No Country for Old Men

In a film which puts its audience on edge, sometimes the quiet moments say more than the carnage.

No Country for Old Men is the Coen brothers' latest, and pits, if that's the right word, three characters against one another. There's Llewelyn Moss, who stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad, and picks up a pile of cash, which seems, in most films, a cause for trouble. There's Tommy Lee Jones, the sheriff, whose trying to figure out what's going on. You wonder, perhaps, like Misery, whether his inquisitive nature will get him into similar consequences as the sheriff in that film. Then, there's Anton Chigurh, whose much like the Terminator. You can't stop him.

His character reminds me a little of Samuel Jackson's character, Jules Winnfield, in Pulp Fiction. To be fair, Jules, outside of his killing, seems to go on about his life as usual, trying to be cool and hip. Eventually, however, he wonders whether his life is meant for killing, and has a change of heart.

Whether that's what happens to Chigurh, is not entirely clear. Up until the ending, the film seems to be building up, as many films of this kind of genre are, to some kind of final showdown, to see who is the most clever, and who wins in the end, and yet that would lead, I imagine, to something the film can't easily deliver.

Why does Chigurh do what he does? How is Llewelyn so darn clever? Why doesn't Chigurh kill the sheriff (it seems that he could have)? Does Llewelyn's wife survive? If she doesn't, why does he seem to feel remorse? If she does, what does that mean? Has mercy meant that he's now going to pay for a life full of mayhem? Was he some kind of devil's spawn, forced to see good, and then punished for it?

Almost aside from the cat-and-mouse of the two men are the quiet conversations with Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. He relates a story early on about the old times when the sheriffs didn't need guns. What does that say about now? That we're heading to lawlessness?

And what of the rather bizarre weapon that Chigurh uses? Why does he pick something so strange? Is it because no one will suspect it is a weapon? Indeed, we don't. Many of the people he kills are randomly innocent. Does he use the weapon because he sees them as some kind of cattle, being slaughtered by him (perhaps echoing some basic idea in Killer of Sheep).

There's no doubt that the Coens are good at what they do, building up tension, but not keeping it ratcheted up throughout, letting the quiet moments be, as the sheriff recounts stories of the past.

And what of the Mexicans? They serve no function except to be some vague threat that Chigurh disposes of. What is their role? (Javier Bardem, as it turns out, is Spanish, so his American accent is fairly impressive).

The film's ending is, of course, rather abrupt. The kind of ending you don't have in really popular films because, well, it doesn't seem to satisfy. But it leaves at a point where you don't know what's going to happen. Is Llewelyn just a more sympathetic killer, who will eventually do what Chigurh does? Does the sheriff decide to leave this violence? Is the sheriff the son of Chigurh (that was a random thought I had)?

An intense film worth watching, even if it leaves your head scratching.