No Country for Old Men
Produced and distributed by Miramax Films
Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen

It’s not often that an audience gasps at the end of a movie and shouts, “What?” or “You’ve got to be kidding” at the screen.  But that’s just what several people did in the theater in which I watched No Country for Old Men.  They were not reacting to what had been shown but, rather, to what had been withheld.  In adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel to the screen, filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen have been almost clinically faithful.  They have even adhered to McCarthy’s willful refusal to provide a climax and resolution to his narrative.

The novel examines how blind chance and ineluctable fate intersect, contradictorily enough, in an arbitrary world, and how human beings react when this existential absurdity finally dawns on them.  And dawn it does, repeatedly, through the agency of a bone-cold angel of death named Chigurh (Javier Bardem), an implacable force given to demonstrating precisely what it means to live in a meaningless world.

Chigurh is a killer who enjoys giving his prey the opportunity to gamble at the edge of their mortality.  Once he has them cornered, he flips a coin and asks them to call the toss.  Should they win, the unspoken prize will be their lives.  When one of his unsuspecting victims, a convenience-store owner, objects that he doesn’t know what he stands to win, Chigurh tells him simply, “Everything.”

But the man persists.  “I didn’t put nothin’ up.”

“Yes you did,” Chigurh replies.  “You’ve been putting it up your whole life.  You just didn’t know it.”  He points out that the date on the coin is 1958.

“It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here.  And now it’s here.  And I’m here. . . . Anything can be an instrument. . . . Small things . . . They pass from hand to hand.  People don’t pay attention.  And then one day there’s an accounting.  And after that nothing is the same.

I’m quoting from the novel, but most of this dialogue is in the film, and Bardem delivers it with an air of disinterested finality that petrifies the shop owner, who belatedly recognizes that, in Chigurh, he has met his own fate.  For Chigurh, every moment is fatally decisive.  Ordinary humanity fails to notice this.  They are distracted either by their everyday lives or by their futile belief in the purposeful order of things.  But, as Chigurh says, there will be an accounting for such childish inattention.

McCarthy takes a common experience most of us have had from time to time and uses it to dramatize a sort of discount existentialism.  When our world is suddenly upturned by the unexpected—a traffic accident, the death of someone close, a dire medical diagnosis, or an implacable hit man—our minds instinctively scramble to account for this affront to our sense of order.  Consider an auto accident.  At the point of impact, we go into a mental stutter that makes it seem that we knew the collision was coming moments before it arrived.  Psychologists report that this is the mind’s way of maintaining a sense of reasonable order in the face of unreasonable events, which might otherwise unmoor us from our comfortable certainties.  Once we have recovered our bearings again—if, of course we are lucky enough to recover at all—the collision does seem to have been absurd, and life, more arbitrary than we had thought.

Chigurh’s fatal message stalks West Texas in 1980 as he pursues Lloyd Moss (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam veteran who has stumbled upon the aftermath of a drug-deal shoot-up in the desert.  Amid a passel of bullet-ridden corpses, he finds a bag stuffed with two million dollars.  He decides to take the money, and, from that moment, he is a marked man.  We never learn who has hired Chigurh to hunt Moss beyond some fleeting scenes of well-dressed executives in a high-rise glass-and-steel office building.  This keeps Chigurh slightly inexplicable and wholly symbolic, a fusion of murderous Mexican and mystical Tibetan, perhaps.

Also seeking Moss is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played with stone-faced I’ve-seen-it-all stoicism by Tommy Lee Jones, who owns this particular role.  There is a fillip of difference here, however.  Now in his 60’s, Bell is no longer unflappable.  In his narration, he tells us, “The crime we have now you can hardly take its measure.”  He’s a man who has always wanted to save people but now finds his mission increasingly difficult to fulfill, what with kids walking the streets with “green hair and bones in their noses” and the waste and carnage inflicted by drug use.  When asked how he has “let crime get so out of hand in [his] county,” Bell explains that “it starts when you begin to overlook bad manners.  Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.”  Is this McCarthy speaking for himself?  He is 73, after all.

America has become no country for old men, but not in the way William Butler Yeats meant in “Sailing to Byzantium,” the poem from which McCarthy plucked his title.  Yeats invoked Byzantium as a sort of salvation from “the fury and the mire of the human veins,” a realm of changeless poise achieved through the alchemy of the great iconic Eastern Catholic art still to be found in Istanbul, where Constantinople once stood.  McCarthy refers, rather, to an older generation born in the 1920’s who are recoiling from the reckless hedonism that was unleashed in America in the 1960’s and continues with us today.  Bell is a good man baffled by what the world has become and longing for some salvation, which doesn’t seem to be on his particular horizon.  As he remarks to his elderly uncle, “I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way.  He didn’t.  I don’t blame him.  If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.”

But, his uncle sagely informs him, “You don’t know what he thinks.”  Amen.

One can see why the Coen brothers were drawn to McCarthy’s novel.  All their films invoke chance as the ultimate arbiter in life.  From their first feature, Blood Simple, to The Man Who Wasn’t There, they have indulged a smart-alecky existentialism that cleverly sneered at the very notion that life has any rhyme or reason.  Events happen, their characters suffer or prosper, that’s all.  No appeal to a higher order of meaning.  Nothing makes any sense.  The one redeeming element in No Country is that, under McCarthy’s metaphysically astringent influence, the Coens’ sneer has vanished.  We are not encouraged to smirk when Bell makes his stoically mournful remark about God not showing up in his life.  And the film includes from the novel the uncinematic moment in which Bell recounts a dream of salvific longing in which he sees his long-dead father on horseback.  As Bell tells his wife, he was

carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. . . . And . . . I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.  [McCarthy eschews punctuating for ellipses.]

The Coens have honored this poignant moment with Jones’ marvelously underplayed, moving, and honest reading of McCarthy’s words.  Perhaps it is here that McCarthy and the Coens do follow Yeats after all, in Bell’s simple wish to find his way into a country that is for old men, a country that affords the soul the permanence of genuine love.  Will McCarthy discover God coming into his works ahead?  Will the Coens?

I hadn’t intended to give No Country a good review.  I initially thought its absent ending pretentious, a strained version of a tired theme: In an absurd universe, meaning has gone distressingly absent without our willing leave.  While writing this review, however, I had to admit that the film provoked thoughts and feelings that we all need to confront, and a tidy resolution might not have promoted such an accounting, to borrow Chigurh’s word.  I am still annoyed by the unanswered plot questions, but I have to commend the Coens for taking such a commercial risk in a medium that counts on pleasing people in the tens and hundreds of millions to recoup its investment.

The acting is excellent all round.  Brolin is stolid and determined as the big resourceful lug being chased by Chigurh and several more or less ordinary humans besides, including Woody Harrelson, who is very funny as a crazed wise-guy gun for hire.  Jones, as always when he gets a worthy script, makes you believe in his character as few other actors could.  And Bardem makes Chigurh exactly the existential killer you imagine him to be when reading the book, with a mirthless smile and eyes that are completely dead to all human sympathy.  This may not be a great film, but it is certainly one of the Coens’ better efforts.