No Country For Old Men

What’s up in the Wild West?



The sun is rising on the plains of Southwest Texas. The old sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who finds the recently increased crime rate in the world quite ungraspable, narrates the good old days when sheriffs would not have to carry even a gun. The sun is rising on the village, where he has been the sheriff since his twenties. As sheriff Bell counts down to retirement, he philosophies his job.
Coen Brothers’ ‘No Country For Old Men’ – winner of 4 academy awards – starts with this lyric nostalgia.
Ed Tom Bell, apparently, is not a man of his age. He is an old style western character from the films of Sam Peckinbach, John Ford, or Sergio Leone, where the good and the bad, the criminal and the innocent are two separate entities whose borders are definable.
However, ‘No Country For Old Men’ positions itself in the misty quarters of the postmodern 80ies, when people do not kill any more for a bunch of dollars but just for fun. Or, like Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), live the matter of life and death to a toss up.
Anton Chigurh, one of the main characters of the film, is a total anti-hero with his funny haircut; cool, empty, and frightening face, and an effective air pressure gun he carries with himself. Chigurh does not need a reason to kill – he kills the ones he has to, and tosses up for the ones he cannot decide.
We first see Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), another main character, a veteran soldier fought in Vietnam, hunting deer in the desert. He is younger than Sheriff Bell but older than Chigurh. Running after his hunt, Moss falls into the afterfight of a drug deal. He discovers a few dead bodies, a truck full of heroine, and the money – 2 million dollars – after a quick search. As Moss evolves from hunting to gathering, he remains unaware of the easy-money troubles.

Postmodern Western
Coen brothers, tracing the three characters on a multi-layered story, tell a postmodern tale of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. However, in the picture by the Coen Bros., we do not find the sort of good, bad, and ugly that we see in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western classique. Here we have a bad, who is a principled bloodspiller; an ugly, who messes up his life with a trace for easy money but who has a conscience; a good, who does not care.
In this film, Coen Bros., whose filmography is a blend of film noir and comedy, set out to re-produce, re-think, and re-locate the Western.
To the common knowledge, Coen Brothers love crime stories. One should not forget, though, that a Coen movie is always-and-already authentic – regardless of its content, it is told in a particular Coen-style language.
What makes a movie a Coen movie? First come the characters – meticulously worked from tip to toe. Coen characters are hardly outstanding or unusual; quite the contrary, they are ordinary characters, usually inept, and even clumsy.
Talented as they are to create exciting characters, Coen Brothers are equally successful in constructing atmosphere. It is possible to claim that the Coen Bros. cinema is atmospheric above all. ‘Barton Fink’ successfully conveys the depths of human psychology, while ‘Fargo’ effectively depicts the small-scale life of a North American village, and ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ extraordinarily renders a Kafkaesque atmosphere.
In this sense, ‘No Country For Old Men’ conveys an authentic atmosphere and successfully created characters, though not so satisfyingly compared to other movies by Coens. Highly charged with a high tension from the first moment till the last, the film does not bring a Hollywood ending but keeps the tension at stake. Whether the reason behind is a Brecthian critic of the catharsis, or a favouring of shock end, remains a mystery.
Unfortunately, the most powerful weapon of ‘No Country For Old Men’, which tries to reposition the masculine world of the wild west, turns out to be its sole point of vulnerability – the film cannot establish a balanced narrative. Nostalgic and local, Sheriff Bell is portrayed as an old man who is born into a wrong age of which he does not want to be a part. Psychopathic and austere murderer Chigurgh stands as a metaphor for the coming age that is defined as cold and meaningless. Moss, on the other hand, is a hyphenated character who cannot belong neither to the good old days nor to the coming age. His sole aim is an escapist gesture – to take the money and live a happy life at home.
The film cannot escape a narcissistic failure that is triggered by the Chigurh character, which is stunningly enacted by Javier Bardem. Therefore, the story is not developed satisfactorily and the audience is left alone to float in the cat-and-mouse sort of plot.
As it is always the case with the battles of old and new, the lost generation turns out to be the one who suffers. Moss dies; Bell retires, whereas Chigurh walks his way down the road. A new era begins, and the realms of this new era is ‘No Country For Old Men’.

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