Ames Progressive

It’s difficult to know where to begin when talking about the Coen Brothers’ new movie “No Country for Old Men.” First, it is a welcome relief to see that despite churning out 11 months worth of mostly drivel, Hollywood can still release a powerful, thought-provoking movie that avoids the clichés and achieves a cinematic brilliance in its clarity and power. Secondly, it is a relief to see that movies need not always ruin their literary source material. Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name is a powerful and gripping narrative, its essence distilled on the screen into well-paced action and powerfully-delivered dialogue. Also, a movie rarely presents such a close examination of our humanity, in both its best and worst aspects, and still manages to avoid moralizing. The characters in “No Country for Old Men” are nuanced and intricate in their detail; their human nature is shown in both their frailty and their violence.

The film’s plot may seem hackneyed on the surface: a drug deal gone wrong, an antihero with a heart of gold who’s in the wrong place at the wrong (or possibly right) time, a psychopathic killer, an old sheriff, Mexicans and vague suggestions of spousal abuse; just your typical western shoot-’em-up. Wrong. Rather than another mediocre western, the Coen Brothers have created what is being called “a meditation on the nature of evil” by countless newspaper movie reviewers who probably never dared imagine they’d get to use those words to describe a domestic movie enjoying a big-screen release.

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across a drug deal gone sour while out hunting antelope. After discovering a Mexican man in a truck slowly bleeding to death and begging for water, he determines that one person must have escaped the scene and, ignoring the man’s pleas for help, heads out to track down the last man. Already, one of the motifs of the film begins to show through here: The vastness of the west Texas desert and man’s insignificance in such an environment. Long and steady shots of the horizon continually remind us of the minutia of our actions. Even as the violence unfolds, the desert is omnipresent and, ultimately, more powerful. Moss finds the now-dead man lying next to a satchel of $10,000 bundles. The question for the audience is not whether or not Moss will take the money. That is assured. The question is how dire the consequence will be.

The consequence comes in the form a man named Anton Chigurh. Javier Bardem, in the part of Chigurh, is a relative unknown to American moviegoers, and his anonymity plays well for Bardem, who crafts a sociopath the likes of which have never been seen on the big screen. Several reviews have drawn comparisons between Chigurh and Dr. Hannibal Lecter as played by Anthony Hopkins, but this is a mistake. Lecter is a lecherous old man whose monologues express his cunning virtue and utter disdain for humankind and who always seems a bit too pleased with his cannibalism. Bardem’s portrayal of Chigurh, by contrast, is of a man who pains at talking and has no room for vanity. Chigurh is a killer in the most elemental sense of the word: He kills, period. As Woody Harrelson’s character, Carson Wells, says, “I guess I’d say he doesn’t have a sense of humor.” Methodical and merciless in his single-minded pursuit, Chigurh kills with a cattle bolt gun. His choice of weapon provides a window into his view of killing: He is doing little more than slaughtering dumb animals.

In one sense, this is a movie with no surprises. Chigurh is too persistent to fail in his pursuit of Moss, and Moss lacks the instincts or skill needed to evade a man like Chigurh. Moss succeeds only in staying one step ahead of him as Chigurh cuts a swath of death through small-town Texas in his relentless hunt for the money. Yet, Moss’s resiliency seems to surprise both Chigurh and himself as he continues to survive encounters with Chigurh through the movie. The true surprises come at the end as the Coen Brothers refuse to tie up the plot with a traditional “Hollywood ending.”

Playing the role of the small-town lawman is Tommy Lee Jones. Jones brings a well-worn weariness to the screen in his vivid portrayal of a man fighting something that he cannot understand and that becomes more confounding as the film progresses. Sheriff Ed Bell, Jones’s character, really exists on the margins of the Coen Brothers’ screenplay. He is continually pursuing Chigurh and always arriving just a couple minutes too late. Sheriff Bell is a good man, but that is not really the issue. The issue is the impotence of the law in the face of uncontrollable violence. Jones is superb in his role, crafting a character who is extremely aware of the fragility of life and, in a way, marvels at the callousness that destroys it.

Though this is not an anti-war movie, the Coen Brothers are definitely examining the role of the veteran in American society. Sheriff Ed Bell is a man feeling more and more anachronistic, worriedly watching the country and ideals he fought for in the Second World War being marginalized and destroyed by the tide of violence and drugs sweeping through Texas. Moss is somewhere between being closed-off and openly hostile with respect to his time in the service during Vietnam. He snaps in response to a character who has revealed his own veteran status, “Is that supposed to make us friends or something?” The isolation results from the feeling among these men that they do not have a place in a world which is being turned over to the next generation.

“No Country for Old Men” is a powerful movie, in setting, subject matter, and performance. The film offers up stark, brutal observations without shelter or protection, a directness mirrored in the harsh, baked west Texas landscape. The plot is expertly paced as a slow, unstoppable march toward what we expect to be a violent conclusion. The film’s final scene is neither the expected conclusion nor the ending Hollywood movies have led us to expect. There is no escaping the film’s ending; it turns a great movie into a brilliant, incandescent movie by its refusal to moralize or romanticize. After making the audience confront evil, the film forces audience members to come to terms with it on their own. For this, I am most appreciative. Rather than being spoon-fed some trite moral or a ridiculous deus ex machina, the film’s ending is as complex and multilayered as the characters of its story.