay, that works...I mean, he could hide in a room in the hotel and never be found, right?), but he runs out a back door, apparently visible from the villain's room since he gets shot at (even though the villain was in a room next to the hunters...on the front side of the hotel).
So the hunter flags down a vehicle and hops in, telling the driver to drive...but our bad guy fires again...shooting the driver. Huh? So our hunter drives the vehicle from the passenger side and on a totally clear road, he manages to lose control and slam into a...parked car. Insert shootout here from which both parties survive.
More stuff and a pointless subplot happens until the wife and her mother are supposed to meet up with them...but mom tells a strange Mexican everything causing the bad guy to beat them to the next hotel and blow our hunter away before anyone gets there. D'oh! And the movie's not over yet. Where's the money? No one knows. Where are the aforementioned drugs? No one has said.
Instead, we get a conversation between the sheriff on the case and his dad. Then the villain visits the dead hunter's wife (who just buried her mom...no mention of how that happened). Nothing is said of what became of her, but we can suspect she was shot (why not?). Then our villain is driving away from that scene down a peaceful street when BAM! He's side slammed by another car, breaking his arm. Why? I don't know!
So in the end, we get a chatter from the sheriff, who is now retired, telling us about a dream he had about his dad. And then it's over. ?! Wait, it's over? Last time I was surprised by a movie suddenly ending was The Godfather Part II, but at least that one made sense. Maybe I missed the point. I don't know, but we had a plot about a bit of money being chased around, and a sheriff kind of tracking it. Then the sheriff gets complacent about the whole thing, and gives up. Our hunter becomes our sentimental focus of the story, and then he's knocked off and forgotten. The money is a focus, but it gets absconded with and is also gone...we know not where.
Granted, the movie has some decent and even unique characters. Maybe one can argue that it's just a tretise on life where anything can happen, and it sucks anyway, but come on...this is a movie! One of my favorite quotes is, "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." This is based on a novel, which is fiction, as far as I know, but it makes little sense. Maybe devotees of the novel just loved and understand what happened to the wife's mother. For me, I just note we're at a funeral and I'm going, "Who the heck is Agnes?"
I guess this is just another situation like The French Connection where everyone just loved it, and I just didn't get it. For this movie, while it had good characters, the plot was unbelievable, the situations near impossible, the characters' actions served the plot, and I'm sure they were going for clever dialogue in some scenes, but it just came off as gratuitous. So, for me, it didn't work.
Now, I have had occasion to be in the "wrong place" for certain types of movies, and perhaps I was expecting convention where I got weirdness. Maybe I expected one character as the lead where it was about someone completely different. Or maybe it had the Coen name stamped on it, and they got points for that. I don't know. Maybe someday I'll watch it again and catch all the fabulous and wonderful subtleties that won it the Oscars, but at this time, it's a movie that missed the mark in my book.
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