No Country for Old Men
Wendell bites back a smile. Sheriff Bell gazes at him over his glasses for a long beat, deadpan. “...That’s all right. I laugh myself sometimes.” He goes back to the paper. “...There ain’t a whole lot else you can do.”
This scene, from No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers’ best film since Fargo, struck me as the perfect description for this brilliant, bleak, violent, challenging movie based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. In its own little way, this scene, and that line by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is the best metaphor for a story of inexplicable and endless violence. How are we supposed to cope? Sometimes, as I often hear myself saying, in the face of such inhumanity, laughter is your only defense.
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