No Country For Old Men

I didn’t like this movie at all. Its gruesome blood lust and senseless, stupid violence, nihilism and fade to black ending had my head turning, seat squirming and one eye shut. On the most superficial level, the movie speaks to the fringe violence of 1980’s Drug War America set on the southwest border of Texas and Mexico. But it seems to transcend time and place to predict a more brutal future - and the future is now. We are a nation that experiences violence daily, we are frightened and demoralized, up to 65% of us have experienced traumatizing events - but how many of us have recovered? And yet… we older folks yearn for those idealized bygone days 20 some years ago when our violent spirit was less transparent and more hidden. As I continued to think and feel about this movie, it became clear to me filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen fashioned an allegorical tale that runs deeper than individual violent acts and speaks to the modern American Zeitgeist.

The movie is based on Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed novel of the same name released in 2005. I’ve read the book and watched the movie and I must profess that I prefer the film - it’s the Coen’s ability to breathe life and death into that stark, brooding western landscape like a modern Peckinpah (and just as violent) and to forgo the novel’s need to tie-up the loose ends.

By now you’ve probably read enough about the film to appreciate the basic plot line and chracter development. Llewlyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder and Vietnam vet, stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad, Everyone is dead save for one poor dying soul, the heroin is still in the flatbed and the last man standing is propped up against a tree, dead as a doornail, holding over 2 million in drug money in his satchel. Moss takes the money and hightails back to his trailer. The chase has begun.
Anton Chigurh (Javier Barden) is an assassin hired to kill Moss and recover the money. Chigurh is a force of “unstoppable evil” that comes alive when he kills, holds a convoluted but identifiable murderous code of values, and has a bizarre Beatles haircut. He is a killing machine with an unusual weapon, a stun gun powered by the pneumatic click of an air tank, typically used to kill cattle, only Chigurh uses it to murder human beings.
The movie’s conscience and voice of reason is supplied by the soon-to-be retired Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). His homespun voiceover narrative provides the moral foundation to the film’s themes of fate and free-will and dumb luck. Can we protect ourselves from such evil? Or are we simply delaying the inevitable, our own self-extinction?
In a pivotal point in the film, a deputy scans a bloody death scene and says, “It’s a mess ain’t it?” The Sheriff’ sardonic reply, “If it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here”, colors the scene with a dark humor and a sense of impending doom that envelopes the rest of the movie. Sheriff Bell identifies our longing for barely remembered values
in a soliloquy of quiet anger and sadness, “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin’ Sir and Ma’am the end is pretty much in sight”. This is a sheer primordial vision of our fading moral decency and the ascendance of our most malevolent instincts. We have become the violence.

There are two vital scenes in which teenage males are confronted with a moral choice trading their shirts for money, and keeping quiet about it. It exposes how quickly our young are indoctrinated by greed instead of altruism. The rot has already set-in…it starts so early now – our last days are upon us.

The final monologue gives meaning to everything that went before. Sheriff Bell talks about a recurring dream, a dream about fathers and sons… “it was like we was both backing 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 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 in all that dark and all that cold and I knew whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”

But where is our father now, when we are scared and we really need him? I hate this movie. It’s the best movie I’ve seen this year.

Peace,
Bo White