{"id":1260,"date":"2025-03-13T07:12:59","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T07:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/detoxherb.xyz\/?p=1260"},"modified":"2025-03-13T07:12:59","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T07:12:59","slug":"no-country-for-old-men-all-hell-breaks-loose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/detoxherb.xyz\/?p=1260","title":{"rendered":"No Country for Old Men: All Hell Breaks Loose"},"content":{"rendered":"
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t\u2019s no country for old men, but\u2014old, young, men, women\u2014we\u2019ve probably been there before. It\u2019s the country where you\u2019re ambling along, minding your own business, when you find a stolen fortune that someone has buried and never claimed\u2014or that someone has died protecting. It\u2019s the country where the lucky windfall turns out to be the fatal curse, the country where money is a key, not to the mansion on the hill but to the labyrinth of the monster. It\u2019s the country where a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills is a mirror that shows you what you really want, who you have been all along.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old story. But Joel and Ethan Coen have managed, as they have in so many of their films, to make it new. They\u2019ve reimagined the book of Job as\u00a0A Serious Man<\/i>\u00a0(2009), reinvented the broken-Hollywood-dreams saga as\u00a0Barton Fink<\/i>\u00a0(1991), revivified the mobster epic as\u00a0Miller\u2019s Crossing<\/i>\u00a0(1990). With\u00a0No Country for Old Men\u00a0<\/i>(2007), they\u2019ve taken Cormac McCarthy\u2019s 2005 novel of the same name and created a unicorn\u2014a film that actually improves upon a beautifully written book.<\/p>\n

In Geoffrey Chaucer\u2019s \u201cThe Pardoner\u2019s Tale,\u201d three men in search of Death, planning to confront him over the demise of a friend, find a heap of gold coins under a tree and wind up killing one another. The Pardoner tells us that greed is the root of all evil, but the book and film of\u00a0No Country for Old Men<\/i>\u00a0mix it up a little. Sure, there\u2019s greed, but there\u2019s also honor, guilt, love, loyalty, good and bad luck, mercy and mercilessness, the power of fate and chance, psychic meltdowns and metaphysics. In a McCarthy novel, you expect a certain amount of ruminative philosophy; in their adaptation, the Coen brothers pare that down to just as much as we need.<\/p>\n

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Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam-vet sharpshooter turned welder, is hunting antelope when he wanders into a scene of carnage: three parked pickup trucks whose drivers have been killed in a gory shoot-out. A wounded man begs for water\u2014Moss has none\u2014and, some distance from the crime scene, he finds a dead man under a tree beside a briefcase that turns out to contain $2.4 million in cash.<\/p>\n

It also contains a transponder that allows Moss to be tracked by the film\u2019s archvillain, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a man who has no heart or soul, no conscience or remorse, no needs except the impulse to destroy. He\u2019ll kill you for the hell of it, or if you say one little thing that annoys him, or if you and he cross paths at the wrong place and the wrong time. A fellow (and rival) bounty hunter, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), tells Moss that even if he hands the found money over to Chigurh, Chigurh will still kill Moss for \u201cinconveniencing\u201d him. His only virtue is persistence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Brilliantly played by Bardem, Anton Chigurh is (perhaps needless to say) one of the all-time-great movie villains. He\u2019s otherworldly bad. His facial expressions, his gait, his speech, his responses\u2014he doesn\u2019t seem entirely human, but we don\u2019t know what else he could be. A psychopathic killer, Wells says. A ghost, says Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). But he\u2019s all too real. He\u2019s endlessly resourceful\u2014wounded, he blows up a car as a distraction in front of a pharmacy so he can rob it for antibiotics and painkillers. And of course he\u2019s a dead-accurate shot.<\/p>\n

Anton? Chigurh? Where is this guy from? What is that trace of an accent? He\u2019s a particular kind of movie monster, one that makes you realize how influential the film has been, and not only for its portrayal of the West Texas landscape. Villains with the stature and weirdness of Chigurh have recurred again and again in films and on TV. For example, in\u00a0Breaking Bad,\u00a0<\/i>the former drug lord Hector Salamanca is a giant presence. Even mute and paralyzed, even in a wheelchair, he projects a hyped-up version of Chigurh\u2019s pure, chilling malignity. The excellent series\u00a0Fargo<\/i>\u2014which shares a title, an introduction, and a tone with its namesake film, by the Coens, who are listed as executive producers on the show\u2014also excels in its villains, including the fifth season\u2019s Ole Munch, who might be Chigurh\u2019s distant cousin. Like Chigurh, he seems to have come from another place, another era. Ultimately, Ole Munch is revealed to be a sin-eater, a five-hundred-year-old Welsh figure assigned to take on the sins of the dead. He, too, is beyond any civilized modern ideas about right and wrong.<\/p>\n

