No Country for Old Men

Wendell bites back a smile. Sheriff Bell gazes at him over his glasses for a long beat, deadpan. “...That’s all right. I laugh myself sometimes.” He goes back to the paper. “...There ain’t a whole lot else you can do.”

This scene, from No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers’ best film since Fargo, struck me as the perfect description for this brilliant, bleak, violent, challenging movie based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. In its own little way, this scene, and that line by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is the best metaphor for a story of inexplicable and endless violence. How are we supposed to cope? Sometimes, as I often hear myself saying, in the face of such inhumanity, laughter is your only defense.

Fargo was an uncommonly funny movie. On the surface, it was a stark drama about a kidnapping scheme gone very, very wrong. But I always saw it has a black comedy. Pitch black. Still, it was funny, and intentionally so. The North Dakota/Minnesota accents. The aw-shucks police force. The blabbering idiot that was Jerry Lundegaard. The wood chipper. No Country for Old Men was by no means a comedy, nor could it even be classified as funny. And yet I found myself laughing at strange points in the film. Laughing because, much like Deputy Wendell and Sheriff Bell, I realized sometimes it was all I could do.

It’s no accident that the Coens selected No Country as their first adaption. In a sense, this film could be seen as the obverse of Fargo. Cormac McCarthy’s brutal Western shares many of the hallmarks of the great Coen oeuvre: little mistakes snowballing into big ones, violence begetting nothing but more violence and greed as the root of these evils, with all of it happening over a rural backdrop… where things like this aren’t supposed to happen. Fargo showed a law enforcement unprepared for the world they now faced, a foreign world of evil. The first words we hear in the No Country, in a voice over by Tommy Lee Jones, echo the themes of Fargo: “Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it… Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about fifteen minutes. I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t.” These are not big-city cops and citizens inured to violence, which makes them more like us. This story, this era, is a last goodbye to the innocence of simpler times.

The film formally begins with our villain, the Prince Valiant-coiffed Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), being apprehended and then soon freeing himself. As Chigurh strangles his unsuspecting captor, who knows nothing of the peerless villain he has picked up, the camera pulls its focus away from the hideous crime and rests it squarely on the determined, blank stare of Chigurh. The Coens use this technique to great effect throughout the film. Chigurh is a a killer so calm, so calculated, so “principled” (as a bounty hunter later calls him) that to dub him cold-blooded would be a compliment. Instead you might call Chigurh, played with an astounding quietude (and welcome lack of hokey mannerisms) by Javier Bardem, a no-blooded killer.

Chigurh is a man hired by some unseen force to track down a briefcase full of cash from a drug deal gone bad. He kills without reservation, but it is never clear if he takes joy in it or not. The film is never interested in giving us such easy answers. The money Chigurh seeks is found a day earlier by Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam vet with little going for him other than a loving wife (the sweet Kelly MacDonald). Moss’s mistake, in thinking he can find a way to make use of the money before the people who will obviously come for it find him, propels the snowball of violence.

No Country for Old Men is, like Fargo before it, a near-perfect movie. The screenplay by the brothers Coen contains no frivolous scenes, no superfluous words. The stunning photography of the always stellar Roger Deakins reveals the south Texas landscape to be just as harsh as the solitary whiteness and cold of the north Great Plains from Fargo. The acting, lead by Tommy Lee Jones, the film’s moral center, is impeccable. Brolin gives a career-best performance as Moss, and welcome turns by Woody Harrelson, Barry Corbin and Garrett Dillahunt only complement the starring roles. Most crucially, the story—though on the surface a straightforward chase/procedural drama—challenges you, both to endure the seemingly endless violence and to decipher just where it all will lead.

The film carries you through from beginning to end waiting for resolution. We want to see a happy ending, we want to see our sad hero Moss survive. We want to see the villianous Chigurh captured or killed. We want to see the old and tired Sheriff ride off into the sunset. When the end of the story finally comes, it comes without a clear resolution. This might frustrate some, but I found it fitting. In a world where we can’t make sense of anything, there are no easy answers. We don’t know what the future holds, but we keep moving forward all the same. A