Good, short piece at Christianity Today that should interest most Coen Brothers fans:

Like [Fargo heroine] Marge herself, the Coens have a longstanding curiosity about matters of morality. But hard as they might try, they can’t seem to shrug off the realities of evil as calmly as their most famous heroine.

There’s a certain moral rigor in all of their movies (well, maybe not in The Ladykillers) that has always suggested, to me, a subtext of spiritual inquiry. Where do these sharply contrasting ideals of right and wrong come from? On what basis do the Coens define virtue and nobility? Christians see goodness as a reflection of who God is, but in many of their films, the Coens, who are Jewish, don’t offer a theology to speak of. Crucially, however, they don’t exclude the possibility, either.

I don’t know that Joel and Ethan Coen have answered the question yet; they may not have the answer. But they at least understand the question. No Country for Old Men—which won the 2008 Oscar for Best Picture—was a full-on breakdown of the Coens’ moral compass. The film followed the devastating trail of death and depravity left by Anton Chigurh, a serial killer over whom human concepts of justice and morality have no power. Tommy Lee Jones plays the local law enforcement, but he’s nowhere near so chipper as Marge Gunderson: “I feel overmatched,” he says, paralyzed by his inability to enforce goodness or bring evildoers to justice.

What, then, of the Divine?