Not long after the novel,
No Country for Old Men, was published in 2005, I went through an enthusiastic Cormac McCarthy phase, voraciously reading all of his works, always with a dictionary at my side, because of the intricate vocabulary that the author employs while describing landscapes weathered by the violence of both nature and man. If you want to make things even more fun, then drink a shot every time you read the word, “atavistic”, in a McCarthy book.
One thing that always riveted me with regard to McCarthy's prose is the way that he describes the supposedly mundane details of workmanship in a tactile way. One such example is John Grady Cole's duties on a ranch in the 1992 novel,
All the Pretty Horses. One example in
No Country for Old Men that is beautifully conveyed in the 2007 film adaptation directed by Joel and Ethan Coen is a passage where Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, puts a tent pole contraption together to retrieve a briefcase of money from a motel air duct.
I love how
No Country for Old Men is note-by-note faithful to the McCarthy novel, even to the extent of pitch-perfect word-for-word dialogue, and yet exists as a work of cinema that is distinctly characteristic of Joel and Ethan Coen, who have always specialized in movies about hapless people who try futilely to exert control over their circumstances in a changing environment. Like the police chief portrayed by Frances McDormand in the 1996 Coen Brothers feature,
Fargo, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, does not understand the increasingly diabolical nature of criminals in present day and ponders the notion that he is living in a cruel world that is nudging people like him to the exit door.
In a sense, Jones's Sheriff Bell represents the past, while Brolin's Moss represents the present and the chillingly nihilistic hitman Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, represents the inevitable future that seems to descend into entropy and chaos as we all perceive it while we age. These three characters are never shown in the same frame. All the while, the Texas border landscapes are depicted through the stunning cinematography of Roger Deakins as beautiful, but indifferent constants, much in the same way that director Terrence Malick uses scenery in his 1998 war film,
The Thin Red Line, to illustrate that the violence of man is not an affront to nature, but rather a mere part of nature itself.
I have always been amazed by the cold effectiveness with which violence is depicted in
No Country for Old Men, with no overt film score cues to guide how we the viewers should think about the killings. As in the McCarthy novel, the demise of one person is not depicted at all, and simply revealed after the fact, a slap-in-the-face moment that reinforces the idea that our best laid plans and expectations are not going to play out in a way that we hope them to play out. As for our belief that what happens is all about us, one side character says it best.
“That's vanity.” Even Chigurh himself is revealed in a late sequence to be, as we all are, at the mercy of the unpredictable machinations of fate, although he leaves the scene ghostlike, as if to remind us that the senseless violence that has always been a part of the world will always be around somewhere out there. What Chigurh does to his victims is nothing personal. It merely is what it is, dictated by a natural order that none of us understand.
I am still stunned that
No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for Best Picture, because it is such a peculiar movie for us the viewers to get our minds around. Even today, it remains a film that makes no attempt whatsoever to engage with its audience in a way that viewers have come to expect from by-the-numbers cinema that wraps tidy bows on their plots before the end credits roll. The way that this movie arrives at its finale is splendid in all of its frustrating lack of closure. We do not quite grasp what has happened, only that it happened before we were a part of the world and that it will keep happening long after we are gone. As we all grow older, we all believe that the world is going to Hell, because we increasingly sense the disconnect between our naive youthful expectations and what actually occurs around us. Those who follow in our footsteps will feel the same way, although the world is the same as it ever was.
This Criterion Collection 4K UHD Blu-ray presentation is beautiful and starkly bright, as it should be.
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