McCarthy doesn\u2019t tell us much about Chigurh\u2019s appearance except that he has dark hair. Dark hair is an understatement for his film version\u2019s coiffure. It\u2019s a bowl cut, a cheap kid\u2019s haircut that, along with an upsetting goofy smile, can make him look like a wicked, calculating baby. His style\u2014his lack of style\u2014is aggressive. He doesn\u2019t care what we think, though he\u2019d prefer that we be scared. Most films introduce us to the bad guys\u2014Jack in\u00a0The Shining,\u00a0<\/i>\u201cReverend\u201d Harry Powell in\u00a0The Night of the Hunter<\/i>\u2014before their wicked true selves emerge. But Chigurh has no \u201cnormal\u201d self, no mask. He is what he is from the start.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Joel Coen\u00a0and Ethan Coen<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Watch enough films, and you become conscious of the images that stick in your mind. The nun at the end of\u00a0Vertigo.\u00a0<\/i>Don Corleone\u2019s death in the garden, at play with his grandson, in\u00a0The Godfather.\u00a0<\/i>The armies sweeping across the field in Akira Kurosawa\u2019s\u00a0Ran.<\/i><\/p>\n

Anton Chigurh blowing holes in people\u2019s heads with the kind of stun gun used in abattoirs to slaughter cattle. We get what it is early on, before Sheriff Ed Tom explains what the steel bolt does to the bovine brain. The device resembles medical equipment, an oversize oxygen tank, for which it\u2019s fatally mistaken by the first person Chigurh kills, a young cop he garrotes with his handcuffs after a wrestling match that is as close as Chigurh will come to anything like sex.<\/p>\n

Chigurh kills his next victim\u2014a random stranger he pulls over while he\u2019s driving a stolen police car and pretending to be a cop\u2014with the bolt gun, his weapon of choice. The murders are more vivid\u2014more shocking\u2014when we see them on-screen than when we read them on the page, despite how good a writer McCarthy is. The shoot-outs, the ambushes, the on- and offscreen assassinations, the crumpling bodies, and the spurting blood evoke the choreography of a video game. But so far no video game has made me think, as the film does, that being a carnivore means living with a certain amount of denial. The cattle-killing bolt to the forehead says: No matter how merciful or quick, the process that put the burger on my plate was not a happy or kind one.<\/p>\n

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Our hero, Moss, is such a good guy that he makes a second trip to the crime scene, ostensibly to give the dying man water. We may suspect it\u2019s too late, and that curiosity\u2014as much as conscience\u2014inspires Moss\u2019s return. That\u2019s when all hell breaks loose. From then on, we\u2019re just waiting to see who survives.<\/p>\n

Reading the book along with the movie, I was surprised by how many chunks of dialogue had been taken directly from the page\u2014surprised, I guess, because the exchanges sound so much like Coen-brothers dialogue: straightforward enough, with flashes of irony and wit, and a steadily deepening thrum of existential panic.<\/p>\n

