I hate typos as much as the next guy. But my terrible tying skills, plus the fact that I never really learned to reread what I write makes them commonplace on my site. I correct them when I notice, but they always make me sad.
I don't know that the Coens are necessarily interested in something more than the surface. Or at least, I think they really like surfaces of all kinds and I don't think that's necessarily wrong. They're more playful than thoughtful.
If they do have a deeper level, I'm pretty sure it isn't an idea about the world, but rather an idea about cinema and/or narrative in general. No Country is the story of how Tommy Lee Jones learns to cope with the story of Moss and Chigurh, and how we all deal with (or don't deal with) stories of senseless violence. Miller's Crossing is more about film noir and gangster narratives than it is about any "real world" subject. This is, I guess, the modern/post-modern distinction.
Ultimately, I think we have these debates (battles between incompatible subjectivities, not one's in which we learn something we didn't already know like, say, an interpretation of 2001 that makes you say "aha! Now I understand the brilliance of that film!") for ourselves and ourselves alone. We read film criticism to better understand our own responses to film in the light of how other people responded. Whether we agree or not, there is still value in the discussion in that it helps us to better clarify and formalize what we already believe. However, at some point the argument reaches its irreducible core, which is that no two people can ever look at the same thing the exact same way. There's no way to reconcile Dave Kehr's opinion of the Coens and mine. Neither of us can be "right" or "wrong".
I think this particular debate over No Country has reached that point. It certainly helps when he starts from a position of mind-reading the Coens's opinions of their characters and audience. How can that possibly be proved or disproved?
Funny that in writing about how I didn't want to think about this subject anymore, I've ended up writing more than I've written about anything in months.