No Country for Old Men (2007)

Rated R for over-the-top brutal violence.  Ironically, that brutality comes from how matter-of-fact the violence is.  It is quick and intense and often, bullets rip people apart.  There's also a bit of language and there's the implication, especially when it comes to the novel, that Llewelyn married Carla Jean a bit too young.  This is an upsetting movie.  R.

DIRECTORS:  Joel and Ethan Coen

I have to do this quickly.  I keep putting off things until they become overwhelming, leaving me in a constant state of self-imposed stress.  It's weird having to write about No Country for Old Men.  I read the novel two weeks ago in preparation for this watch.  The thing that makes No Country hard to write about is the fact that there are so many objectively supported interpretations that anything that I write here will either be straight up wrong or simply a rewritten read of what someone else has written.  There's no win on my part.  The only thing that I get to do by writing about No Country for Old Men is to add a great movie to a list of films that I have on my page.  Oh, I also get to update the Criterion Collection page.

While No Country for Old Men was not my first Coen Brothers movie, it was one of the early ones.  I think my first one was The Hudsucker Proxy, which is kind of impressive to have as a first Coen Brothers movie.  But one of those things that comes with the Coens is a very specific vibe.  But people kind of pigeonhole the Coen Brothers as one thing.  I think, instead, that the Coens find projects that tend to align with their sense of storytelling.  (I'm basically defining how someone becomes an auteur.)  One of the thoughts that kept popping into my head was both how much the film of No Country both stayed absolutely true to the Cormack McCarthy book while simultaneously being almost an insult to the McCarthy book. (Okay, I'm being dramatic when using the word "insult", but the use of the backspace key seems like moving backwards here.) 

There are large swaths of the film that are one-for-one the book.  If you read the book, almost every other chapter is a narration by Ed Tom, the sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones.  It's meant to be his inner monologue about the events of the story coupled with thoughts on what it means to age, especially in today's society.  (Or, you know, 1977 / the '80s).  Now, I'm in a little bit of a weird place.  I had seen No Country back in college.  This was the era of little film nerd who was just dipping his toe in the water of cinema.  But when I read the novel, I had all of the casting in my head.  Tommy Lee Jones was Ed Tom.  Josh Brolin was Moss.  I think it is impossible for me to imagine a different type for Anton Chigurh than Javier Bardem.  Heck, that's how we all met Javier Bardem was from that role. So I had a little bit of a cheat when reading the novel, knowing how the film was going to adapt it.

But as much as this is a Cormack McCarthy book, mirroring the text of the novel so closely, there is so much of the movie that screams the Coen Brothers.  I'll say this.  Llewelyn and Chigurh are beat-for-beat the book.  There are some moments that might not completely align with the story.  But tonally, those characters are lifted right from the page.  But I'm talking about the extended world of No Country.  Part of what makes No Country almost a unique thing from the film is the world of the Coen Brothers.  No Country is an oddly intimate story, where the camera is focused on the primary characters incredibly closely.  While there are smaller interactions, like the boy who gets paid $500 for his shirt or the kids on the bike who find Chigurh, not much is given to these moments.  Instead, it's characters like the lady who runs the trailer park that the Mosses live in.  There are cab drivers.  Carla Jean's mother is straight up Coen Brothers thoughts personified in a person.  

And the insane thing is that these creators were meant to be married in this film.  Golly, rarely have we had a source material and an adaptation that seem to enhance both things perfectly.  I am one of those people who hates when a novel puts the movie poster on the cover.  I must have been in a really weird headspace when I bought my copy of No Country for Old Men back in 2007 or 2008.  I was obsessed with the movie and I wanted to read the book. But this was also a time in my life when I wasn't reading as ravenously as I do today, so it sit on a shelf.  My point behind the movie poster cover is that I don't know if either would have had the same cultural impact if it wasn't for the symbiotic relationship between the two.

One of the biggest epiphanies with this watch of No Country was the fact that it almost has more in common with the slasher film than it does with the modern crime thriller / Western.  (I need you to remind me to return to this idea?  Capisce?) I want to talk about the slasher element of the movie first.  Part of the structure of No Country is the idea that there is no scenario where Chigurh will not leave Moss alone.  He is an unstoppable force.  There are moments where Moss gets a little bit of an edge of Chigurh.  But like a Michael Myers, Chigurh takes whatever injury without a physical reaction.  At one point, Moss and Chigurh are trading gunshots on the U.S. / Mexican border.  Moss gets wrecked.  He hobbles across the border covered in blood and really hurting.  It's a miracle that he makes it over the border, eventually collapsing on a step in town.  We are meant to experience that misery as he fights for survival.  It seems like Chigurh is simply scared off.  Nope.  Chigurh is equally injured.  In fact, we're given gory details on how injured Chigurh is.  But he is emotionless as he patches himself up.  That scene matches James Cameron's The Terminator, when the T-800 patches up his own skin without reacting in pain.  

