Best Picture: #80
Original Release Date: November 9, 2007
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Quick Impressions:
My daughter liked No Country for Old Men. Nihilism holds more appeal for her than romance or war.
“That’s a clever movie,” she remarked at the end. “I like how it’s just not resolved because I was thinking, ‘How could you resolve this in a way that’s satisfying?’ and you can’t really.”
My husband then remembered how jarring he found one key death on a first watch. It stunned him that this death happens off screen. I mean, that is the big shock of the movie. Back in 2007 (when we were blissful newlyweds), I remember watching intently, thinking, “I just don’t understand the point of this movie! I see it’s headed for a big showdown, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get from that.”
Then very late, I suddenly realized, “I’m an idiot! I’ve been watching as if Josh Brolin is the protagonist, trying to build a story around him. But it’s Tommy Lee Jones!” (I remember telling this to everyone with such demented glee. I miss having my mother around to listen politely to my nonsense—the way Sheriff Bell’s wife listens to his dreams at the end of the film.) When I realized whose story I was watching, the whole thing was instantly comprehensible—and a much better film than I’d realized to that point.
No Country for Old Men is a pleasant, captivating watch from the start, but it finishes unusually strong. I’ve never read the Cormac McCarthy novel. (Maybe I should!) Despite the fact that I’ve always liked the film, this is the first time I’ve watched it since the 2008 Oscar season. I usually like the Coen Brothers’ movies though I haven’t seen them all. We’ve been steadily working our way through Alfred Hitchock’s complete filmography (and I’m kicking myself for not writing about each of those because I certainly have plenty of thoughts about them!). Maybe we should move on to the Coen Brothers next. Naturally my daughter (who only just started high school) has not seen many of their films.
I wish I had some new, mind-blowing insights about No Country for Old Men. The best I can do is my realization that it came out sixteen years ago, and Tommy Lee Jones apparently doesn’t age.
“Oh my God!” I kept thinking. “Now I’m practically his age! And I’m having the same kinds of internal struggles. The world has stopped making sense to me! Time is marching on, and I’m stuck clinging to the past. People keep asking me to make choices, and Death is stalking everyone I know with an air gun!”
Plus, I’ve also never come face-to-face with Javier Bardem! I’ve never run into him once. I assume, though, that every time I’ve had two choices about where to go for dinner, he’s been eating at the other restaurant! That’s always the way!)
The Good:
On this watch, I kept delighting in the way setting is established. Intermittently, characters mention random city names in Texas. (Most of them might not ring a bell for non-Texans. It takes forever to get to Dallas, Austin, and El Paso. Usually, we’re talking about places like Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Sanderson, Odessa. (Do non-Texans know Odessa? Maybe.) The characters constantly toss off place names, which I found charming. (My husband pointed out that this is how people in Texas actually converse, kind of like how Californians really do always give you highway-related directions, sort of the way they’re parodied on that SNL sketch. Texans give directions in hours and city names.)
Then, after the movie, I realized, “Oh that’s more than charming!”
It ties right into the way our true protagonist spends so much time reflecting on stories that happen in other places. Throughout the film, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is reading stories about horrific, senseless crimes Somewhere Else. He points out, “That happened here. This happened there.” Boy, the world is crazy! There’s one great scene in which he peruses the newspaper and recounts a long story to Deputy Wendell (a really fun Garrett Dillahunt) about a couple in California who torture and kill boarders until they’re finally caught when one man escapes wearing a dog collar.
And then—wouldn’t you know it—it turns out that the whole time, Sheriff Bell has been living in a story himself. It’s not Somewhere Else. It’s all around him. He’s smack dab in the middle of it. And it doesn’t make any more sense than any of those other crazy stories! It’s incomprehensible. Granted, he tries to make sense of everything through fiction. That’s why as the movie progresses, the stories he relays get more personal. He starts taking charge of them, trying to be the narrator. He tells Llewelyn’s wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) a long, involved story about killing steer that seems uncannily related (if not outright analogous) to her husband’s situation. In the end, he gets even more personal and recounts his own dreams (also pretty clearly related to the events he’s trying to process).
