No Country for Old Men

Synopsis and Recommendation

This movie is for anyone who might need a cheerful reminder of what W.B. Yeats describes as a blood-dimmed tide being loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence being drowned. Who is doing the drowning you may ask? The answer my friends is blowing in the air-powered cattlegun of Anton Chigurh. The passionate intensity of this man’s malevolence is second to none. He makes Hannibal Lecter look like Dr. Phil. The second this man entered the screen I was filled with the urge to run sobbingly to a corner and soil my breeches. Without a doubt this character will top the all-time most vicious villains list.

Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, is a hit man who is after good-ol-boy Llewelyn Moss who happened upon a boatload of cash left over from a drug deal gone bad. The wrath of Chigurh sends Moss (Josh Brolin) on the run. All the while Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is pulled along in the wake trying to make sense out of all the mayhem.

While much of the movie plays off of the interaction between Chigurh and Moss, Sheriff Bell is the one that carries us through the story. While he tries to piece together the fragments of madness of a busted drug deal and a man on the run with Satan on his heels, he also tries to make sense of his actions as a man of justice in a world seething with dark atrocities.

The acting is flawless. The direction and flow of the movie keeps the viewer wound tighter than a golf ball. The themes and storytelling, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, are vivid and are worthy of moviegoers who are interested in a movie that will probe the heart of darkness and lay bare what a hero must face – what we must face.

Direction – Superb
Performance – Brilliant
Aesthetics – The sparse score and the cinematography of the arid Texas landscape perfectly frame the story.
Story – Needs to be in the hopper a bit longer
* See how I rate movies


My Musings on the film
(Spoiler Warning!)

The movie begins overlooking the sparse dry West Texas landscape and a voiceover of sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) describing a heinous massacre that happened some time back. Some said it was a crime of passion. However, the man who committed the crime was sure to clarify that passion had nothing to do with it but that killing someone was something he was going to do since the time he was born. He said he would do it again if they let him out. There is a brief pause as the wind moans slightly over the parched countryside. “I don’t know what to make of that” he says, and so begins the movie and sheriff Bell’s odyssey along a path of darkness and bewildering evil that will be his last walk as a lawman in an overwhelmingly lawless land.

The movie/book takes its title from a W.B. Yeats poem entitled Sailing to Byzantium, who's opening line reads, "That is no country for old men." The poem explores themes of growing old in a land that perpetually celebrates youth, as well as how one can attain immortality by attaching oneself to something that will remain after one dies. In the movie, it is not youth and vitality that cause the main character to feel out of place, but the perpetual existence of evil.

The movie could have been a silent film with its minimal dialog and its visual dramatic tension, and I mean that in every good way possible. The structure of the entire movie as well as every shot of every scene is cinematic architecture at its finest, not because of its beauty, per se, but because it frames the story perfectly. At no point was I looking at my watch wondering when it was going to end. The silence, the close-ups of candy wrappers or shoeless feet, and the cold face-offs between characters made the scenes more pregnant than a hippo with triplets.

The movie has several scenes of graphic violence that would make even the most bloodthirsty of Old-testament-loving Christians queasy. However, it is neither gratuitous nor a glorification of violence. It is rather a raw portrayal of a man who is the personification of evil. The evil violence vividly conveys not only the gravity of the situation in which Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds himself, but also dark gloom in which an old sheriff feels he’s swimming and maybe even foundering. This movie continually gestures at epic and archetypal questions without overtly asking them, and that in part is the power of the movie. Nothing is laid bare. Every detail of the movie is ambiguous. We know next to nothing about the drug deal gone bad in the desert. We can guess that Anton gets the money, but we don’t know for sure. We can only assume we know what happens to Moss’s wife, but we don’t know for sure. And worst of all, we don’t know if Anton Chigurh ever gets what’s coming to him. All of this seems to give us a view from sheriff Bell’s perspective – feeling like we are caught in the wake of a title wave of evil and having trouble making heads or tails about it.

But any movie can point to the darkness and despair in life, that is no real feat. What makes this whole movie worthwhile, and even noble, are two short scenes at the end of the movie – namely the final monologue. We follow this character through hell and are led right up to the cusp of a resolution. But in character with the movie we are only given a gesture rather than a straightforward and painfully trite soliloquy such as “believe in yourself,” or “good will overcome.” Rather, we hear sheriff Bell retelling his dreams.

I had two dreams about him after he died. I don’t remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times 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 nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had 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. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that when ever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

If the dream is equating the evil that sometimes seems to surround us like a cold dark night, then it would not be far off from St. Augustine’s notion of evil. Augustine articulated that evil is not a force that is diametrically opposed to good and that the two must duke it out and it’s up for grabs as to which side will win. Rather, evil is an absence of light. While at first this may not seem like a very helpful metaphor, if we press it we come to a similar point as the sheriff in his dream. If evil is an absence of “good”, then it would be absurd to think that you can somehow control it, or outrun it, or stop it. The only way to eradicate darkness is by the presence of light. Light does not have to fight darkness, only be a presence in it.

To say that the world if full of bleak darkness is not the sad revelation of this movie. The sad revelation is how few people there are who are willing to carry a little fire in the darkness and make their camp for wayfaring strangers.