Coupled with the notion that this might be a slasher movie over a thriller is the idea of Moss's morality.  One of the odd moments I noticed throughout the story is the idea that Moss basically doesn't make waves in his life.  When the sheriff's office points out that they recognize Moss's truck, the question is brought up whether or not that Moss would run dope.  The narrative becomes quickly clear that, no, Moss doesn't run drugs.  Instead, everyone figured out that Moss was just a guy who discovered two million dollars and got caught up in something that got out of hand quickly.  This is the violation of the code that tends to get the protagonist into trouble.  In the same way that a group of camp counselors get into trouble for something that should be innocuous, Moss is punished for a single mistake.  That punishment is unforgivable, especially considering that what gets him caught by the cartel is his empathy for a thirsty man in the desert.

When it comes to the thriller or Western element of the story, there's something that is contrary to the history of cinema that No Country manages to pull off.  (This is me trying to return to my point, but the interruptions of writing has me pivot a bit from my forgotten point.)  Most film noir and crime films had a dictate from the self-regulating body that the studios all agreed to.  Studios agreed to make edgy crime stories as long as there was an agreement that virtue was rewarded and villainy was punished.  Often, this led to eleventh hour moments where the bad guy, through some cruel irony or twist of fate, got his comeuppens.  No Country violates that idea head on, leading us to a conclusion that actually has more in common with the horror genre.  Llewelyn invokes a trope.  He is threatened by Chigurh, which only makes him more mad.  He did that old chestnut, "You don't have to come to me.  I'm coming for you. You're my personal project."  When the hero of the story says that, we get the Kevin McCallister plan unfold.  He's going to prep for Chigurh only to save his wife.  

Instead, we get the most insane ending.  Not only does Moss lose his fight for survival and fails to intercept Chigurh, but he doesn't even get to confront Chigurh.  He's killed unceremoniously because his mother-in-law told the cartel where they were staying by accident. Moss's death happens off-camera.  Now, I'm not saying that the horror genre would kill off its protagonist off camera.  But there are many horror films where the protagonist thinks that they have the upper hand only to lose in the last moments.  Crime dramas have to have a chance for virtue to succeed.  Instead, we have Carla Jean, an innocent in the story, most likely killed by Chigurh.  She refuses to play by his rules and is left to suffer the consequences (in my read of that ambiguous ending).  Not only that, but it seems like villainy would be punished.  Much like the crime dramas and thrillers of yesteryear, Chigurh is hit by a vehicle and it looks like that's the end of the bad guy.  Instead, he does what he always does.  He dispassionately walks off, licking his wounds without repercussions. 

But now I have to talk about the idea that I have been avoiding.  What's the read on the movie?  It's been a minute since I've read the take on this film.  I know that it has a fairly common read.  The title itself is the film's theme.  If we look at the film from the perspective of Ed Tom, an aging sheriff who has watched the world grow more violent, it seems to be a criticism of the current generation.  The world is going to heck in a handbasket and Ed Tom seems powerless to stop the oncoming storm.  When I first saw this movie, I probably disagreed with the message that McCarthy infused into his tale. There was always that narrative that "Things aren't as good as they used to be."  There seems to be this misconception that the past was some Rockwellian utopia that is being strangled by the advent of technology and the stripping away of manners.  I always hated that, because the reality of that narrative was that there was more terrible stuff in previous generations.  After all, there was a need for the Civil Rights movement and let's not forget the crisis of juvenile delinquents.

But now as I get older, the movie has a bit of a point.  It may not be the exact point that the movie wanted to make.  We're in a crap society, everyone.  Things are really bad.  So many rights are being stripped away and I see my students completely lack empathy in even the remotest sense.  I hate when teachers crap on the following generation.  The message from No Country, criticizing a degraded younger generation, was always annoying to me. But Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to lack empathy.  I see this mostly in the young men I teach, but it is there.  Instead, the real evil is that the return to the values of a previous generation are ruining the current generation.  So as much as there was "no country for old men", the current situation is that old men are reshaping the country so that there would be a country for them.  It's depressing, but the message of the film almost reads better.  It's hard to think why the world is devolving, much like how Ed Tom questions what makes people so violent.  Instead, we're looking at people embrace the worst elements of yesteryear to bring about a world where the Ed Toms of the world can judge others without repercussions. 

But man, the Coen Brothers know how to make a movie.  While there have been a couple of weaker entries in their ouvre, when they hit on a drama, they really hit.  No Country is a tank of a film.  It holds up today.  It's one of those movies where each shot is a masterpiece. It's pretty incredible.