Sheriff Bell has the good sense to realize he’s caught up in one of those bizarre incomprehensible stories, but no one around him gets it, so it’s like some existential nightmare. Late in the film, he’s having a conversation with the El Paso Sheriff. It’s pretty clear from his expression Sheriff Bell grimly suspects he’s caught up in some kind of “Pardoner’s Tale” situation. But the other sheriff doesn’t quite join him there. Yes, the world has changed. Yes, it doesn’t make sense. But this sheriff is caught up in complaining about how kids dress (with green hair and bones in their noses). When Bell posits that Chigurh is a ghost who doesn’t exist, the other sheriff is like, “Whaaaaat? No!! He’s real. He killed a whole bunch of people. What are you talking about???” (That’s my own paraphrase, despite the quotation marks.) But Sheriff Bell is right. Chigurh is Death. (Don’t you think?)
Bell then has to carry around the grim awareness that he’s living in a dark parable. Somehow, he’s inside the incomprehensible story. He’s now in one of the Somewhere Else places. He can’t get home again. Everywhere is Somewhere Else.
And the movie just leaves us with that. I love his brief reflection that he’s now lived twenty years longer than his late father, making him the older man. (That’s such a horrific realization. We can imagine him thinking, “That can’t be right! I still don’t know what the hell is going on! Does no one know?”)
It’s truly a fantastic film. I like it much better than Unforgiven, which similarly subverts genre expectations. To me, the ending of Unforgiven feels anticlimactic and disappointing, whereas it’s the anti-climax of No Country for Old Men that makes the ending so powerful. I think it’s because Unforgiven has the vibe of, “This isn’t some fairy tale of the Old West. I’m going to tell you how life really is.” No Country for Old Men, on the other hand, says, “Don’t ask me! I don’t know how life really is! None of it makes sense to me either! Maybe there is no meaning!”
We get foreshadowing of this ending in the scene when Carla Jean asks Sheriff Bell if what he told her was “a true story,” and he replies vaguely with obvious confusion until finally doing the best he can by saying, “It was a story.”
Of course, the most memorable part of the film is Javier Bardem’s iconic, Oscar-winning, (arguably) star-making turn as Anton Chigurh. (At the time, I thought it was so funny everybody was talking about his haircut. Like, yeah, that’s the oddest and most noteworthy thing about this guy for sure! But, I mean, the jokes are funny.)
Disturbingly, I think like Anton Chigurh. When he talks about the coin travelling to this moment, and how you were always moving toward this moment…
Rather than seeing missteps or non-strategic moves in life, I always see that whatever you choose guides you to what you will become. Also, anything I learn or do shapes what I will write. If you’re a writer, you’re always learning to be a better writer. Life experience makes you a better writer and feeds into your future work. (But I’m sure most people don’t think like I do and wonder, “Why did you do that, you weird idiot?”) I get a little bit mystical about it sometimes. When my mother died, I started to realize, “If life is like a book, the part of the story I shared with her is always there. Her story ending does not take that away.” Step back and examine things from the perspective of infinity, and it all looks so different. From a certain point of view (even accounting for free will) you were always in the process of becoming who you are. I feel Chigurh and I are like minded in certain ways. I don’t go around murdering people, of course. (Who has time for that?!)
He’s right, too, that we don’t usually realize the full stakes of our choices. Death always comes, and we’re not usually looking for it. (It’s kind of delightful that he himself gets in a car wreck in the end.)
