I didn’t miss not having Bell’s backstory, nor did I mind the additional action. Movies move. You have to have action to make them work. Not a hard and fast rule, but it’s a good general principle.

As to the question of Carla Jean’s fate, if you take the movie by itself (and there’s no reason not to), her survival is debatable. I toyed for a while with the idea that she lived and that her defiance of Chigurh so unsettled him that it led to his ‘accident’, but I’ve backed away from that. I now think she died because there’s no reason to think she didn’t. Everything we know about Chigurh leads us to believe he did exactly what he said he was going to do.

But, as Evan says, it almost doesn’t matter. Her defiance is what counts. She defied him believing she would die if she did.

Finally, thanks Evan for asking me to participate.

That being said, it was still my best of last year, and I don’t feel like I missed out on much. It was still a tightly wound story that seemed right at home on the screen.

Regarding Carla Jean, I thought it was just assumed from the simple shot of Chigurh checking his shoes that he had in fact killed her, and I too loved how it was inferred and not shown, Evan (like a number of the scenes). I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I just didn’t consider the possibility that she was still alive.

Since, as you say, the Coens have subverted some of the novel in their adaptation, going strictly from the film, could a case be made that Chigurh doesn’t kill Carla Jean? You can see the brief look of confusion and frustration when she refuses to play along with his game, to play by his internal rules of logic. Is it feasible that this threw Chigurh off enough to spare her?

As Rick mentioned in his excellent article, Chigurh operates on his own twisted internal logic that is apparent only to himself. Since his internal logic is so convoluted, isn’t it possible that in sparing her, he’s only demonstrating another facet of his complex MO?

In truth, I think that whether or not he kills her isn’t the important part. As you so clearly lay out, Craig, the important part is that she stands up to him, the lone voice of courage in a bleak landscape. Equally important, I think, is that the Coens don’t show what happens. Their silence on the matter speaks much louder than if they had actually shown us what happens.

Great work here, Craig.