NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Every action has a reaction. If I could sum up the Coen brothers' films in one sentence, this would be the one I would choose. The Coens love to look at how one action creates a whole chain of events that seem both inevitable and avoidable, if only that one action could be taken back. In Blood Simple, their first and one of their best films, a wife has an affair with another man and has a jealous husband, leading to three deaths. In Miller's Crossing, a mob boss's love for a woman results in a high body count because he refuses to give up her brother to a competing gangster's vendetta. In Fargo, a horribly planned kidnapping for ransom ends up with lives ruined or eliminated. But this film is a little different. We indeed see how a man who picks up drug money after a massacre is chased by others who claim it. But we also see how everyone reacts to something unfathomable. No Country for Old Men is a movie about how our world has become both oblivious and resigned to the true evil that roams the land.

I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. Me and him was sheriff's at the same time; him up in Plano and me out here. I think he's pretty proud of that. I know I was. Some of the old time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lotta folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough'd never carry one; that's the younger Jim. Gaston Borkins wouldn't wear one up in Camanche County. I always liked to hear about the oldtimers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself gainst the oldtimers. Can't help but wonder how theyd've operated these times. There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. 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. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

Tommy Lee Jones echoes these lines at the beginning of the film. We see the vast barren lands of west Texas. The movie starts like a western, and feels like it. The scenes feel like they came out of a Sergio Leone picture. It's a hard world, with hard people living in it. Tommy Lee Jones is laying it all out on the table, right from the start. The "oldtimers" rarely carried a gun, but a law enforcement official wouldn't dare now. He wonders how they would respond to living in today's environment. Really, he wonders how he can.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, a sheriff in a lonely town in west Texas. The wear is in his eyes. He has seen enough to know he has seen too much. Present-day crime is centered around drugs and the viciousness of the greed surrounding them. Passionless crime that is unrelenting and unforgiving. We sense that Bell has seen the world without crime and now this one. He doesn't belong in this one, and he can't stop thinking about the previous one. These words set the tone for the whole movie. Ed Tom Bell cannot fathom the world of crime he now lives in, and he has no way of fighting it.

There are two players from a younger generation that are Ed Tom Bell's symbols for his current philosophy. There is the merciless killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and the youthfully ignorant go-getter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). Ed Tom Bell doesn't know how to understand or stop either of them. And the other two probably don't either.

Near the beginning of the film, we see Chigurh kill two people quietly and without any emotion. He strangles a police officer, and then uses a compressed air tank and a stungun to kill his next victim immediately. He now has his getaway car. The two scenes are striking in their simplicity and in their efficiency. And both killings serve a purpose. He escapes arrest as a result of the first murder, and he steals a car for the second. For Chigurh, this is a matter of a means to an end. He does not think about what he is doing, but only about the next step.

We then meet Llewelyn, antelope hunting in the vast empty fields. He stumbles upon a scene of mass murder. There are a number of victims in a number of trucks. There is even a dead dog, for which the Coens use as a source of almost satirical humor. Llewelyn finds a badly wounded survivor. He needs water, but Llewelyn has none to give him. He finds a truckload of drugs in the back of one of the vehicles. What's missing is the money.

Llewelyn, like Chigurh, is smart and calculating. Through deduction, he knows where the last survivor escaped and ends up finding him. He is dead near a lone tree, money by his side. Llewelyn is poor, and could definitely use the money. He takes it with him; this, of course, is the event that leads to everything else in the movie, a Coen brothers touch that pervades every one of their films.

What Moss never seems to comprehend is that the massacre is not all-encompassing. There are others interested in the goings-on regarding this drug deal gone macabre. And they want the money back. Chigurh is hired to obtain the money, but we, of course, sense he wants it for himself too. After two of his employers go with him to the site, Chigurh kills them instantly. Again, he has discovered what he needs to, and doesn't want anyone else to know about it. The money is gone, and someone has taken it.

