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I just heard this show.. I'm not too pretentious about movies and can freely admit that for a movie like There Will Be Blood, while it interested me, I didn't totally get it.
But I thought No Country was amazing and is unquestionably my favorite movie of 07. Unlike others, though, I would never use words like 'innocence lost,' 'awe' or other vague pretentious bullshit in describing what I got out of it.
To me the movie was a simple moral tale with a message - that death isn't a bad thing, and being alive isn't necessarily good. The way Josh Brolin's character was killed spoke to this - he's supposed to be the protagonist but they totally brush over his death in what was clearly some sort of shootout that we don't even see. That's them saying 'hey, maybe death isn't such a big deal.' At least, though, he still had passion and drive in life. This is contrasted by all the old characters who are washed up, crippled, and useless, too afraid to hunt down Bardem, and even not worth killing (Bardem leaves Tommy Lee Jones alive in that room).
I think the ending totally fits with this understanding of the movie because by ending so abruptly, it was playing with the message of the movie. Instead of waiting for things to end and draw to a nice tidy bundle of a close, it just ended when we were wondering what was going to happen next. The collective WTF in the theater was their way of "killing" the movie abruptly like they did Brolin's character, instead of extending it to a peaceful, agonizing let-down of a death as is happening to all the old people in the movie. They're kind of poking fun of how movies are often so awesome, yet fall apart at the end and disappoint the audience, and applying that metaphor to human life.
Tommy Lee Jones' lil soliloquies also spelled this out pretty obviously.. the first one, where he was saying something about he'd always been waiting for something to happen in his life, yet nothing did. And the dream at the end where his dad passed him on the way to the camp, with a warm fire, meaning that his early death wasn't a bad thing, but meant that he reached peace and comfort earlier than TLJ's character.
Maybe that sounds really pretentious to some people but at least I can explain exactly what I got out of the movie and why I liked everything from the way they handled Brolin's death to the ending without being vague. I know too many people who liked this movie, but when you ask why, they have no clue, or they say "hmm, I can't explain it."
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