Chance and Anarchy: ‘No Country for Old Men’

If there was any lesson that No Country for Old Men taught me, it’s that patience is the key to suspense. This 2007 film, directed by the Coen brothers, runs roughly two hours long- which is on the longer side of the average of most film run times (statista.com). Most films tend to run somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes, with the longer movies I’ve seen running at 240 minutes. For the average film viewer used to solid 90-minute long Marvel superhero films, 240 or even 120 minutes can seem like a lifetime. However, with longer movies, patience is key, because the buildup and payoff of scenes and the overall arc of the plot are able to hit with an elegance that simply can’t be crammed into a 90-minute film. Which No Country does, and does well. No Country for Old Men is a masterclass in storytelling through environment, and proof that time is a key element in creating a good film. 

The movie centers around Lleweyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a mostly ordinary man, who stumbles upon a drug deal gone very, very bad in the desert while hunting. In a bizarre stroke of fate, Moss finds $2 million at the massacre, and knows that if he can successfully hold onto that money he can have an entirely new life for him and his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald). However, the story doesn’t just belong to Moss- it also belongs to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and the deadly hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) hired to find and kill Moss to recover the $2 million. When you throw in the wild card of Woody Harrelson’s Carlson Wells, and all the chess pieces are set on the board. From there it’s a game of cat and mouse- you roll your dice, move your mice, and hopefully nobody gets hurt… in a coin toss and/or killed by an air powered captive bolt pistol. (Speaking of which, how terrifying IS that! It’s like being killed via icicle or something that can’t be traced, and in rural Texas in the 1980’s? A NIGHTMARE. If I was killed by one of Chigurh’s air shots? With one pthwip nobody would ever hear from me ever again. Or find my killer. Tragic!)

I think that the opening line, from Sheriff Bell, quite well summises and sets up the film- 

“I always knew you had to be willing

           to die to even do this job -- not to

           be glorious. 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.

...He would have to say, okay, I'll

           be part of this world.”

I want to take a minute to deconstruct just how perfectly this opening line sets up the entirety of the film. One of the major themes of the film is that with the development of technology and as time passes humanity finds more and more ways to be, to put it bluntly, despicably cruel to itself. There’s only so much that someone can take of the horrors that man pits against his fellow man before someone says “this world isn’t for me anymore. I quit.” When it’s man versus the world, how much of the world can you take up on your shoulders? How do you come to meet something you know you will never understand? How do you survive in the wilds of the world when the world is so wild? That theme is brought up often, as the cops frequently demonstrate that they simply do not know how to handle or stop the violence created by hitman Anton Chigurh as he blows down everyone standing in the way of that $2 million. 

It’s very interesting that in examining the script, most of the story is told WITHOUT dialogue. Time is on Moss’ side right up until he runs out and Chigurh catches him.
I found the script online using this link: https://imsdb.com/scripts/No-Country-for-Old-Men.html and it’s written as if time is the language of the film, and the characters all speak with their moments. Take, for example, the scene where Chigurh and Moss are in the same motel- both within inches of their goals, and tensions running about as high as they can get.

“CHIGURH

          He walks over to the bathroom.

          He turns on its light, looks.

          He leaves the door open. He goes to a closet, opens it, looks.

          He goes to the door of the room but doesn't open it. He stands

          with his back against it and looks at the room.

          The bathroom door.

          The closet door.

          Chigurh goes to the bed and sits to take off his boots.

MOSS

          Moss snips the last of the wire hangers' hooks off with the

          sidecutter. He wraps the three hooks with duct tape to make

          a sturdier one.

          He wraps more tape to attach this hook to the end of the

          three-link pole.”

Additionally, I think it’s quite interesting and important that in the end, Chigurh should be the one that the audience knows survives. The world is prone to chance and anarchy, and Chigurh embodies that sentiment. We never know what horrors the world will throw at us next, and it’s almost poetic that he is so heavily injured by a random car crash after everything that has just happened. 

However, Bell’s final line sums up again the themes of time, chance, and anarchy, and the struggle to understand the future:

“And in the dream I 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. Out there up ahead.”

The dark and cold represent death, but the knowledge that his father was out there somewhere, preparing a fire, is comforting. We never know what’s ahead, so all we have is who we are and where we’re from. No Country for Old Men is a masterclass in storytelling through environment, and proof that time is a key element in creating a good film.