No Country for Old Men Film Review

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No Country for Old Men: A Violent Look at Violence

By Gregory Desilet

No Country for Old Men is a complex film because it divides its time between three main characters and avoids shock sensationalism and the celebration of violence while instead provoking considerable soul-searching about violence and the life issues it raises.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and his reflections and perceptions frame the entire film. It begins with Bell in a narrative voice-over, returns to him in narrative sequences in the course of the film, and ends with him narrating a dream to his wife (Loretta Bell). He’s also featured in many important action scenes as the story and plot develop. Early on, however, attention shifts to the actions of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), his arrest by a highway patrolman, killing of the patrolman, and escape. Also, early in the film, the focus switches to Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), the Vietnam War vet turned hunter who lives in a trailer with his girlfriend Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald). He becomes the target of a multi-pronged manhunt, with Sheriff Bell and law enforcement as one prong, Mexican drug operatives as another, bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) as yet another, and Chigurh as the fourth—all seeking to recover the money Llewelyn has taken from the site of a drug deal gone bad. When Llewelyn decides to run with the money and take the consequences, come what may, the plot quickly thickens. Scenes shift from one character to another.

As the chase unfolds, Chigurh leaves a trail of bodies behind him while displaying calculating android coolness and a disturbing killer’s code of unflinching “integrity.” He will not alter for any reason what he contracts or promises to do—except, on occasion, by the whim of a coin toss. He sometimes allows potential victims the benefit of a coin toss because, as he explains to one victim, “That’s how I got here.” Like a god from the Old Testament or the cold, predictable, yet unpredictable, stalk of death itself, he seems to operate in the world with the indifference and randomness of a coin toss. Herein lies the incongruity between happenstance and justice, a tension the film and Cormac McCarthy’s book of the same title strain to find an appropriate comportment toward.

The primary tension eventually centers on the characters of Sheriff Bell and Chigurh. Bell’s growing understanding of Chigurh’s fanatical drive and degree of professionalism force him toward a choice that daily becomes more obviously one of life and death consequences for him. He must decide between continuing to track down and confront Cigurh (and most likely be killed in the process) or move along into retirement as planned.

Toward the end of the film, Bell has a conversation with his Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin) about having confronted this kind of choice earlier in his life when a soldier in WWII. After surviving a mortar shell explosion that kills the other soldiers in his squad he has to choose whether to retreat, leaving his fallen comrades, or hold a hill gun position and risk the likelihood of taking another mortar round and dying. He chooses to save himself, abandon post, and sneak off in the night. Bell confesses that the medal he received for bravery had been forced on him by his superior officer for the sake of military appearances and good publicity. Far from bravery, he felt he acted like a cheat who had "stolen" his life and had been living with a stolen life ever since. Ellis calmly suggests that he probably did the right thing by saving his life rather than throwing it away in what was likely a hopeless situation (although we're not sure if the uncle is saying this just to make him feel better). Nevertheless, Bell feels guilty because he broke a kind of military "promise" not to abandon a position (without orders). In the case of Chigurh, Bell wonders whether what he "signed on" for when he became sheriff includes confronting this level of professional threat (with the suggestion that when becoming sheriff you sign on for whatever comes your way).

The film poses questions not only about the current state of criminal violence (from psychotic individuals to well-financed professional machines) but, on a more allegorical level, the way those who find themselves on the battle line are obligated to act. Carson Wells says to Moss at one point: "you think you are, but you're not cut out for this." Maybe Bell is smarter than Moss and knows he isn't "cut out for this"—meaning the degree of threat posed by Chigurh and the criminal organizations that create (the need for) men like Chigurh. This may be a situation of risking one's life where the risk is out of all proportion to what the sheriff of a small county ought reasonably to be expected to take. Does it make sense to do this regardless of implied "promises" and “duties” related to a thankless "job"? Does Bell have a special wisdom and a balanced grasp of how to cope with life’s limitless challenges or is he simply a coward who turns away when the going gets tough? How to answer?

Additional provocative scenes raise similar difficult questions such as that posed in the situation Moss’s wife Carla Jean faces at the end of the film: how to deal with life’s randomness and its violence? And to what extent may life actually be “random”? Chigurh tells Carla Jean that her fate is not random but of a piece with what she had "chosen" from the beginning. Were the "consequences" for Moss's wife part of what she "chose" when she decided to hang out with a man like Moss? Should an audience buy into this logic? Does everyone, as Chigurh seems to believe, ultimately "deserve" what they get?

Shortly after his meeting with Carla Jean, the audience sees how Chigurh responds to random violence when his car is broadsided at an intersection and he is nearly killed. As a cold-blooded killer it would seem he deserves to be killed. Yet he survives the crash, remains calm, takes it in stride, and procures the help of two teenagers to patch himself up and limp off to freedom. What does his response to the accident and his escape tell us?—that crime does indeed pay? That bad things will eventually happen to bad people? That for some inscrutable reason he did not deserve to die? That he practiced what he preached, took life as a coin toss, and shrugged off misfortune?

Consider also what appear to be random acts of luck—as with Moss finding the money from the failed drug deal. Did Moss rightly attempt to take advantage of a fortunate opportunity or did the opportunity expose a flaw in his character that would have led him inexorably to disaster of one form or another? Every choice has a string of consequences tied to it that, with scrutiny, seems to be appropriate to it—a kind of poetic justice. But is it really justice? Or is it an illusion arising from the need to find a comprehensible order to life that it in fact lacks?

With these questions in the mix, the film's use of violence clearly lies beyond the coarser purposes of shock sensationalism and entertainment. Instead the film raises difficult questions about confronting crime and violence in addition to broader existential questions about the depth of the roles of choice and chance and fortune and misfortune in life and what attitude to take toward such challenges.

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