Meanwhile, Moss returns to the site to give the badly wounded man some water. He has died, and now he sees a truck full of interested people chasing him. Again, the Coens use a dog here, this time in a much more menacing, but still eerily humorous manner. The Coens find the strangest ways to bring comedy into a scene, but it is critical -- because it helps to build the uneasy tension that is beginning to develop in each sequence.

The middle half of the film is a cat-and-mouse chase between Chigurh and Moss. Moss, at first, does not realize that there is a beacon in the chest containing the money. Chigurh soon deduces who might have stolen the money and where he may have gone. Ed Tom Bell is a step behind. He is at the crime scene. He intelligently figures out what transpired at the scene, and also deduces who may have come across the site. He goes to Moss's house, just a while after Chigurh was there. We see his silhouette on the TV, just minutes after we see Chigurh's. Ed Tom Bell is chasing a shadow.

Each scene of confrontation between Chigurh and Moss is meticulously crafted. There are great scenes of tension, in which the only sound is a beeping transmitter. We see shadows and can almost hear the breathing of the hunter and the hunted. Tension is especially high when both know the other is there. One particularly potent scene features Moss in a hotel room with Chigurh standing outside the door. The chase that follows is also perfectly developed. Each surprise is extreme, rapid, and realistic. Both are smart enough to escape capture.

Chigurh and Moss are wounded. In equally crafty scenes, we see how each one heals their wounds. Moss goes across the border into Mexico to get medical treatment; Chigurh diverts a drug store's customers and employees to steal supplies.

The Coens are painstaking in their analysis at the men's plans. We are shown several minutes of sequences in which we find out what Moss plans to do to hide the money in one hotel room. We see how Chigurh looks at cell phone calls and mail to find out where Llewelyn and his family lives, or may be going.

Meanwhile, Ed Tom Bell can only observe the aftermath. He never can quite keep up with either of them. But his observations are crucial to the film's impact. It serves as the "state of affairs", maybe even the moral compass. He reads in the paper of a heinous crime in California. His partner nervously chuckles when hearing it. Ed Tom Bell agrees. "Not much else you can do about it, I suppose." Interesting how viewers may find humor out of a dead dog at a site of mass murder.

Another critical methodology behind the film is how each character, major or minor, reacts to Chigurh's presence. There is a scene of masterful dialogue between Chigurh and an old store clerk. The two are dancing off each other's words, one all knowing and the other completely ignorant. We know Chigurh is pondering murdering the clerk. We sense the clerk is eventually aware of the danger he is in, though maybe not in complete understanding. Chigurh flips a coin. The clerk chooses correctly; he survives. Chigurh tells him to save the coin; otherwise, it's just another coin, which it is.

This scene is one of the best in any film. The Coens have a mastery of depicting people. This gas station clerk is such a realistic character. He reminded me of numerous clerks I've come across during my day. And Chigurh -- he is larger than life here, completely evil and clearly insane. His rules of killing and not killing are arbitrary but rigid and identifiable. A character asks him at one point if he has any idea how insane he is. Chigurh responds by asking about the nature of the current conversation. Interesting. He assumes it is not about himself, or maybe he wants to hear it from other people.

He comes across many of these other people. A manager, an accountant, a bounty hunter, and Moss's wife. Their reactions are different but carry many of the same themes. "You don't have to this." Chigurh points out that everyone says that. He's right. And what he means is that he does not understand why those words would have any impact on his decision. And his victims do not understand why they cannot.

There is one character, named Carson Wells, who understands Chigurh. He is played by Woody Harrelson. He is asked by a businessman (Stephen Root), with a vested interest in the drug money, to find him and the money. Chigurh finds Wells first, and their scene is revealing. Chigurh is absolutely insane but never seems physically so. It reminds me of the characters in The Bridge on the River Kwai. All had various forms of madness, but Alec Guinness played a man so insane as to fool himself into helping the enemy while maintaining a militaristic sense of patriotism and duty. Chigurh is sort of the same way. He does everything by a set of rules that he has dictated but outside of which makes absolutely no sense. But it does to him, and so he can't understand why people try to convince him otherwise.

