Number 7: No Country for Old Men (2007)

Note: The following contains massive spoilers. You have been warned.

A review I wrote a while back:

“The wages of sin is death.”

We have a problem with this phrase because it doesn’t appear visibly true. Great sinners don’t get struck by lightning. Saints too often find the world an inhospitable place. But while Paul was undoubtedly referring to death of the soul in Hell, there is still a place for the literal. Sometimes we just need a visceral reminder, and No Country for Old Men is nothing if not visceral.

Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam veteran who can weld anything able to be welded, stumbles across a drug deal gone wrong in the desolate landscape of the proverbial West. He finds bloody bodies, lots of drugs, but no money, no “last man standing”. He tracks a line of blood to a spot a few miles away. Two trees stand on a hill. Under one is a dead man and an apple in the form of two million dollars. Llewellyn takes a bite.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable (that word was created for the Borg and Anton Chigurh) villain, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, is introduced to us as he strangles a police officer with the handcuffs on his wrists. Chigurh unemotionally steps over the myriad scuff marks on the floor. He uses the cop’s car to pull over an unsuspecting driver, and Chigurh uses a cattle gun to procure the new vehicle. The cattle gun is the earliest indication of Chigurh’s Lucipher-esque opinion of humanity.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, opens the film with a voiceover about old time sheriffs and guys so tough they didn’t even carry guns. Then he asks what they would have done in modern times. Soon enough, he is investigating the drug deal catastrophe and the puzzlingly vacant cash. The chase is on as Bell tracks Chigurh, and Chigurh tracks Moss.

It isn’t so much a man hunting Moss as it is guilt. Moss tries to hide from Chigurh; that doesn’t work. He tries to run, even fleeing to Mexico. That doesn’t work. Eventually he gets the bright idea to kill Chigurh. Like so many before him, Moss loses in a battle with Hell.

At one point in his slow march of carnage Chigurh stops at a gas station. For some reason, Chigurh is irked by the owner of the gas station. It might be the fact that he married into the house out back. It might be the fact that he asked Chigurh a superficial question. Whatever the reason, Chigurh eventually makes it plain that the man’s life rests on a coin flip. “Call it.” The man does, and he wins his life. But one wonders if he lost his soul.

After giving Moss the option of forking over the cash to save his wife—Chigurh won’t tell Moss he can save himself “because he can’t”—and being rebuffed, Chigurh goes through the same coin flip routine with Moss’s wife, telling her it is “the best he can do”. Perhaps the only virtuous character in the movie, she tells him the coin flip has nothing to do with it; it’s just him. Chigurh walks out of the house and wipes the blood off of his boots, but Karla Jean Moss was the only one who survived Chigurh—she refused to fight.

The aging sheriff, the only character in the movie with the right or duty to take Chigurh head on, follows after him with reticence. It isn’t the possibility of losing his life that scares Bell; it is the possibility that his life, his profession, his life’s work, is obsolete. He doesn’t know where to go or how to fight something so implacably evil that it would kill hotel desk clerks because they were inconveniences.

Chigurh is as inexorable as the devil, but even the devil needs to know where to look. A tracking device in the satchel of cash is pulling Chigurh along. The devil needs a sin to get his claws into you. Once he does, you get nightmarish, late-night visits from a guy with a silencer on a shotgun. On a shotgun. The Coen brothers (who adapted the screenplay, produced and directed) create scenes as well as anyone, and the several battles between Moss and Chigurh reek of compunction, fear, and more than anything, inevitability.

And Moss is no simpleton. He is resourceful, tough and quick-witted. He uses tent poles to hide the money, can fashion a sawed-off shotgun with ease, knows when to move onto the next hotel and dresses a bullet wound with dexterity. His braggadocio in believing he can defeat Chigurh—“What’s this guy supposed to be, the ultimate badass?”—is not entirely unfounded. But like Adam and Eve, he does not know who he is dealing with. The best description of Chigurh is in response to a question regarding how dangerous he is: “Compared to what? The, uh… bubonic plague?”

And, of course, the bubonic plague was often believed to be, and is still used as, a symbol for the devil. No Country for Old Men comes from a Cormac McCarthy novel, and it doesn’t waste words.

Along that line, the sheriff’s closing monologue is every bit as probing as the opening. In effect, the sheriff is the character we can identify with. He knows what he needs to do, to an extent, but doesn’t quite do it. Yet he knows his father would have, and his dreams haunt him.

The Coen brothers have long been obsessed with characters of seemingly preternatural evil—from the terrific “Barton Fink” to the pitiable “Raising Arizona”—but only when they took the supernatural out of their villain did they achieve something actually resembling ultimate evil. Chigurh is frightening because he isn’t riding a motorcycle or stampeding through hallways. He kills with a coin flip. And most fail to realize that the stakes are higher than one’s life.

Atheists or Saints

The Coens are one or the other. Their most recent film, A Serious Man, has been derided as an anti-religious satire. I saw the film. I actually went to the theater and watched it. I have no clue what the people deriding it as such are talking about.

Except I suppose do. If I were a fundamentalist Protestant, I would probably take it as an attack on religion. It questions certainty, simple answers and above all it questions those who refuse to question. None of that is anti-religion but it is anti-fundamentalism.

Similarly, No Country for Old Men has been cited as a movie fairly certain God can’t exist. I have also seen No Country for Old Men. I went to the theater to see it. I have watched it many times since. I have never seen a movie so convinced that God exists. Guilt, wonder, fear, implacable evil—none of these things make much sense in a universe lacking a God. I have no idea if the Coens believe in God. But their movies, contrary to popular opinion, certainly do.

Every Pixel

And just to mention it: every single pixel on the screen, at all times, matters. I have never seen a movie that is fuller than No Country for Old Men, and that includes #2 on this list.


Up Next: Quite the Sequel

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