Yeah, I feel like I have to read the book now. It started out like a Coen Brothers movie and wound up like a Flannery O'Connor story. What I loved so much was how the Coen Brothers knowingly subverted not only genre conventions, but the conventions of other Coen Brothers movies - everything I had come to expect from seeing every one of their other movies was deliberately defied.
I stayed up until three o'clock this morning talking about different interpretations of the Javier Bardem character and his relation to Tommy Lee Jones. My friend Danny made a convincing case that he represented the invisible hand of the marketplace, i.e., the violence that underlies the capitalist economy, and that he punished anyone who tried to keep money out of circulation. My wife thinks he's death. I tend to look at it as sort of a Buddhist interpretation: that Bardem is inevitable suffering that can neither be defined nor avoided, and the only way to be spared by him is by letting go of earthly attachments - some of those being money or pride, but in the end even the pursuit of justice or safety. What's so great about all of these interpretations is that they all work to a point but eventually they all fall short - the movie both invites and defies interpretation.