Moss is also the same way. His wife (played by the excellent Kelly Macdonald) tries to convince him of how dangerous his actions were, but he hears nothing of it. Why? Because he thinks he can outrun it. He thinks he has a complete comprehension of the situation. Which makes his inevitable demise all the more interesting. He is gunned down, not by Chigurh, but by other criminals searching for the money. And Ed Tom Bell can only clean up the mess.

The final portion of the film is brilliant. The Coens have finished the cat-and-mouse chase; now they present the ambiguity and the stubborn lack of resolution in a world that seems to have no purpose. The Coens do not tell us if Chigurh murders his victims anymore. Instead, they only leave subtle clues, like the checking of his shoes. When Ed Tom Bell nearly finds Chigurh in a hoel room one night, neither one investigates further. To the sheriff, Chigurh will always be a shadow. To Chigurh, the sheriff will always be close but never quite there.

Chigurh, so far, has been presented as a larger-than-life individual. Many of the Coens' main characters have had this trait. Think of Albert Finney in Miller's Crossing, Dan Hedaya in Blood Simple, and John Goodman in Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? But there is one scene in which the Coens make Anton Chigurh a part of a random act of chance himself. After this incident, he asks a boy for a jacket, much like Moss did in a scene long before. They are the same people, in many ways. They strategize, they respond, but they are just as vulnerable as anyone else. But they keep on going because that's all they know how to do.

Ed Tom Bell cannot keep on going anymore. He finds he is increasingly useless in a world he cannot control or prevent. But, as one character reminds him, the world has never been too kind.

I sent Uncle Mac's badge and his old
thumbbuster to the Rangers. For their
museum there. Your daddy ever tell
you how Uncle Mac came to his reward?
...Shot down on his own porch there
in Hudspeth County. There was seven or
eight of 'em come to the house. Wantin
this and wantin that. Mac went in and
got his shotgun but they was way ahead
of him. Shot him down in his own doorway.
Aunt Ella run out and tried to stop the
bleedin. Him tryin to get hold of the
shotgun again. They just set there on
their horses watchin him die. Finally
one of 'em says somethin in Injun and
they all turned and left out. Well Mac
knew the score even if Aunt Ella didn't.
Shot through the left lung and that
was that. As they say.

(Ed Tom Bell) When did he die?

Nineteen zero and nine.

His point, of course, was that the country has never been safe or
even sane.

...What you got ain't nothin new.
This country is hard on people. Hard
and crazy. Got the devil in it yet
folks never seem to hold it to account.

No, it seems, they do not. And maybe Ed Tom Bell never did.

There is a stunning lack of sound in this film. There is virtually
no music, and there are long sequences of silence throughout.
This is appropriate. The silence brings about an unrelenting
sense of vastness, of a harsh and cruel world. It also gives the
moments with sound extra emphasis. But, mostly, it makes
sense given the territory and the material. Every touch is right
here.

The film's closing is a source of consternation for some viewers.
It should not be. It is the only ending that makes sense given
the themes of the film. Ed Tom Bell talks about two of his dreams
to his wife. And listen to what he says:

Alright then. Two of 'em. Both had my father in 'em.
It's peculiar. I'm older now then he ever was by
twenty years. So in a sense he's the younger man.
Anyway, first one I don't remember to well but it was
about meeting him in town somewhere, he's gonna give
me some money. Ithink I lost it. The second one, it
was like we was both back in oldertimes and I was on
horseback goin' through the mountains of a night.
Goin' through this pass in the mountains. It was cold
and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me
and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He
just rode on past... and he had his blanket wrapped
around him and his head down and when he rode past I
seen 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. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the
dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and 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. And then I woke up.

There are three things to observe here. One, his father would
now be younger than Ed Tom Bell by twenty years. Two, he was
going to make a fire in the vast, empty space. Three, he knew his
father would be there when he made it to the fire. The point is
that he woke up before he got there.