Time and Chance: A Look Back at “No Country for Old Men”
No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers’ near beat-for-beat film adaption of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same name, wears a lot of hats. On the surface, it’s a blood-and-dust Western Noir, a pulp drama about drugs, guns, and money. But it’s also clearly a meditation on old age, on death and fate, and, ultimately, on finding meaning in an absurd, violent world. While it may not be McCarthy’s best novel, it just might be the Coen Brothers’ best movie, and that’s saying something.
While No Country for Old Men would seem to possess the winking “not-about-what-its-about” qualities of allegory, even its thinly-veiled allusions are something of a feint. The subtext of the film is certainly rich, and is certainly worth exploring (we’ll dig into it below) but the true source of the film’s peculiar power derives not so much from what’s on screen — or even what’s hinted at on screen — as what isn’t. No Country for Old Men is a film of narrative absences, a masterclass in elision — the real fireworks come not from the frenzied shoot-outs, tense stand-offs, and narrow escapes, but from what’s not said, from what happens when we’re not looking, and from what doesn’t happen at all.
The plot, as it is, is simple enough: Llewelyn Moss, an impoverished welder living in a trailer park with his faithful and ingenuous young wife, Carla Jean, is out hunting in the west Texas desert when he stumbles across a drug deal gone bad. Investigating the scene, Moss discovers all the participants dead, save one dying member of a Mexican drug cartel who begs him for water. Ignoring the man’s pleas, Moss stumbles upon something that will irrecoverably alter the course of his life: a satchel containing some two million dollars in cash. He takes it and leaves.
And with that, the story is set in motion. The rest of the movie follows Moss on the run, as he struggles to stay ahead of Anton Chigurh, a preternaturally vicious contract killer hired by the Mexicans to recover the money, and County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who wants to bring in both Moss and Chigurh.
It’s obvious the Coens are not all that invested in this police-blotter version of the violent events that make up the core of the story — not unusual for a duo for whom crime is merely the preferred scalpel with which to slice open the human psyche. What’s interesting, and different, about No Country for Old Men is that the Coens are not all that invested in the characters that populate the film as archetypes, either. This is something of a departure from the blueprint followed in most of the brothers’ work (particularly their “crime” films) where we are presented with characters who are memorable, but not especially complex — essentially vivid proxies that exist to carry the larger message home. The Coens’ films aren’t as concerned with human beings so much as they are with the human condition — characters suffering from Hamlet-like vacillations or implacable mental anguish might be more realistic, but they would not allow the duo to tell the kind of grand stories that they want to tell — stories almost desperate in their desire to grapple with the “big” ontological questions: why we’re here, where we’re going, what it all means.
Any filmmaker wishing to explore such questions faces a difficult balancing act: how to grapple with meaningful, vital problems without coming across didactic, condescending, or just plain callow. One tried-and-true approach is to take what you “really” want to say and conceal it deep in the center of a seemingly unconnected narrative maze; a funhouse of distractions, of mirrors and false doors. Then you set the audience loose and let them feel their way through, giving them the satisfaction of finding things out on their own, of uncovering a revealed truth instead of being burdened with a manufactured one.
Such calculated deflection requires skill — swing too far one way and characters can end up as cardboard cutouts, soulless mouthpieces for a too-obvious agenda (see: most Oliver Stone movies). Swing too far in the other direction, and the message can become diluted to the point of obscurity (a pitfall that in my (unpopular) opinion diminishes the Coens otherwise excellent Barton Fink).
Yet that the Coen Brothers are masters of this kind of deflection is without doubt. There is an almost Manichean duality at the core of their two best movies: Fargo and No Country for Old Men — of moral men and women battling against almost inhuman evil — but the stories are so thrillingly told, so packed with human frailty and foibles, and often so funny, that it’s easy to miss. And that’s the point — it’s the machine working as designed.
What separates No Country for Old Men from Fargo, and what makes it the better of these twin masterpieces, is just how stripped away these narrative flourishes are (for that we might thank McCarthy’s famously unadorned prose, which helps reign in the Coens’ sometimes unfortunate predilection for whimsy). One can approach Fargo as a quirky crime caper and leave it there, because, although it puts a spin on genre conventions, it doesn’t abandon them. In Fargo we have a likeable hero to root for (the unsinkable Marge Gunderson), clear delineations of right and wrong, and a story that is tragic, but in which justice of a sort is meted out just in time for the credits to roll.
No Country for Old Men lacks all of these comforts, which makes it both less satisfying as a drama and more satisfying as a work of art: richer and deeper thematically than any other film the Coens have made. Take Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: he would appear to be the hero at the center of the film, the crusading lawman who will bring Anton Chigurh to justice, rescue Llewelyn Moss from himself, and keep the innocent Carla Jean safe.
