No Country for Old Men (movie review)

 

 

 July 18, 2009        

 

 

 

 

The Coen Brothers specialize in being confusing and exciting. This movie is no different — in fact, it’s tailor-made for the purpose. Thus, in one sense this movie is a sincere lament on the tragic self-destruction of human moral choice, but in another, competing sense, it’s an empty academic rumination on the role of chance in our lives. This tension in the movie between moral choice and chance is resolved in favor of chance, to the detriment of the film. On the other hand, it’s a thriller of great achievement at times, but with an unsatisfying ending even there.    

 

Echoes of Ancient Greece reverberate throughout this movie, but unfortunately, those echoes don’t ring true: it’s a case of misinterpretation. That is, in the old Oedipus plays of Aeschylus, our royal protagonist is prophesied by the oracle at Delphi to kill his father and marry his mother. In response, Oedipus flees, so as to make it flat-out impossible for the prophesy to come true: just don’t show up, and then it can’t happen. But it does happen anyway, he does fulfill the two prophesies, doing both unwittingly by wild chance.    

 

But the point in these Oedipus plays is not that mere blind chance wholly rules our lives, that chance is a dragnet one can’t escape. The point is rather that the logos, the rationality of the moral system underlying the chance occurrences, is the really decisive part. Since Oedipus has answered the riddle of the Sphinx correctly, something no one else had ever done, Oedipus has thereby put himself outside human society and outside human morality, and he is manifestly a prodigious moral freak beyond nature.  

 

The ineluctable logic of moral consequences, then, will bring it about that Oedipus will live a truly monstrous life, as Nietzsche pointed out, since he is a man without compass psychologically. He can see what’s behind the veil of nature’s secrets, he can see behind the riddle of nature’s mystery, and therefore he is beyond the pale, not one of us. So it is not precisely chance that makes him do monstrous things so much as the grinding wheel of punitive comeuppance, the Furies, that is. (Don’t mess with them!)  

 

To return to our movie, it is, in short, a misinterpretation of all the Greek stuff, to the point of farce. The Oedipus-like character here, Anton Chigurh, compared to Oedipus, is about what a candle is to the sun: not much. The Coen Bros. are experts in this type of brilliant vapidity. Their movies are very entertaining, to be sure, lavish, sumptuous, a feast for the eyes and ears and sensibility, but ultimately they’re empty due to their failure to stand for something besides barren, wandering intellectuality.   

 

Tommy Lee Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, the old sheriff who is worn down and eventually broken by a world increasingly violent and out of control. It could be said his character is a good candidate for the central consciousness of the movie, since the plot spins out his inability to live up to his opening voice-over, wherein he pledges to keep on fighting the good fight. But the sheriff’s defeat in the plot represents the defeat of moral choice’s efficacy, and the defeat of responsibility and accountability. He must lose so the movie can have some fun with juvenile profundity.  

 

Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, a welder, out hunting pronghorn in the middle of the day for some reason, when he happens upon the very bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. He finds dead bodies galore, and, wouldn’t you know it, two million bucks in a big black satchel. (We learn a new vocabulary word, too, the word “transponder,” which device tracks the whereabouts of the satchel.) Fatefully, Moss decides on the spot to take the money, and by so doing he puts himself outside of conventional ethics.  

 

His grisly outcome is to be eventually killed by the dealers who want the money back. (He had no idea what he was up against.) It is blind chance, of course, that gives him this opportunity, as has happened in so many previous movies (Treasure of the Sierra Madre, A Simple Plan), but it is still straight forward moral consequences that deliver him to perdition. So the treatment of his character by the plot is one of the bright spots of the movie, since chance is here relegated to its true place as a triggering cause only, not promoted foolishly to an underlying cause. That latter type of cause in this case is provided by Moss’ choice to take the money.  