Bardem is exceptionally good in the role because he’s so understated. Far too often, people overplay psychopaths. He’s more effective because he plays the character as a contemplative philosopher. But he’s not so contemplative that he doesn’t appear to be living in the real world. (That’s the problem with The Counselor. They all act like they’re chanting on a stage in the kind of production where there are no props or sets and everyone dresses in black—except Cameron Diaz who is simultaneously the worst and best part of the movie.) Bardem does make Chigurh seem human enough for the story to work on a literal level. At many moments, he seems sad and frustrated that people don’t understand his point. That makes him seem like a real person, someone who might have chosen the life he has because he’s a bit unhinged. (He kind of reminds me of the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”)
I felt so old watching this time. Back in 2007, I had just gotten married. I was shocked to see Kelly Macdonald playing an American with a West Texas drawl. My kids don’t even know who Kelly Macdonald is! When I mentioned, “That’s Josh Brolin! He was Brand in Goonies, and his step-mother is Barbra Streisand,” my son said dismissively, “Well, I don’t know who any of those people are, so that’s not very important to me.” (Our eight-year-old wasn’t actually watching this often gruesome movie. He was playing games on his tablet. But I’m still baffled that the “Brand in Goonies” reference meant nothing to him.) My daughter didn’t even recognize Tommy Lee Jones! I don’t think she knows who he is! How can she not have seen at least Men in Black or The Fugitive?) (She did see Lincoln in the theater because she wanted an Icee, but she fell asleep through the entire movie, so that’s no help.) Forget Old Men. This is No Country for Me!
The other thing that jumped out at me on this watch were the film’s similarities to Psycho. Since I keep mentioning that our family’s enjoying a Hitchcock phase, surely no one’s too surprised.
Granted, these similarities are all superficial and glaringly obvious, but they never crossed my mind back in 2007 (that I recall), because I wasn’t reading Hitchcock/Truffaut and bingeing my way through Hitchcock’s films at that point. (Sadly, I am almost done with that book. I have only a handful of paragraphs left. I’ve been eking out meaning from it more slowly than anyone has ever read a book in human history. I only read a few paragraphs in bed until my eyes start to get heavy. Sometimes I lose my place (because of my sleepiness), drop the (heavy!) book on my face, and end up reading whole sections over again. But even by that strange method, I can’t make the book last forever.)
Watching both Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) interrogate motel front desk clerks, I suddenly blurted out, “This part reminds me of Psycho.”
I meant only the ephemeral front desk conversations. I picked up a fleeting vibe of Psycho, especially when both men want to see a map of the rooms. That reminded me so strongly of Norman pulling out the hotel register (both for Janet Leigh and then later for everyone looking for Janet Leigh). It was just a quick, sensory impression.
As soon as I said it out loud, I felt stupid. My daughter joked in a West Texas drawl, “I think I can figure why.”
Then I realized the numerous glaring similarities. 1) The plot point of someone stealing a big suitcase of money and hiding it in a motel room. 2) The idea that there’s a seeming psychopath on the loose. 3) The thematic white/black contrast. (Marion Crane wears the white bra when innocent, but the black bra after she’s decided to steal the money. Similarly, Chigurh dresses in black, but both Brolin and Jones’s characters pointedly wear white.
In a scene when Bardem removes his socks (echoing an earlier moment with Brolin), my daughter joked, “He wears evil socks! That guy, the good guy? He only wore white socks!” (There’s an earlier scene where Brolin pointedly says so.) (Of course, this is a standard movie trope/cliché, so it’s not unique to Psycho, but I do think both films include it with deliberate heavy-handedness, drawing attention to it so they can, in the end, tell us gleefully, “But turns out that didn’t matter, did it?”)
Like Psycho, the film also pointedly features pooling blood. (There’s a late event you might miss if you don’t pick up on the pains Bardem’s character takes to avoid it.) And, of course, in both films, there’s a sinister-sounding mother (here Beth Grant) we don’t get to see until near the end of the movie (though we hear her complaining voice).
“Killed by his mother-in-law!” my husband joked with a sad shake of his head. (But how could Carla Jean’s mother have committed that murder? Next time we see her, she’s dead!)
