The triumph of evil over good.

Good has nothing going for it in this movie. The last violent scene felt like the punch line to the whole movie: Not even random bad luck can stop an evil man. In contrast, Moss (Josh Brolin) refuses to abandon or even mess around on his wife and for this he gets greased by a truck full of Mexican drug dealers.

Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is a good guy, but he can’t stop even a single one of the bad things that happens. The old man with the cats saying he would forgive the person who (presumably) had put him in the chair is good, but his situation is pretty bleak. Hell, Moss would have gotten off scot-free if not for his need to do a good deed.

Chigurh (Javier Bardem), the bad guy with the bad hair (and an unpronounceable name), steals the show. The scene with the coin and the old Texas gas station attendant is more effective at articulating an evil character than anything else from recent memory. And it contains no blood.

This is just a great movie.

It’s about redemption, but not just for Jason Bourne, an incredibly likeable assassin who discovered (in previous movies) that he has been turned into a killing machine by the government. Moreover, he has lost his taste for killing. In this movie, we discover his own complicity in the nasty business of turning himself into a killer. The movie doesn’t actually say, but one imagines it was September 11 that drove Bourne to such desperate measures. Now he’s sorry and wants to make up for it, indicting (but not killing!) all of the right wing loonies he’s been in bed with the past few years.

Bourne is an American everyman in a Post-Iraq-Goat-Rope-Brought-To-Us-By-Our-Paranoia world. In this movie, he has finally come around. Good for him.

Good for us.

This is a dark fairytale about a little girl’s coming-of-age during the Spanish revolution. Ofelia, a young girl who loves fairy tales, is being brought to the country to live with her mother’s new husband, a dark Captain serving with the fascist forces. No sooner is Ofelia in the country, she begins fantasizing she has met a vaguely terrifying faun who sends her on quests.
 
All of the father’s in this movie are evil or weak: the Captain, the faun (I know this is sort of a metaphoric fatherhood role, but I gasped at one point when an imperiled Ofelia nuzzles with the faun, as any child might with a parent), even early on there is a peasant farmer who watches helplessly as the Captain slaughters his son. I found it creepy how Ofelia’s relationship to the faun sort of mirrored her mother’s relationship to the Captain. On one level it seems perfectly normal for Ofelia to imagine a character as dark as the faun, considering how the Captain eagerly risks Carmen’s life.

The big hero is Mercedes, a rebel working serreptitiously inside the Captain’s compound. She is not the hero because she is the only one to stand up for Ofelia (although she is), but because she offers a strong contrast to Carmen’s behavior with men for Ofelia. Mercedes righteously stands up for what she believes in, even though doing so puts her life in considerable danger. Ultimately all of Ofelia’s quests can be seen as a way of getting her to think for herself, instead of letting herself be pulled along by mere circumstance, like her mother. In what is arguably the most satisfying decision to rebel since Tom Sawyer chose to go to hell, Ofelia chooses, in the end, to be like Mercedes.

I like how ambiguous the story is about whether Ofelia’s fantasy world is real or invented. At the risk of sounding like a kook, I am not so sure I would argue for one or the other, real or imagined. The movie gets a lot of its tension from this ambiguity.

But I thought there was a bit too much gore. We get the Captain is an evil man even without all the fake blood. A minor point in what is otherwise a great movie.

Here is my favorite spoiler story: We were taking my daughter, who was 4 years old at the time, to a Christmas play and we had one of her friends in the car. My wife and I had just started attending Catholic church that year and my daughter was enjoying a mild surge of curiosity about Jesus. We played up the idea that Christmas was baby Jesus’ birthday and got a little nativity scene for the house. From the back seat, I heard my daughter start humming a little Christian tune, “Jesus Loves Me.”

Then I heard her little friend say this: “Jesus? He’s dead. They stuck pins in his feet and hands and killed him.”

Horrified I looked over to my wife and saw she was looking back at me with the same astonished expression. From the back seat, my daughter, her voice rising three octaves, said, “Dadddddyyyyyy?”

It was very fucked up.

Trying not to appear too angry with her little friend, I said to my daughter, “We were just getting to that part, sweetie. I promise.” You don’t realize how ridiculous the whole Christian thing sounds until you try to explain it to a semi-hysterical four year old. “But the good news is, he rises from the dead three days later. No, really. It’s called Easter. And there’s this bunny. And you get lots of candy and stuff.”

“Just as good as Christmas. Maybe even better.”