Review of Coen Brothers No Country For Old Men (2007)

There may be no better indicator of how much our culture has evolved (or devolved) in the last decade than to compare the leading roles in Fargo, the 1996 Coen film, and No Country, from this year. In Fargo, the dominant role was played brilliantly by Deputy Marge Gunderson (Francis McDormand). Her quiet efficiency and dogged intelligence eventually led to the capture of the seething sociopath who killed several people on the barren ND landscape. Gunderson, who was pregnant at the time, represented not simply the triumph of the good in the midst of human irrationality, but she managed to bring into the world a beautiful child at the end of the movie. Fargo presented weird people, but none of them could trump Deputy Gunderson.

In contrast, the Sheriff in No Country, played by the amiable and philosophical aging lawman Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), is, figuratively speaking, toothless. He follows the sociopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and the pursued man Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) with intelligence, but his inteligence has no spark, wit, energy or passion. He arrives at crime scenes too late to do anything; he engages in ruminations about the deep past with his father; he ends by reciting a dream of the darkness of the night when his father was lighting a fire for him. Thus, instead of Jones being the star of No Country, that role is taken over by the sinister Chigurh, who has a demeanor so menacing and actions so heartlessly ruthless that I almost felt like checking to make sure he wasn't stalking me outside the theater before hopping into my car.

Thus, in a decade, the Coen brothers have gone from presenting the weird which eventually came "under control" of the law to the weird completely out of control and able to intimidate, kill and terrorize at will. But then, just when you think that the sociopath might take over the world, so to speak, something happens to him that shows that neither the bad guys nor the good guys control life--fate or chance happens to us all. Philosophical discussion of moral decline or societal fraying is made meaningless by the wanton violence of Chigurh as well as the aleatoric chanciness of it all.

A Word on the Story

The narrative closely follows Cormac McCarthy's 2005 book of the same title. Set in the barren sagebrush of Western TX in 1980, No Country opens with lines that set the tone for the whole film: an inexperienced Sheriff's Deputy confidently claims over the phone, "I got it all under control" just seconds before Chigurh, in custody for an unspecified crime, strangles the deputy with his cuffed hands. Chigurh then goes on a killing rampage, using the ghoulish instrument of a compressed air gun (used to kill cattle at feedlots) to claim some of his victims. But Chirugh both talks strangely and has an eerily weird but logical moral system. He will make a deal with a victim (I will kill you but not your wife if you give me the money--money from a broken drug deal that Llewellyn happened across while he was hunting), and hold to it. He will even grant "grace" to Llewellyn's wife when Llewellyn doesn't go along with his end of the deal--by letting her chose "heads or tails" in a coin flip. If she guesses right, she will be spared.

In contrast to the murderous efficiency of Chirugh is the resourceful yet hopelessly outmatched former Viet Nam veteran and welder Llewellyn Moss. Moss has been out hunting when he spots a bleeding dog wandering off in the sagebrush. Following the trail of blood (there are lots of trails or pools of blood in this movie), he ends up at the grisly scene of a major drug deal gone bad, where corpses of man and beast litter the quiet desert. A little later he comes upon another dead man, with a briefcase containing $2 million in Franklins. Thinking that this would be a better way to fund his retirement than through a 401(k), he makes off with the money. But it is that act which then brings Chirugh, as well as people related to the failed drug deal, on his path. In one of the flaws of the film, we really never learn who Chirugh is working for. He bumps off two guys in suits who appear to be the ones to whom he reports, but he spends the rest of the movie on the trail of Moss. Photographer Roger Deakins, who also photographed Fargo, is responsible for creating the sense of "wide space" in the film, but he does it so brilliantly that the viewer gets the sense of extreme claustrophobia even as the wide-angled lens is in place. There is no place to hide for Moss, even as he crosses over the border into Mexico.

Conclusion

Complementing the riveting drama is a sort of weird series of conversations between characters, most of which don't go anywhere but all seem to point to themes that Coen's have previously explored: the breakdown of the culture, the chanciness of life, the rigid moral systems we try to maintain in the midst of this chanciness, the courtesy of small-town folk. Sheriff Tom Bell says trenchantly, with respect to the first point, 'Once people stopped saying "Sir" and "Ma'am," it was a short spiral downwards to chaos.' And then, a conversation between Sheriff Bell and his wheelchair-bound father captures the irrationality and unstoppability of it all. His father says:

"What you got ain't new. Can't stop what's coming. Ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity."

So it may equally be vanity to try to find a "message" in this film. But if we see it in the context of the Coen's earlier work, especially Fargo, we recognize that the forces unleashed in our time, according to the Coen's, are not simply dangerous and sociopathic, but they also make the forces of good look pretty hapless. That may be the only concession to the reality of the post-9/11 world, even though the film was supposedly set in 1980. This is a provocative and harrowing film, but one that sucks you into its powerful vortex.

3131