I don’t think No Country for Old Men is meant to be a meditation on Psycho. I suspect these similarities are largely a coincidence. (Any story with dark elements set in West Texas is going to include a sinister motel. Motels are just really sinister out there. Trust me.)
Still, we get a nice inversion of many of Psycho’s plot elements. In Psycho, the detective is murdered, the killer is caught, and (presumably) the money is eventually recovered (though the audience doesn’t care anymore). In No Country for Old Men, the money is never recovered, the killer escapes, and the sheriff investigating the whole thing throws up his hands and quits. Sheriff Bell, increasingly aware he’s trapped in a story, is kind of like the audience watching Psycho. The whole thing leaves him with an uneasy feeling, but in the end, he has to walk away, more disturbed by the strangeness of the evil he has encountered than by the fate of the money.
This time around, I particularly enjoyed Roger Deakins’s cinematography and mused aloud during the end credits, “Think how many movies Roger Deakins is cinematographer of! And when you grow up in a certain era, you see certain people’s images over and over, and you don’t even realize. You just internalize.”
Carter Burwell’s score is practically non-existent. I am not sure I noticed the pronounced lack of score the first time, but the background noise in each scene propels us through the story. By this time, sixteen years later, I know the sound in the movie is diegetic (which is always cool).
Best Scene:
Probably the most iconic scene of this film is Chigurh asking the convenience store owner (Gene Jones) to call the coin toss. This is brilliantly executed and superbly played by both actors. I love the way it’s written. We get to see how Chigurh thinks. It’s suspenseful, too, because the clerk keeps stalling and stalling (not entirely knowing what he’s forestalling). We wait and wait for him to be murdered. The moment is torturously prolonged. Then, of course, he happens to “call it” correctly. The anti-climax here foreshadows the “twist” ending of the movie.
Best Scene Visually:
I love all the visual echoes in this movie. So often, Bell and Chigurh find themselves in the same places just moments apart (as in the scene with the milk) or in the same moment just a small place apart (as in the motel room scene near the end). The imagery is captivating—reflections into the TV set, shadows on the wall.
Probably the most crucial visual is when we see Chigurh check the bottoms of his boots as he leaves Carla Jean’s house. Another great moment is our last look at Llewelyn, particularly when we remember the early moment when the mortally wounded man in the truck kept begging, “Agua.” (Maybe he should have given him some water. In West Texas, surely you’re not driving around without something to drink in your truck. I feel that was a coin toss moment, and Frendo called it wrong.)
Best Action Sequence:
I love watching the money get dragged through the vent, but the scene at Eagle Pass is also pretty gripping. Llewelyn makes terrible choices.
The Negatives:
I have no problem with Brolin’s performance. I usually like him as an actor. But why does Llewelyn make such terrible choices? Why is he such an idiot? (I mean on a literal level. He chooses so poorly. He reminds me of the time my sister and I inherited our uncle’s Ultima game and tried to pick it up mid-quest without a booklet. We had no idea what we were doing. At one point, we started stabbing all the beggars. Then we were evaluated on our virtues. It was like, “Clemency: thou art doing poorly in this virtue.” We died laughing. But in real life, behavior like that is not funny. Watching Llewelyn’s misadventures, you almost feel like Brolin’s getting extra metaphorical coin tosses just because Fate watches him and decides, “You seem like you need a handicap. Let’s give you some extra chances, so you can get warmed up.”)
On this watch, I noticed that Llewelyn is able to get as far as he does only because being a man grants him a degree of privilege. He does the weirdest stuff, and people give him a pass. They react like, “Well, okay, you seem to be a man, so that checks out. You can go about your business, sir.” (The one guy gives him a pass because he authentically provides evidence he’s a Vietnam vet, and that makes sense to me. I wish the characters in First Blood had been so logical.) But most of the time, he stumbles around growling at people, and they seem to say, “Well, a man has to go his own way. He’s a man, all right!” If I stumbled around the streets at night the way he does, I would get committed! People would say, “Here, come with us, sweetheart,” and I would be like, “Thank you! I have always depended on the kindness of strangers!” They’d pull me into a blanket, and that would be it. They wouldn’t help me buy boots and send me on my merry way. They would lock me up and take away my shoes. (It seems like male privilege until you reflect that I’m so much less dead than Llewelyn.)
