No Country for the Best-Laid Plans of Men

The Bell Tolls For Thee
by M.A. Fedeli




Joel and Ethan Coen's western poem No Country for Old Men begins with the widest of landscapes; rolling, unobstructed fields that meet in the far distance with an expanding sky. It concludes in a somewhat similar place; the endless expanse of a dream, with all its infinite emptiness. These places, with their similarities, are also completely different. The first is open, public reality as far as the eye can see, while the second is the most personal and hidden of spaces: the unconscious of a man's mind. In between is the film's story, its drama. However, just like a dream, what is considered drama, as well as what is considered story, narrative, character, climax, and conclusion is open to interpretation. Dreams are notoriously lacking in consistent structure and satisfaction (in the Barry Lyndon sense of the word). No Country for Old Men is not a dream, but it functions like a dreamlike representation of birth, death, and the struggle between. What is important to the story, what is crucial to comprehension, what is entertainment in the film, is open to interpretation as well.

The film's main action begins with Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) as he hunts in the wilds of West Texas. He happens upon a drug deal gone bad, where all the players are dead or dying. The money and drugs are still there and Llewelyn, in the grand American tradition, takes them (well, takes the money at least). Javier Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, a man whose mission is to get the money back at all costs, and who sets out immediately to do so. All of this, however; the drugs, the dealers, the money, it is all secondary to the film's larger message: the inevitability of fate. The inevitable fate in this film being death, personified by the pale and ghoulish Chigurh. Chigurh, like the similarly named pest that is also difficult to shake, will not be deterred in his attempts to retrieve the money. Like death, he marches on with no sympathy for his target's appeals or circumstance. The closest he comes is offering, at times, a coin toss to decide if a person's final end will happen right then or sometime in the future. Everything to lose, everything to gain. But the coin toss itself is irrelevant. The fate has already been decided, the coin merely displays it. If a character decides not to "call it", it changes nothing about the outcome. Death cannot be cheated.

Like death and dreams, No Country for Old Men does not conform to standards or norms. Non-conformity in film can obviously be seen as both a positive and negative trait. For the same film, it can be treasured by one viewer and dismissed by the other, depending on their levels of enjoyment and personal leanings. I found the loose and experimental structure of Todd Hayne's Dylan-fest I'm Not There to be overly self-indulgent and ultimately lazy as a document of anything other than Todd Haynes' brain. I feel the opposite about the Coen's latest. They are scholars of film and masters of suspense. They understand both the subtle and not-so-subtle rules of genre and genre's place in the collective American consciousness. The West itself is long and slow. Within this crawling atmosphere, the Western highlights the loner and his quest. It isolates man as he is surrounded by massive nothingness. He is alone with his thoughts, his obsessions, and desires. In the context of a film, his choices can render him either larger than all that arid desert nothing, or smaller than the boundless and imposing terrain. Aware of all this, the Coen's use supposition to their advantage and craft a film that turns off of the genre's main artery, using the audience's expectations as a character in the film, in the person of Llewelyn Moss.

Llewelyn believes, as most of us do, that his actions, wise and cunning as humanly possible, can turn, enhance, or delay his fate. As an audience observing him, we want to believe the same. But Chigurh operates beyond human constraints, he and his weapons are superhuman, they are mythological. In the sense that Llewelyn is the audience, Chigurh is the film. The film deals in anti-climax. Life and death are anti-climactic, despite what the movies have shown us. Like anti-climax as used in The Sopranos, it is not uninteresting filmmaking. You can shock without showing. You can bring entirely new cinematic experiences to the audience if you take the time (and the risk) to set them up in your own unique way. At certain moments, the Coen's slow and quiet everything down so the sound of even a common gunshot is a shattering experience, and careful footsteps boom and echo. Slow and quiet, as well as large doses of anti-climax, will naturally lead naysayers to claim the film is "boring" or "meandering". Against modern suspense or action film standards, maybe that is true, and those films exist for people who need the safety of familiar structure. Look to the classics, however, and you will see where No Country has its roots. Even the most violent and predictable of mid-century films were anti-climactic by today's filmmaking standards. That does not make them worse, just as if No Country somehow making $300-400 million domestic would not make it any better.

The Coen's do a wonderful job here of comparing the mundane with the manic, proving that even the most insignificant seeming moments can be made as fascinating as explosions. What happens immediately after the gun fight, the calm after the flash, is just as exciting as the gunfight and carnage itself. This film banks on the audience's appreciation of both aspects. Violence comes with heavy circumstances, and not just the immediate visual and sonic destruction. Blood pours out of bodies in this film, it does not trickle. It has to go somewhere and it has to be stopped somehow. Gunshots, bruises, and broken bones hurt and hurt bad for a long time. Most of us do not constantly experience such tragedies, so watching what a character has to go through just to get the minimal medical equipment necessary to fully self-operate on a gunshot wound is fascinating (even educational?) theater. This method of storytelling takes attention to detail to the next level, proving that there can never be too much.

No Country for Old Men is a visually stunning opera of souls; some good, some bad, some just floating. It mirrors the progression from the limitless possibilities of birth to the lonely, closing light of death. It starts wide, working with the audience and all their years of film knowledge, expectation and understanding. As the film lurches along towards the ending, it strips away action and convention one by one and narrows until it whittles down to the bare and finite point of one man's fleeting, existential thought. It is an acceptance of both the end on its own terms, and the futility of planning. All the efforts to decide or enforce your inevitable fate are worthless. Like Chigurh, it is coming, regardless. You can hold out hope that things will be set right in the end, hope that the bad guys will go to jail, hope that the good guys will win, hope that we'll all find paradise in heaven. Hope though, is not reality, it too is a futile dream. And then we wake up.