‘No Country for Old Men’ Has a Winning Message
I saw No Country for Old Men in one of the best possible ways: in an old, grand, one-screen theater from the 1940s, the last show of the evening (as it alternated with Citizen Kane), where the owners nuked real butter in the concession-stand microwave to pour over the popcorn. The velvety red seats with wooden armrests (before audiences got spoiled by cup holders), original architecture, and general chill through the old building coordinated perfectly with the circa 1980 Old West thriller unfolding onscreen.
Like another Best Picture nominee this year, There Will Be Blood, I thought No Country was a fantastic, mesmerizing film with great storytelling and powerful performances. But No Country also had an ironclad premise that seems so un-2008: good and evil were black and white.
Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff character, seeing the cold-blooded nature of the new drug smuggling unfolding in his once-peaceful neck of Texas, struggles with this evil from the very first frames of the film. His narration describes “this boy I sent to the gas chamber at Huntsville here a while back,” who killed a 14-year-old girl in what the press called “a crime of passion, but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it. Told me that he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about fifteen minutes. I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t.
“The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure,” the character, Ed Tom Bell, continues. “It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job — not to be glorious. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. You can say it’s my job to fight it, but I don’t know what it is anymore. More than that, I don’t want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, ‘O.K., I’ll be part of this world.’”
The hard-to-understand evil that forces its way into the sheriff’s rural world — Anton Chigurh, the hitman played so brilliantly by Javier Bardem — is unique among Hollywood’s bad guys. In Point of No Return, Harvey Keitel’s “the cleaner” character — disposing of not-quite-dead bodies with acid in the hot tub — equals Chigurh’s emotionless efficiency, but his character lacks the many layers of Chigurh — his interactions with plainspoken townsfolk, his coin flip over the life of a stranger — that were so fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
In fact, Hollywood has a history of creating hitmen who are meant to disgust us with their crimes but then become endearing or find redemption. In The Professional, hitman Jean Reno bonds with an orphaned girl played by Natalie Portman. In The Whole Nine Yards, Bruce Willis turns whacking into comedy.
And in one of my favorite films, Pulp Fiction, the hitman duo of John Travolta as Vincent Vega and Samuel L. Jackson as Jules Winnfield are arguably the film’s most likable characters — and characters whose fates are molded by the concept of redemption. After believing that God stopped a hail of short-range bullets from striking either he or Vincent while out on a job, Jules decides to give up the hitman life and go straight. He then puts this talk into action by deciding to spare a pair of restaurant robbers in his “transitional period.” Vincent mocks Jules’ conviction about divine intervention and his decision to give up contract killing. The moral of the story? Vincent is killed in a most inglorious way. Jules lives.
But Chigurh is a character who would have unceremoniously killed Pulp’s Pumpkin and Honeybunny robbers, along with the blustering restaurant manager and maybe the waitstaff, then would have enjoyed the rest of Vincent’s bacon before hitting the road. (Just nobody ask him where he’s headed, friendo.)
You leave the theater after No Country realizing the central message, intended or not: We may spend so much time trying to figure why people are bad that we fail to accept that some people are just bad — and should be dealt with accordingly. Like Ed Tom Bell wakes up from his dream, we, too, can wake from a false sense of security, difficult as it may be to understand the changing world around us.
Because Chigurh may have been fiction, but one look around the globe — from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who proudly admits to sawing off the head of Daniel Pearl, or Mohammed Atta, who commandeered a jet full of frightened civilians and plowed it into business people’s offices in his holy war — tells us that his character is far from make-believe.
Bridget Johnson is a columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News.
I love this movue..hureee
I’m not sure that the following logic is particularly strong, “Since it exists in a very good movie then it must exist in real life”. Is this not the argument made by the author of this blog? Also, I’m not sure how having a sensible, less accident prone spot to keep one’s drink during a theater experience manages to spoil an audience. The fact is, theaters charge an inordinate amount of money for the theater experience and with so many alternative ways to watch a film, I would think it good business practice to give customers a cleaner, high quality environment in which to watch a film. If they could make hand carved armrests with cup-holders in them, rather then the plastic ones, that would be the best of both worlds, no?
