Release Year: 2007
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen*
Runtime: 123 minutes
Without realizing it, what most people want is control. For good or bad reasons, everyone has, to some extent, the desire to control some aspect of self, life, or environment. Maybe all three. Fear and dissatisfaction do not have to exist when we have control: but life tends to give us anything but. It is not in our design to have as much authority and security as we want in this world, and no film follows a character who learns this lesson the hard way quite like No Country for Old Men. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is a respectable, small town lawman who expands well beyond a character who has simply “seen some things.” He is thrust unwillingly into a fiasco with no turning back and no making it out unscathed, and the experience is remarkably affecting.
The Coen brothers both defy and utilize conventions for Westerns and films in general here. The utilization, however, is always with some unique purpose that makes the viewer feel like it is being used for the first time (ultimately turning into another defiance, by nature). The most obvious example of this is the voiceover that opens the film. Falling meticulously over beautiful frontier establishing shots, that adhere satisfyingly to the rule of thirds, is the sheriff’s sincere account of his longevity in the position and what dread disturbs him most about it. The dread, unsurprisingly, is encountering something he does not understand, something he cannot control. The way he sees it, there is good like him and bad like the criminals he arrests: anything in between, he can deal with case-by-case. The audience meets a different character as the voiceover concludes, however, and his name is Anton Chigurh. His introduction right as Ed admits his fear provides the audience with the suspicion that he might be the fulfillment of this fear, and that it is more than possible that Sheriff Ed is the old man who does not belong in this country anymore.
This dual character introduction has the same effect as Shakespeare’s blatant titling of his plays as tragedies. The audience is sought to be intrigued not by whether or not the ending is tragic, but by the way the events unfold. Voiceovers tend to be lazy and/or overbearing devices in modern film, but Ed’s introduction frees the narrative up to focus on other events and present a more dramatic reaction from him, now that we know the philosophy on which he’s built. The film’s goal is quickly diverted from telling you what its message will be. . . to how and with what visceral storytelling it will show you. Convention gets upturned to introduce nuance.
Another trope more easily recognized, that of the cat-and-mouse chase, is soon made clear as well. We are introduced to something of a protagonist, an everyman named Llewelyn Moss, who plans on stealing money from the aftermath of a criminal transaction. One can sympathize with him, but only by default: he is not a “good” person, but he wants to take control of a situation in which he’d otherwise have no part by obtaining money with which he can take control of his life. Anton Chigurh does not exactly want him to go quietly, as we will learn. The stakes are terribly high with a villain foreshadowed to be fatally fearful, a “good guy” who clearly fears him, and this villain’s target who honestly does not seem to stand a chance.
He’ll certainly try to deny that, and try to make the viewer deny it too: Llewelyn ends up being crafty either by personality or as a defense mechanism, and the twist on the cat-and-mouse game is that it is so terribly difficult to root for Llewelyn, the obviously doomed mouse, and that it is so surprisingly burdensome to call Ed the cat as he chases Anton one step too slowly. There are three runners in this race, but the middle man is something neither of his opponents can understand, their every move poking the soulless, unstoppable bear.
Anton is definitely more of a bear than the cat Llewelyn believes him to be and the mouse that Ed believes him to be: nothing, not even feelings, successfully stands in his way as Javier Bardem delivers one of the most chillingly convincing performances I’ve seen from any actor in my life. The whole nightmare tour the film takes feels so real and unnerving and frightening, but the quality of how the tone is accomplished makes for an outstandingly impressive experience. The Coen brothers communicate an idea of such relevant truth that it seems to never get old, as well. That idea is that plans do not have a guarantee of success. From Blood Simple to Fargo or even True Grit, their films have featured characters so plausibly fixed on things going their way, without a single hitch or obstacle whatsoever. The novelty of the concept persists in the realistic and emotionally driven ways that the characters meet the real world. Almost all of them are fixed on money and greed, and the destruction of such wicked pursuit strikes a chord every time, especially in the humorless, dry, unrelenting narrative of No Country. The Coens have a significant story tell with this small town debaucle.
Similar to Western ancestor The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, characters in this film are humanely (or inhumanely) representative, in true Coen fashion. While probably not going to the same lengths that Llewelyn does, nearly every audience member can relate to the concoction and stubborn pursuit of a plan that cannot work out: we have all tried to control what we simply cannot. It seems so obvious to the audience just how severe Llewelyn’s futility is, but this is only through the perspective of the movie: real life can make us into Llewelyn’s on a smaller, subtler scale. Ed’s pursuit of Anton does not seem nearly as futile, but just as bleak. He has the humility to submit to moral values, but perhaps not the humility that admits that there is more to life than he can understand, similar to how Batman learns in The Dark Knight that some people “just want to watch the world burn,” and reason will not work on them as much as taking a strong, maybe simultaneously introspective stand. Anton is the “thing Ed doesn’t understand,” who exists not on Ed’s black and white moral scale but seemingly outside of it. He determines his actions from a coin toss. He wants to chase Llewelyn for the thrill and satisfaction of his own inhumanity: Llewelyn’s theft of the money is just an excuse. Anton is the inhumanity both of the other central characters are unwilling to face or comprehend, with Ed and Llewelyn as two versions of denial. They exist without a greater perspective of the world, that is cognizant we cannot understand everything, and a has a virtuous sense of humanity that is satisfied with all that is good no matter the circumstances.
No Country for Old Men, in a sense, helps to provide that perspective. If we seek morality purely as a way to control or understand the world, we will be disappointed by a world that is not so luxurious. If we stare the world’s bankruptcies in the face, however, humbling ourselves to the truth that we cannot understand everything, seeing the consequences of self-centeredness and arrogance, truly fearing the corruption of circumstance-based purpose, then we are closer to a life of clarity. A life of morality despite hardship, fulfilling in the ways we possibly can God’s design for His fragile creatures.
*some of my favorite directors
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