The challenge of adapting a novel to the screen is to make the interior visual\u2014to turn consciousness into action. The novel includes long, first-person meditations in Ed Tom Bell\u2019s voice, but the film gives us just enough of those passages to make us understand that McCarthy and the Coen brothers are after something deeper than a tale of innocent lives cut short by dirty money. McCarthy\u2019s themes\u2014courage, destiny, spirituality, the American West, history, the contest between our better natures and our survival instinct\u2014are here, even as we realize that they have always been the Coens\u2019 themes as well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Like any translation, the process of turning a novel into a film requires a series of choices, and much of what makes the movie work so well is the intelligence and creativity of the choices the Coens have made. It\u2019s a choice to start, in voice-over, with a passage from the book\u2019s sections of first-person narration. Ed Tom Bell begins by reminiscing about a bygone era when sheriffs didn\u2019t need to carry guns, then segues into a story about a kid whom Bell\u2019s testimony helped send to the electric chair. The boy killed a fourteen-year-old girl in what was supposedly a crime of passion, but, the boy told Bell, no passion was involved. He\u2019d always wanted to kill someone. If he got out of jail, he would kill someone else. If we\u2019re listening carefully, we\u2019re being warned: we are about to meet evil in its purest form.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a choice to take us across the dry plains of West Texas and in and out of what seems like every seedy motel in the region. It\u2019s a choice to have no background music to warn us of approaching danger or to show us how to feel, no music at all until a brief, disquieting norte\u00f1o serenade seems to herald more problems but ultimately leads our wounded hero, Moss, to the relative safety of a Mexican hospital. It\u2019s a choice to film Chigurh so he seems to occupy the entire screen, so we know there\u2019s no getting around him. It\u2019s a choice to cut directly from Chigurh telling his victim to hold still and blowing a round hole in his forehead to a second circular aperture that turns out to be the sight of Moss\u2019s rifle, aimed at the antelopes he\u2019s telling to hold still.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re subtly but memorably told where Moss learned (or practiced) his sharpshooting skills: Vietnam looms in the background, connecting the state-sponsored violence of war with gang-related narco violence and with the individual human impulse to kill and destroy. The Coens deftly thread the legacy of Vietnam through the film; in one scene, a U.S. border guard allows Moss\u2014naked but for a hospital gown\u2014into the country only after he hears about his military service record.<\/p>\n

The casting choices are inspired. Woody Harrelson is transcendent when he comes face-to-face with Chigurh and knows that his number is up. Kelly Macdonald is similarly expert as Carla Jean Moss, our hero\u2019s loyal, plucky wife. Macdonald\u2019s native Scottish accent vanishes into a convincing Texas drawl, as she manages to catch and hold our interest despite having only a few key scenes. Macdonald leaves us broken after the honest, smart, and decent Carla\u2019s inevitable meeting with Chigurh.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s hard to pick the film\u2019s scariest moments, but two obvious candidates occur in scenes involving a coin toss that will determine whether someone lives or dies. Just the thought of that decision can drive our blood pressure up, and it keeps rising throughout Bardem\u2019s terrifying performance of what, finally, is an act of extreme psychological torture. The assumption of power, the bullying, the cruelty, the stupidity, the implacable insistence, the mocking smile\u2014every negative human trait feeds into the game that Chigurh enjoys so much, at least partly (we assume) because it confirms his essential nihilism. Heads or tails, life or death, kill or be killed\u2014none of it has any more significance than the way the coin lands. It reminds you of the Misfit (perhaps the literary character whom Chigurh most resembles) in Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s story \u201cA Good Man Is Hard to Find,\u201d what he says in killing a father, a mother, a grandma, and two kids. \u201cNo pleasure but meanness . . . It\u2019s no real pleasure in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The final series of choices by the Coens\u2014to edit out many of the sheriff\u2019s reflections near the conclusion of the novel, but to end as the book does, at the breakfast table, where Ed Tom is telling his wife about a dream he had last night\u2014is both sensible and daring. In real life, we may find ourselves spacing out when our loved ones tell us their dreams. But we\u2019re riveted by the poetry of Bell\u2019s dream about going through a mountain pass, in the cold, and meeting his father:<\/p>\n

Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s certainly not a Hollywood ending\u2014but like McCarthy, the Coens make it work. What would the Hollywood ending be? The shoot-out to end all shoot-outs. Bullets ricocheting everywhere, bystanders ducking for cover. But neither McCarthy nor the Coens are going to give us that. Because by then, the only major characters left standing are Bell and Chigurh, and neither the novelist nor the directors are cheap or deluded enough to pit good against evil and suggest that one will ultimately win.<\/p>\n

The last we see of Anton Chigurh, he has been gravely wounded in an auto wreck. His bone is sticking out of his arm, but with the aid of a sling\/tourniquet made from a shirt cadged from a local boy, he lopes off down the street. Chigurh is still out there, maybe coming for us next, because there\u2019s no pleasure in life but meanness, and because his stun gun is the right tool for the right job.<\/p>\n