Flak Magazine: Review of No Country For Old Men, 11.14.07

When the filmmaking fraternity of Joel and Ethan Coen loosely adapted Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key into Miller's Crossing, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep into The Big Lebowski or Homer's Odyssey into O Brother Where Art Thou, the magic of those projects was their distance from the source material. The Coens larded the movies with their fingerprints, staking their filmmaking personae on such askance takes on the originals. What makes No Country for Old Men a queer duck is that there's nothing askance about it at all — it's the most doggedly faithful novel adaptation in memory from any filmmaker, a total deadeye reading of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 tale of misappropriated money and the lives it ruins. That's not to say that the Coens did nothing — of course, they did all the business of filmmaking, from structuring the right screenplay (abridging this, cross-cutting that) to finding the right actors to composing all the right shots. The movie rewards all these right choices by being unreservedly gangbusters. It's a technical marvel that matches the story's emotional rigor while delivering all the desired heart palpitations. Still, what's striking is the uncharacteristic faithfulness: Why? What was it about this book that yielded such reverential treatment?

The answer, I think, is that in McCarthy's book they found not only a kindred spirit but a work that ennobled their fundamental philosophy. In No Country for Old Men, set in 1980, Llewelyn Moss (James Brolin) is out hunting in the Texas desert when he happens upon a clutch of corpses indicating a heroin delivery gone sour. Moss leaves the scene with $2 million and is subsequently set upon by multiple parties who want to recover the money, most centrally Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Meanwhile, local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) relinquishes the primary investigation of the crime to federal agencies, but is compelled to do what he can to protect Moss simply because he's one of his constituents caught up in a bad way, and tries to convince Moss' wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) to help him.

Brolin makes Moss a captivating rogue, and so although he seems like the main character, he's really just a catspaw for the story's greater concern, which is a contest of philosophies between Sheriff Bell and Chigurh. Bell has two lines, taken more or less straight from the book, which shore up his position:

I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job .... But I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore. More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard.

and

I think once you stop hearing sir and madam the rest is soon to follow.

Chigurh says it all in one line, to someone on the wrong end of his gun:

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

Bell is all about law, order and decency, and at first it's hard to give the Coens credit for casting Tommy Lee Jones, because successful or not he's an obvious choice. But Bell is asked to toe a line reminiscent of the high school American history lessons about how the British soldiers weren't prepared for the colonists to essentially engage in guerrilla warfare. He honestly cannot reckon with what has happened to the world, specifically the way that drugs create such outsized fortunes that it impairs "decent" behavior, leading to the story's various coldblooded murders. It's not the murders that stun Bell — it's the temperature of the blood, the accountant's way that characters, specifically Chigurh, regard these lives like any other wrinkle in their plan. The question for Bell is, can he, as he said, "put his soul at hazard" and pursue Chigurh and his kind? Or is the better path to retreat to his sheriffdom, a moral sinecure with its knowable, understandable crimes of passion, and simply wash his hands of psychopaths and their unknowable crimes of dispassion?

Chigurh is what Hannibal Lecter needed to be to make any of those Anthony Hopkins movies really work — Lecter's victims were always portrayed as too deserving to really mourn, allowing the cannibal to be a proxy hero in those movies. Not Chigurh. Whenever he meets someone, he doesn't look for reasons to kill him; he looks for reasons to let him live, and rarely finds any, which is bad news for the other guy if Chigurh thinks he can make a clean getaway. The above quote about "the rule you followed" encapsulates this — it's directed at a criminal, but describes Chigurh's attitude toward those who come up with their own rules to justify whatever way of living they choose while simultaneously trying to integrate that into the larger context of a society based on shared ethics, as opposed to Chigurh's utter indifference to both society and other people. (The self-made man, fully made.) Other than basing the occasional decision on a coin flip, he gives no quarter to anyone, considering their moment of meeting to be a predestined time of judgment:

You know what date is on this coin? 1958. It's been traveling 22 years to get here. And now it's here. And it's either heads or tails, and you have to say. Call it.

Chigurh, a classic psychopath who literally kills people as if they were cattle, is just the sort of person that Bell can't understand. This gap is the engine of the story, because while Chigurh's decisions are authorial in their declarations — I won't divulge any character's ultimate fate, but Moss taking the money and explicitly expecting it to result in his early, unearned retirement is a damning offense to McCarthy, the Coens and Chigurh — it's Sheriff Bell that the storytellers side with. The storytellers split the difference between these characters by doing what Bell is so hesitant to do — they "put their soul at hazard" so they can grapple with an America tilting to amorality — and it's these characteristics of the novel that make it not only possible but sensible for the Coens to adapt it so straightly. Miller's Crossing, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and even Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers all concern themselves with connecting the decline of civility and virtue to aberrant or abhorrent behavior. As a friend of Bell tells him:

This country is hard on people. Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it, yet folks never seem to hold it to account. ... You can't stop what's coming. Ain't all waiting on you.

And so the best scene in the movie, which slightly deviates from the book, is the only scene in which Bell and Chigurh are in the same room. Here is where the decision to cast Jones transcends being obvious and becomes genius. Bell stands at the closed door under the night sky, staring at a burnished cylindrical bushing that tells him Chigurh recently knocked out the deadbolt and may still be inside. To enter the room is to cross that "soul at hazard" threshold, to risk having to confront something not just criminal but evil. Maddeningly, the scene doesn't play out the way you expect, and it's ambiguous to boot, each reading reflecting differently on Bell and Chigurh. But what matters most is the sorrow in Jones' eyes as he considers that missing lock, the hole in the door between the world he knows and the world he fears. Why adapt a book if you're going to do it so faithfully — why not just be content to leave it as a book? For moments like this, and in that way, the Coens' authorship here is as distinct as it's ever been, translating McCarthy's severe prose into a movie of astonishing beauty and terror.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)