I agree that we must hunt down any enemy who is engaged in war against us (Jihadis). We should maintain embargoes against nations who have stolen the property of American businesses (Cuba), and make life miserable for the leaders of nations which threaten to pass nuclear or bio-chemical weapons to our enemies.
While Brigit Johnson has decided that the most significant element to “No Country For Old Men” is its good guy vs bad guy theme, It seemed to me that the issues of choice and pre-destination were far more interesting and better developed then any other question.
We have populations on both the Right and the Left who feel strongly that they make decisions every day and that their will alone has brought them to where they have arrived in any given moment. Meanwhile, many members of both the Right and Left believe either in the Grace of G-d or the world as an uncountable series of chemicals whose future can be divined by the right computer model.
What I find amazing is, all that the ancient arguments school had taught me had been settled in our modern age, those that one needs only wait out the old folk’s exit to be rid of entirely, have been revived or never went away and both arguments can and have been made with eloquence and sense by one of the few films worthy of winning a best film award.
I also thought this film was exceptional and well deserving of the Oscar. Javier Bardem created what, in my opinion, was the most terrifying villain in the history of cinema; he reminds me of a great Dostoevsky character, something purely satanic yet intimately acquainted with the world he inhabits. The modern, humanist left cannot even begin to grasp evil like Chigurh (the original humanists like Machiavelli or Hobbes were entirely familiar with it)and Chigurh fully knows this; in a way, he seems to be meticulously measuring each person he meets, probing them, as if their entire lives are being weighed in microcosm. The effect is both electrifying and disorienting, there is a sort of immobilization in the face of such menace, people either cannot bring themselves to see what they plainly know, or never even see it coming: this man is no man at all and every second seems to stretch out.
This is not a gratuitous film, but it is unquestionably a film for adults. I applaud the Cohen brothers and Cormac McCarthy for making such a thoughtful and demanding film. Another note: the production values are out of this world; brilliant casting, cinematography, sound, lighting etc. This is a exceedingly well-crafted work.
For several years now, I’ve characterized most Hollywood movie plots as variations on the “hitman with a heart of gold” theme. For some reason, they want us to understand and even identify with unspeakable monsters. With this movie, it’s encouraging to see a little moral sanity coming from the hollywood cesspit. Too bad it’s all too rare.
I did not see the movie but did read the book recently.
To be honest with you all, I did not see the story as one of good vs evil and the necessity of confronting evil. Nope…
What I got out of the book is how personal decisions impact the individual. And, how ambiguous AND random life and fate truly are.
Maybe someone can explain the dichotomy I’m living…
After 9/11 I lost my appetite for violent films. I’m not interested in seeing “No Country.” Violent films literally make me feel sick.
However, I regularly go to YouTube and LiveLeak and watch videos of terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan being blown to pieces.
People call it “war porn.” It’s not that I’m getting off on it, but I feel a grim, ice-cold satisfaction seeing these bastards running for their lives as the high-explosive cannon shells burst all around them, and then the poor sons-of-bitches literally disintegrate.
The only way to confront this kind of evil is to kill it, and nothing is deader than a terrorist hit by a 30mm cannon shell.
“No Country for Old Men” is a depiction of decent, honest people who lack the “sophistication” to understand and “contextualize” monsters like Chigurh, who patiently and almost politely plumbs the humanity of his victims to savor all the more who he’s going to murder.
The Cohen brothers have done this before in “Fargo” – a world with people like Marge and Norm who are unable to comprehend how Grimsrud (and his partner Carl, prior to being fed into a wood chipper …) can do what they do “for a little bit of money.”
But alas, as Ubu Roi notes, “the modern, humanist left cannot even begin to grasp evil like Chigurh”. I saw both of these films in the company of a kind of NYC audience who importantly and intelligently laughed at all the wrong times.
Of course, they’ve been properly educated to parse and appreciate the neo-post-ironic subtext of the story they think they saw …
The writer of the news article hits the ‘nail on the head’ and understands fully the impact of ‘good vs. evil’ in this film-story. Yes, we are seeing the rise of evil today in our society and it rears its ugly head more boldly all the time.
Evil lives and its cells are planet wide. All one has to do is pay attention . More civilians are murdered in the United States in one year than the total casualties of Troops killed in the duration of the War.
It is by their sacrifice that Liberals can feel warm and fuzzy in hating America.