1 The stark, beautiful landscape that screams "Coen Brothers!" in a scene from No Country for Old Men
Miramax
Guns, drugs, and old men
The Coen brothers' latest and greatest is about a place that really is No Country for Old Men — or anyone else for that matter
By Beth Capper
Published: November 15th, 2007 | 3:00pm
From 1996's Fargo with its backdrop of North Dakotan silent snowy flatlands to 2000's O' Brother Where Art Thou? set in the barren pastoral digs of the Mississippi Delta, Joel and Ethan Coen have made some of the starkest depictions of Americana ever committed to film. And for the Coen brothers’ most recent and best film yet, they give a sparsely populated West Texas desert town bordering the Rio Grande their archetypal treatment, teaming up with bestselling author Cormac McCarthy to adapt his novel, No Country for Old Men, for the screen. No Country for Old Men is well-served by its soundtrack, or lack thereof. It's a quiet, prowling film partly about a cat-and-mouse–type hunt between two men: a hapless poacher named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and a demonic drug lord named Anton Chigurh (which is pronounced “sugar;” the part played to terrifying excellce by Javier Bardem). Moss stumbles upon a drug deal gone very wrong — five men and a dog dead in the middle of the desert, along with a whole lot of heroin and $2.4 million. He figures he may as well keep the money, but Chigurh — whose drug money it is — has different ideas and proceeds to trail Moss like the grim reaper.
Tommy Lee Jones is in the middle as the bewildered Ed Tom Bell, the town's prosaic Sheriff who is unable to fathom why his quiet rambling homestead has suddenly become the locale for mass homicide. The film divides its attention equally between Bell's struggles and Chigurh's reign of terror.
The film hinges on the dichotomy between Chigurh and Bell. Chigurh represents a contemporary, postmodern apathy, showing he is not the master of his own or of his victim's fates by asking people to toss a coin to see if they'll live or die. Bell represents an old and outmoded way of thinking — a belief in law and order; a faith that people have rational motivations behind their actions.
No Country is nihilistic, sure. What film isn't these days? But it's not celebratory nihilism like Fargo with its cartoonish and comical violence. It's not for an audience that cherishes nihilism. In No Country, we are shown a world where violence begets more unwanted violence and where morality has long gone out the window. It's a stark, futile, and hopeless world much like a Samuel Beckett play. It's a world we can no longer exist in, and it's the world we have made for ourselves. This is most certainly no country for old men. Or anyone else either.
Issue #35
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