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My problem with the movie, ultimately, is with the narrative -- for roughly 4/5ths of the movie, the audience follows along with Llewelyn Moss. At a key moment, Llewelyn is suddenly yanked out of the picture by the (truly bizarre) assassin, Anton Chigurh. To this point, much of the movie followed the back and forth between these two characters, and that Chigurh ultimately prevails is fine by me. What I couldn't accept was the suddenness of their resolution -- and that it happened off-screen.

It's been a week or so since I've seen the movie, but I recall that there is no resolution between Llewelyn and Chigurh, because Llewelyn is killed--not by Chigurh, but by the Mexican drug dealers. Although it happens off-screen, we do see the drug dealers discover where Moss is meeting his wife and horrible mother-in-law, and we later see a dead drug dealer at the motel with Moss's body, and Chigurh doesn't arrive on the scene until later.

celloshane wrote:

It's also not especially vital to the plot to know who did the killing. I completely agree with Bart's main point though. Considering how much the audience attaches to Llewelyn, it's shattering that the main protagonist is killed off-screen.

And it's an even bigger shaft that he was killed off-screen by characters who don't even have name tags.

Felon wrote:

And it's an even bigger shaft that he was killed off-screen by characters who don't even have name tags.

I thought that was awesome in the novel (I have not seen the movie). It was straight forward thriller up to the point you discover Lewellyn and his teenage hitchhiker are dead, then the rules and expectations were upended. The author was plainly playing with expectations too, since Chigurh is the obvious culprit not because he is the "only" suspect in logical sense, but simply because the drug dealers seemed like minor characters and, by literary convention,only the important characters usually do anything important.

In that sense, it was Stoppardesque. Rosencrantz and Guilderstern slew Hamlet, so to speak.

Besides, it wasn't completely random, as it's not as if Chigurh was the only one after Llewellyn, so it wasn't exacty like he died in an freak bus accident. The reader is carefully led from one literary convention to another and then, bang, regular rules of real world logic intrude and you need to think out die the "conventional" box.

Random chance and fate intertwine in the book to decide the fates of the characters, and Moss's death is just another bit of that. From the standpoint of the book it doesn't matter who got the money or who killed Moss, really. It's more about how he got into the position he was in, what desires and thinking drove him there.

Also, in the book it was plainly a story not about Lewellyn, but about three different men Lewellyn, Chigurh and Sheriff Bell, and in some ways more about the Sheriff. The loss of Lewellyn was surprising, but didn't slow the narrative.