Fox Searchlight has either done a great job of picking up indie films over the past few years or they’ve done a great job of intentionally producing “indie-ish” films over the years. Either way, I’ve really enjoyed the stuff they’ve been putting out of late. Juno is the tale of an oddball high schooler who gets pregnant and decides to go through with the pregnancy and give her little sea monkey up for adoption (good for her). Juno is one of those special kinds of people who speaks in a never ending stream of witticisms and poetic sarcasm and yet after a few minutes it feels natural… somehow. What I most appreciated about Juno was the dedication to imperfect, weird characters. No one gets a pass. The would-be suburbanite parents Juno wants to give her baby to are much more broken and odd than appearances first let on. The husband, Mark, is a failed musician writing jingles for commercials who still has aspirations to become a rock superstar. His wife, Vanessa, has become a one-woman religion dedicating herself to “becoming a mother.” Her devotion to this task borders on creepy at times. Juno and her baby-daddy, Paulie Bleeker (played by Michael Cera) have plenty of their own coming-of age issues to work out in the midst of bringing a baby into the world and seeing if they might dive dating a second chance (or first, depending on who you ask). It’s a touching film without feeling contrived or sentimental.

While Kara has been working feverishly to finish up her final papers for the semester she’s given me leave to take off and watch movies. This serves dual purposes of not having me around to distract her while she’s hardest at work and it gives me the chance to go watch some films that aren’t exactly on the top of her list. One of these films was No Country for Old Men.

I grew up in the desert of eastern New Mexico and this film flawlessly captures the quiet, echoing wide-open spaces that the eastern New Mexico/west Texas desert is made of. There are long periods of time where dramatic landscape is accompanied by an equally dramatic silence. This is fitting for the desert of the southwest. Quiet. Dry. Hot. Windy. All these pieces of the setting make this the perfect place for an incredible thriller. But the acting in No Country for Old Men is far weighter than that in a thriller film, it’s too nuanced and real to be a horror flick. But I found the mundane elements that dominate the film to make the horror all the more scary.

What’s more, I was very pleased to see the story follow a trajectory that was authentic to the groundwork it had already laid [read: bleak and mundane] rather than throwing on the breaks at the very end in order to give the standard happy hollywood ending. By the way this is something that made my fellow moviegoers very unhappy… to the point of actually booing the ending of the film. I however, was cringing near the end fearfully waiting for everything to get tied up in a neat bow. Lucky for me, there was no bow, no finish that would wipe out or give a sigh of relief to the events that had just transpired. I got the sense that I had only seen a window of time in the life of a few people from a town in west Texas. There is no real sense of beginning middle and end, but instead a whole lot of middle. I found that to be more true to life than had this story been neatly packaged with a “fitting ending” where justice is served and we can all go home and erase the brutality of Anton because he got his just desserts.

So as it is with so many films, the best ones often do not have “happy” endings or uplifting subject matter, but are brutally honest in how tragic events can end up. Frustratingly tragic and anti-climatic.

I just reviewed a chapter of John D. Caputo’s new book What Would Jesus Deconstruct? over at Church at Postmodern Culture.  If you’re into that kind of stuff go check it out here.