Early on, when he gets shot and escapes into the river, I noted, “I feel like this could never happen to me as a woman. This is something I could never experience. This is part of a world that’s inaccessible to me. Can you imagine a woman ever doing this?”
My husband replied, “No woman would be that stupid.” (That wasn’t what I meant, but I saw his point.)
What are you doing, Llewelyn? Welders make good money. That’s a niche trade. That’s skilled labor. I’ve known a lot of welders. That job pays. You don’t need to steal money. What are you thinking?
Let me be clear. I am a dingbat. But if there’s a bag of millions of dollars surrounded by a bunch of dead guys who have been gunned down, would you take that money? Come on! Again, I have no experience with anything…like this. I am a woman. I am a stay-at-home mom who writes mainly fiction. If you said to me, “Build me a house, install the plumbing, and kill that rattlesnake,” I’d have to start googling frantically. But hasn’t this guy ever seen a movie?
1) Somebody always wants two million dollars. 2) Murderers will kill you. 3) A large sum of money—in a bag like that—always contains a tracking device, or ink pellets that explode, or hot serial numbers. I know that from being a little girl watching cartoons.
You can’t just steal a bag of money from a bunch of people who have been gunned down and think it’s going to be a-okay.
And why for the love of God doesn’t he give the suffering man water? That’s a big mistake. (I could imagine that happening to me, though. I’ve had things like that happen to me. Someone asks me for something, and they frighten me, so I don’t help them because I’m afraid. Seconds later, I realize, “I should have helped that person!” It’s a terrible feeling. You always know immediately you’ve made a mistake. Sometimes it’s not too late to fix it, but often it is.) On a non-literal level, I think his needless callousness to the suffering man is the coin toss that sets everything in motion and determines Llewelyn’s fate.
The whole debacle is just such a bad choice. He’s in over his head from the start. Now, granted, I know the whole film is sort of a parable, a morality play. But all the other characters make realistic choices on the level of the story. Llewelyn’s choices are harder to understand. I am not worldly. But it would not take me a second location to realize, “Hmm. This money is being tracked.” That’s a given with big bags of money surrounded by dead guys. Even in 1980, everybody knew that!
Hmm. Where’s the last guy? There must be someone who’s not dead yet! Llewelyn, if you pick up that bag, it’s you. You’re the last guy who’s not dead yet. Yet.
Of course, I guess the improbable nature of his initial crime kind of matches up with bizarreness of the California couple who kill boarders and are only caught when one victim escapes wearing a dog collar. And I know the movie also thinks Llewelyn is a baffling idiot because Woody Harrelson shows up mid-film to tell him so quite pointedly. So this is less a weakness of the film than a criticism of Llewelyn himself. But I had to think of something negative to say!
Overall:
Sixteen years later, No Country for Old Men still packs the same punch it did on its initial release. It remains a strong Best Picture winner. Thematically, it reminds me a bit of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (a film I seemed to like better than most people I know). (I mean, I liked the movie more than they did, not that I preferred the film to their company). (You have to watch the whole thing!) (At the time, I talked to so many people who didn’t like it but didn’t watch the whole thing. Of course, tragically (to me) many would go back and watch the whole thing and still not like it.) I should probably read Cormac McCarthy’s novel. (That doesn’t seem quite as pleasant to drift off to as the Hitchcock book!) Also, I need to watch the car wreck scene again because looking at the cast list, I see one of those boys on bikes is Caleb Landry Jones, and I did not recognize him when we watched the movie!