 

Javier Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, the most bizarre creation in the plot by far. He carries the chic haute couture of the movie on his shoulders, he’s got the cachet. He is vaguely Asian, or Native American, or Eastern, or…..something — something vaguely out-of-this-world, in sum, not Westernized. This L’Etranger aspect of Chigurh gives him a sense of moral authority (according to the movie-makers, that is), but it fails miserably in the artistic long run. It degenerates into the usual and tiresome Coen weirdness-gratia-weirdness. Chigurh’s dialogue is peevish, irritable, confusing, purposely self-contradictory, and full of half-baked Sartrean existentialisms to snare the unsuspecting. He does everything but wink at the camera. It is definitely funny at times, the Coen Bros. know a good joke when they see it, but the pretentiousness of having a retarded psychopath claiming to know something profound is ludicrous and cliché. Chigurh delights childishly in intimidating the down-to-earth Red State types with his Socratic banter.   

 

The movie opens with a beautiful, evocative montage of desolate, pure, lonely, deserted countryside, accompanied by a magnificently gravelly voice-over by Tommy Lee Jones talking about the good old days. But he is confused about these bad new days, and the growing level of violence, and he vows naively to continue to do his job in this brave new world of mayhem, that “he’ll be a part of this world.” In fact, though, the plot will spin out his inability to live up to those words: the forces of disorder win in this script, and Ed Tom Bell, the symbol of order, loses. There’s very little music in this movie, but there’s plenty of moody sound effects: lonesome wind rustling through the sage, ominous, crunching footsteps, lightning, and cars whizzing by past the various roadside motels, like so many harbingers of something or other. There’s also a lot of silence, evoking yet more moods. The narrative gets under way and switches cleverly back and forth between Bell, Moss, and Chigurh.  

 

Moss finds the money and puts it away at home, and then implausibly goes back to the scene of the drug war to give water to one of the drug-deal guys who had been asking for agua. The guy is gone when Moss gets back. (No kidding?!
Didn’t see that one coming!) Is this Moss’ attempt to remain within conventional ethics? It certainly bespeaks a contradiction within him, and an innocence in believing he could survive the excursion. There are many implausibilities like this in the plot: another is when Moss forgets that his mother is dead, and has to be reminded by his wife. He comically stops to think about it, as if he’s realizing, “Oh, yeah…..that’s right!
You know, you’re right!” There are too many pointless things like this in the movie, apparently designed to give it a little psychological texture.  

 

But most of the crazy stuff is for Bardem/Chigurh, though. At first, he’s being arrested; somehow a cop has got the better of him. (That’s implausible right there, given the preternatural powers the movie ascribes to him.) In the station a little later, the cop foolishly turns his back on him to make a phone call, and just as the cop is saying, “I’ve got it under control,” Chigurh walks over and strangles the cop with the handcuffs manacling Chigurh’s hands. The motif that everything is now out of control in our civilization, despite our best efforts, is thus introduced. We are put on notice that the forces of disorder are stronger than the forces of order. The camera slowly pans over the murder scene, revealing to us a million or so black scuff marks on the floor from the shoes of the sheriff as he desperately struggled against his assailant. This is a portrait and image (like a Jackson Pollack painting) of the violent randomness that emerges victorious in this movie — the Coens are giving us an emblem of the Dionysian limitlessness that joins battle with, and defeats, order and measure.  

 

Later, on the trail of Moss and the money, Chigurh pulls out a quarter at a gas station, and demands of the station owner that he call it. The man delays. This eventually prompts an irritable, and pointless, “You’re a bit deaf, aren’t you?!” from Chigurh. The man, being normal, is confused by the unprovoked aggression, and by the opaque, shell-game style of conversation Chigurh engages in. The man finally calls the coin-toss out of fear of the consequences if he refuses, and he fortunately gets it right, thus saving his own life.  

 

Chigurh then says to him, “Don’t put that back in your pocket — it’s your lucky quarter. It’ll get mixed in with the other coins, and then it’ll just be another coin…..which it is…..” This confusing, back and forth philosophizing demonstrates the tension in the plot between chance and necessity. The quarter should be saved, since it saved the man’s life, and is thus a non-contingent, necessary thing. But, on the other hand, it’s still just a random quarter, a contingent, non-necessary thing. The whole scene is too cute by half, though, and is characteristic of the whole movie — having fun being sadistic, juvenile, and intellectually superior towards decent, non-insane, country folks. Moreover, there’s a curious elegance to Bardem’s portrayal of this remorseless murder, an elegance which can only be made up, not taken from real experience, and which can only be explained by the script’s conscious desire to make an innately antipathetic character look sympathetic and chic.  

