No Country For Old Men

****
Written and Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

In 1996 Joel and Ethan Coen burst into the mainstream film scene with their
American masterpiece: Fargo. With iconic characters, dark humor, and an uplifting faith in the human spirit, Fargo allowed viewers to fall in love with its unique portrayal of humanity. The America that the Coen brothers so carefully satirized and embraced has undergone some severe changes. School shootings, 9/11, global warming, political division, and world wide unrest has shattered the optimism of the mid 90s and led to the growing pessimistic viewpoints as portrayed through modern film. Scorsese tells us that if we do the right thing, we will just get shot in the face. Cuaron suggests that the world is beyond fixing, we should just get on a boat and leave. No Country For Old Men, adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, is the Coen brother’s darkest (and best) movie. Though not quite echoing the masculinity of The Departed (what movie can?) or the idealism of Children of Men, No Country, through perfect craft, acting, and screenplay, demands that we take a closer look at humanity and our role in its complex scheme.

A drug deal has gone wrong, leaving several dead men, $2 million in heroin, and the funds to procure the product to bake in the hot Texas sun. Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a Vietnam Vet who happens to stumble upon the carnage while hunting. He takes the cash, which triggers one of the greatest games of cat and mouse in recent film history. It’s greatness comes from a truly evil cat, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a bounty hunter who happens to be a “psychopathic killer” with a silenced shotgun, a high powered air gun (capable of shooting locks off doors), and fate on his side. Investigating the remains of the drug deal and the subsequent murders Chigurh tallies up, is the Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). As the bodies stack up Bell tries to distance himself from the case, growing ever more tired of the ugly half of humanity.

In a scene that is already famous and will undoubtedly become legendary, Chigurh is unsure about whether he should end the life of a gas station clerk. Chigurh asks, “ What’s the most you’ve ever lost in a coin toss?” He flips a coin and covers the side, asking the clerk to “Call it.” In a similar scene later in the movie, Chigurh tells a character, who is pleading for his/her life, “I got here the same way the coin did.” Bell, Moss, and Chigurh are similar characters, each strong willed, intelligent, and principled. What the Coen brothers suggest, is that a simple flip of a coin has chosen the path each will take. The entire film is a coin flip: heads vs. tails, dark vs. light, good vs. evil, strong vs. weak, and life vs. death. It is in the unconventional last act of the film where each character learns the result of their metaphorical coin toss.

What separates No Country thematically from Fargo, is not just a dramatic shift in worldview. Though there certainly must be factors outside of film that changed their view on humanity, the Coen brothers suggest that there was never a time where humanity was anything better than how it is portrayed in No Country. The epiphany reached by Sheriff Bell is not that humanity has gone to shit, but it had gone to shit long ago. This viewpoint, coupled with the fatalism of the last act, paint the Coen brother’s picture of humanity, suggesting the rising of the “dismal tide” is not a new one, and that, in fact, this is No Country for Old Men.