But he accomplishes none of these things. Bell, in fact, seems utterly impotent. He touches the main action only tangentially, existing along its edges. There is not one scene of dialogue between him and Chigurh, or even Moss. Unlike Marge Gunderson, he is not presented as a particularly gifted investigator, or even, for that matter, particularly devoted to Moss’ case. The film follows him almost in a daze, going through the motions of his duties (and to an extent even avoiding them) playing out a role that he senses is little more than a thin charade.
This isn’t because Bell isn’t a moral man, or a fool. Both the film and the book take care to show that he is both decent and wise. But Bell is also preoccupied, owing to his engagement along a second front, one that is drawing him away from the concerns not just of the case, but of the world: his is a battle with time, with hindsight, and with old age. Sheriff Bell has seen the full sweep of life, he has experienced the death-in-life of which growing older is inevitably a part, and he is struggling to find a way forward. In a sense he has aged out, philosophically, of the role that society has created for him — that of the upright Sheriff who will set right the wrongs of this world, who will ensure that justice is done, who will collar this bad guy and the next one and the one after that, on and on down the line. Bell senses that these are vain fantasies, or at best, temporary fixes. Capturing Chigurh, for him, isn’t the point. What Chigurh represents is. The hitman’s bloody reign of terror is just the latest evidence of the breaking of the world, of its descent into madness and moral decay. He knows there is no resolution, no healing of his soul, to be found in slapping cuffs on Chigurh.
This is a narrative inversion that frustrates many audiences, who may feel that the movie is building towards a final showdown between Bell and Chigurh. But it never comes. The Coens (borrowing heavily, it must be said, from McCarthy’s book) deftly upend genre conventions here; they avoid the easy, ephemeral plot satisfaction of Bell gunning down Chigurh (or arresting him) but, tellingly, they also avoid the ostensibly “deeper” confrontation of the world-weary Bell engaging in a metaphysical tet-a-tet with Chigurh’s embodiment of Death. The old man never confronts Chigurh because there is nothing Chigurh could say, or make him come to realize, that he doesn’t already know — he and Chigurh are two sides of the same coin. And so the Coens leave it out, and by doing so they let the audience know that such a denouement would be pointless. Bell is a lonely character, one that exists almost outside the story proper; and his only victory — if it comes — will be the victory he wins over himself.
If Sheriff Bell is a man on the verge of renouncing the world, Llewelyn Moss is his opposite: a man too much in it. Moss is something of a red herring in No Country for Old Men: we spend most of our time focused on him — on his flight from Chigurh and his long-distance attempts to keep Carla Jean safe (while holding on to his satchel of cash) — and we sympathize as his plight becomes more and more desperate (another favorite trope of the Coens: the naïve yokel in over his head). But while Moss is the focus of the story, the story isn’t about him, any more than it’s about Bell, Chigurh, or Carla Jean. The grand story at the center of No Country for Old Men transcends any one character because each character is a piece of a greater whole; no one truly exists except in relation to each other — and particularly in relation to Anton Chigurh/Death.
If Bell is the sorrow and confusion of old age, weary of the world and fearful about the future, and Carla Jean is the innocence of youth, struggling to understand it all, then Moss is the vanity of adulthood — too attached to material possessions, too bold in the face of obvious danger, too convinced of his own invincibility, too sure that death is a thing to be outwitted, outlasted, or outrun. Moss thinks the story is about him, but in a brilliant and disturbing turn, he is killed off-screen by a nameless cartel member, learning too late the tenuousness of his own existence, and the suddenness of death.
Is Anton Chigurh, that strangely coiffed and cosmically indifferent hitman from another world, the embodiment of Death in No Country for Old Men? They certainly share some common traits: Chigurh is presented as vaguely foreign, clearly an outsider (a nod to another famous Coen bad guy, Fargo’s Gaear Grimsrud) but we also have the vague sense that he is not just a tourist, or even someone imperfectly assimilating the culture he finds himself in. Like Death, he is strange, unwelcome, a visitor from another plane of existence. And like Death, he relentlessly stalks his prey, is immune to human concerns, and operates by an inscrutable code that only he understands. He has principles, but “principles that transcend money or drugs.”
The Coens’ adaptation closely follows the novel in presenting Chigurh as a terrifying force of nature, but whereas McCarthy’s book firmly grounds the hitman in the world of mammon, by way of a scene in which Chigurh returns the recovered money to the cartel and offers his services in an effort to “establish his bonafides,” The Coens cannily cut this moment from the film, further divorcing Chigurh from the world, and making him seem even more an abstraction. The result is that, on screen, Chigurh is the ultimate freelancer: he doesn’t seem to owe any real allegiance to the cartel, or even to his task — one senses that his motivations spring from some someplace deeper, and even darker.
But, importantly — and even on film — Chigurh is also a man, and he is a man obsessed. Free Will, or lack thereof, is another central theme of both the movie and book, and Chigurh, who would appear to believe in nothing save the inexorable rule of fate, cloaks himself in the garb of death to conceal his own human frailties. He is a man who has grappled with the same absurd universe that Sheriff Bell is struggling to come to terms with, and in the process, he’s become a kind of fallen version of Bell: abandoning the notion that the world is changeable, that the actions of any one person can make a difference to a future that is already written.