 

There’s lots of strange interludes in the movie, too. For example, Chigurh at one point is driving alone across a bridge out in the bright emptiness of nowhere, whereupon he slows down to shoot at a crow he sees sitting on the railing, but misses somehow, and then continues his driving back at regular speed. Oh…..I get it…..this is heavy stuff…..back at the gas station, while he’s torturing the owner with fear, he munches on some snack, like peanuts or something, and puts the squished cellophane wrapper back down on the counter — then the camera, in all seriousness, focuses solemnly and luxuriously on this stupid, irrelevant candy wrapper re-opening and uncoiling. This was a close-up. What are we supposed to do with that? Do these film artists just put a bunch of stuff like that into the movie because they feel like doing so, and then we have to figure it out for them? There’s a lot more of that type of stuff, not worth going over.  

 

Woody Harrelson arrives in the plot, tracking the money, but the hunter becomes the hunted. At first, Woody finds the money in a not-believable way, yet another major implausibility in the sometimes sloppy script. Somehow Woody has tracked Moss to a hospital where Moss is recovering. Then Woody is outside after the  interview with Moss, walking over a bridge and looking around at random, and just happens to look down at the right moment to see the satchel far below on the ground where Moss threw it earlier for safekeeping. (That’s how it works when you’re a pro, kid.)  

 

But Chigurh is also in town, and he knows Woody from before. By ESP, evidently, he knows where Woody’s hotel is, and gets the drop on him in the lobby, and they adjourn to Woody’s room. He’s going to kill Woody, but he has to torture him first with philosophy: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” (…..indeed.) Chance rules all, you see. No sense in trying. This is an example of the sophomoric nature of this psychopath the movie seems to think is a cool guy. Woody suggests a deal whereby they go to an ATM (in 1980?), take out $14,000, and “we all just walk away.” (Can you take out $14,000 from an ATM in one visit? I don’t know about y’all, but my bank limits me to $20 a day.) Chigurh looks off into the distance beatifically, and says, like a half-wit, “A-T-M.” Then he kills his friend Woody.  

 

Towards the end of the movie, Moss is dead, too, at the hands of the original drug dealers, and Chigurh has gone to see Moss’ wife, because he made a promise to Moss. He tries to make Carla Jean feel as though Moss wanted Chigurh to kill her, but she doesn’t fall for it. In fact, Chigurh has a lot of trouble throughout the movie getting people to fall for his philosophizing. He pulls out a quarter again and demands that she call it, which she refuses to do. She says, “You don’t have to do this,” quite intelligently introducing the concept of moral choice into his empty life. He responds with his usual self-deceit by scoffing and saying, “People always say the same thing. They say ‘you don’t have to do this.’ But I got here the same way the quarter did.” He means to say that his being a murderer is just a chance occurrence, like a coin-flip, or just like the quarter being in exactly that spot, instead of somewhere else. The script seems to take this seriously. But then Carla Jean says, “It’s just you, the quarter ain’t got no say.” That’s the most intelligent line in the script, but he kills her anyway.  

 

Chigurh gets admonished finally, and by his own principle of chance. He’s driving away after killing Carla Jean, driving very safely, in fact, when he gets hit by a reckless driver. He makes a sling for his broken arm from a kid’s shirt and walks off, remorseless as always. He has suffered a minor injury compared to the fatal ones he inflicts. Why is he made so fashionable?   The penultimate scene in the movie is the worst. Bell the sheriff goes to see his lawman mentor, who tells him about the old days, as if Bell is some kind of rookie cop when he’s actually a crusty old veteran. The mentor does a lot of looking off into the meaningful distance as he speaks, a lot of pauses for silence to catch up, a lot of baritone voice, a lot of respectful deference. It’s a masterpiece of crap, totally unspontaneous and phony.  

 

The last scene has Bell in retirement, at the breakfast table with his cheerful wife, who knows nothing about what goes on in the world. The contrast is extreme. He tells her about his dreams. They had his father protecting him. Then we hear the inexorable sound of a ticking clock, so profoundly, as the screen goes black. Now, this movie is very entertaining most of the time, to be sure, but it needs to stand for something clearly. The purposely confusing nature of the moral sensibility of this work is a major flaw.