In the Prison of His Days

In the Coen brothers’ film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Garret Dillahunt, playing Wendell, deputy to Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, gazes over the carnage of a drug-smuggler shoot out in the West Texas desert and declares:

“It’s a mess, ain’t it sheriff.”

Says Sheriff Bell in reply:

“If it ain’t, it’ll do til the mess gets here.”

And the mess, the greater mess – the real mess –  Old Country portends at every turn, right to the very end, is surely coming.

Another Coen brothers’ film about the mess, in one man’s life – we might call him Job, but in this case it’s Larry Gopnik – is A Serious Man.

The Coen brothers are filmmakers about whom one might say, in common parlance, that they are an acquired taste – a rare taste that demands increased familiarity and sensible acculturation in order to be acquired. The phrase is often a misnomer, I think. Cavia…