Chigurh’s famous coin toss, in which he flips a coin to decide the fate of his victims, is a telling misdirection. It would at first seem to be the action of a man who believes that the future is not preordained, but the coin toss is not an opportunity to allow chance to intercede, it’s merely the expression of an outcome that was etched in stone from the first blink of existence. Chigurh believes that actions — his and everyone else’s — are predestined; he uses the coin not to decide but to reveal, and, in what may either be a further instance of torture or an act of strange grace, he presents his marks with the illusion of chance that the coin toss seems to provide. For Chigurh, the coin flip is all performance; heads or tails is written in the stars. As he says to Carla Jean in the novel:
I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one is a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.
The rub, of course, is that Chigurh is only a man: he doesn’t know what fate holds in store anymore than anyone else does. His is an act of dark faith. When, towards the end of the movie, he commands Carla Jean, at gunpoint, to call heads or tails to decide whether she lives or dies — to reveal the fate the universe has decided for her — she refuses (in the book Carla Jean does call it: another minor, yet telling, change made by the Coens for the film) and this refusal would at first blush seem to please Chigurh. But Carla Jean, the face of childhood innocence struggling to understand Death, to understand the vagaries of human action, sees through the pretense as a child would, and far more clearly than does Chigurh himself. She places the responsibility for what’s about to happen squarely on the shoulders of the man pointing a gun at her: “The coin didn’t have no say. It was just you.”
This is a small act of defiance, but it may be the defining moment of the film. Carla Jean’s refusal, and with it her implication that Chigurh is a free being, unbidden by fate, seems to unnerve him, and for the first time and the briefest moment, we see something like shock and confusion pass across Chigurh’s face. Carla Jean’s momentary victory — her cracking the carapace of this peculiar madness — is to make Chigurh realize that he might be wrong, that he might in fact be inauthentic in the Existential sense, that he might have unleashed the flood, instead of being carried away on the wave. The veil drops as Chigurh the man is revealed in this tense moment — as frightened as everyone else.
Whether Chigurh actually believes in predestination — truly — isn’t the point. The point is that his espousal of this belief runs metaphysical cover for his heinous actions. He imagines that he is absolved for everything, since the world could not have been any other way. Carla Jean, in the moment before she dies, suggests he might be wrong.
When last we leave Anton Chigurh, limping away to freedom after having just barely survived a random car accident, we may, along with Melville, “take the whole universe for a vast practical joke.” Predestined or not, the universe does seem absurd, and No Country for Old Men stings its audience with this final absurdity. Chigurh is not caught. Moss and Carla Jean are dead. Sheriff Bell retires, defeated. Justice has not been done.
Yet the film doesn’t feel as hopeless as this accounting would make it seem, perhaps owing to its final scene. Here we return to Bell one last time, and find him recounting a dream to his wife. Bell is a man who didn’t want to solve the world’s problems so much as understand why they exist, and he is a man who knows he is running out of years in which to do so. He is coming to grips with the truth of existence: that it doesn’t make sense, that the bad guy does get away sometimes, that we will die without knowing all the answers, and without even knowing what this was all for.
Here he can again be contrasted with Fargo’s Marge Gunderson, who is in many ways equally perplexed by the world: just witness her utter bewilderment in attempting to understand the murderous actions of the captured Grimsrud. The important distinction, however, is that, unlike Bell, she has not renounced that world, not given up on it as a lost cause. This makes her a more sympathetic character than Bell’s aloof sheriff, because her recognition of evil and absurdity does not devolve into despair, as Bell’s threatens to. Gunderson takes action, and by taking action she combats the absurdity of existence, placing upon its blank slate her own moral code. The universe may indeed be absurd, but it is a benign absurdity, a place that does not cow to human aspirations but that need not be devoid of meaning or of justice. One might follow the example set by Gunderson, and accept this truth with determined resignation, without having one’s humanity annihilated by it, as does Chigurh.
Whether Ed Tom Bell is defeated by this absurdity, or has simply grown too old and too weak to wrestle with it, is an open question. He is not a man, either in the book or on film, who would seem to give in to despair. He appreciates the beauty of life, and the gifts it has given him (embodied most strongly by his loving wife) though he is well aware that they may be taken away at a moment’s notice. The message of his dream, in a beautiful passage that closes both book and film, is ambiguous. In it, Bell and his father are on horseback, riding through a snowy mountain pass. The Sheriff watches as his father rides silently past him:
I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make afire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
“And then I woke up.” What weight Bell attaches to the dream is up to him — the universe has no say. He can choose to follow the path of Chigurh, letting himself be tossed by the winds of imagined fate, or he can choose to hold on as long as he can, to “be a part of this world.”
It is tempting to think that Bell, a decent man in a dark world, will follow his father’s example, riding out into the darkness with his lamp lit. After all, what else can decent men do?
