Review: Nuance Has Its Day in "No Country For Old Men"

The Coen Brothers carved out a neo-western masterpiece with a hair cut, a briefcase, and a really old coin.

March 8, 2024

In the penultimate episode of the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, Lord Eddard Stark gets dragged to the executioner’s block on the orders of King Joffrey Baratheon. Joffrey is a bastard born of incest with no claim to the throne, vacated upon the death of his “father,” King Robert. Lord Eddard has spent his life making honorable, not strategic, decisions. He knew venturing to the capital would endanger his family. He knew investigating Jon Arryn's (the previous Hand of the King) death would intensify a political game he was ill-prepared to play, but it does not matter: honor must win out.

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He combats impropriety at every turn, even as Lord Varys, the King’s Master of Whisperers, urges him to beg for mercy and take the Black, sending him to the Wall in the North. Honor is all he has left; he renounces it only to spare his daughters.

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Unfortunately, it is too late. Joffrey is an animal, but not a political one. He is a Lannister lion, and there are no pacts between lions and men.

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Honor kills Eddard Stark, just as his mercy killed the King. As he bows his head, slowly accepting a fast-approaching reality, one question rings out:

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

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Fantasy is the ultimate escape, but we often underestimate its ability to parallel our struggles. After all, that is the foundation of fantasy: reconciling reality by layering it with the impossible. Ultimately, all television shows and films are fantasy, even if they do not adhere to the genre. Even the most faithful adaptations of history are fantasy; they are imaginings, flights of the improbable, natural encounters exacerbated by artistic license. It makes it easy to dismiss their practical application or overstate it entirely. Few movies conjoin fantasy with reality to the point we forget they aren't real. Such effect makes us reflect on rarely asked questions, like:

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

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In the desert near the Texas-Mexico border, hunter Llewelyn Moss comes upon a drug deal gone awry; he finds the drugs, a dying Mexican man begging for water, and $2 million in a briefcase. He refuses the man, ignores the drugs, takes the money, and returns home. Plagued by guilt, Moss comes back that night to give the man water but is pursued by two men in a truck and forced to flee downriver. He returns home, makes his wife, Carla Jean, leave, and goes to a hotel in Del Rio.

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Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game between Moss and Anton Chigurh (the bounty hunter pursuing him) as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell pursues justice in a world increasingly rejecting the idea.

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It begins with narration from Bell, describing his conversation with a convicted killer on death row. He killed his 14-year-old girlfriend, a murder the papers described as a “crime of passion,” but the young man admitted he’d wanted to murder for some time and, if released, would kill again. He believes himself damned to hell and passively remarks he’ll be there shortly. Bell “doesn’t know what to make of that.”

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No Country for Old Men is built on the realities we do not realize dictate life until we suffer their consequences. Slithering into the shadows can provide momentary solace, but the acceleration of demise often comes from doing what's right. Rectifying our misdeeds, like returning to the site of our heresy to extend one final courtesy, plunges us deeper into peril than the initial moral challenge. The bullet wound is our flaws, the Bandaid our meek action. As such, wound and world will fester.

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The movie rejects a thematic binary, choosing between self-actualization and destiny, the rewards of morality vs. the damnation of corruption, or the safety of selflessness against the danger of deception. Life does not allow "right" and "wrong" to give neat conclusions. Llewelyn zig-zags between the cost of his actions and what power he believes he has to pay it. If he can hide Carla Jean, she'll be safe. If he can outwit Chigurh, he can keep the money, free his wife from her dead-end job, and upgrade from their double-wide. If Chigurh can rationalize his psychopathy, he can justify his twisted sense of justice.

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It understands that characters fail when designed as general reflections. We cannot answer questions like these because we don’t want to know the answer. We would take the money but also return with the water. We would have refused our chance to save our loved ones to believe we could solve their problems. Movies that draw difficult conclusions must force us to look inside.

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No Country is thus built partially on conversational wisdom, but that wisdom gets spaced out and tightened enough to feel like a natural product of its characters. The world they grapple with and work to understand has taught them as many lessons as it has taught us. The means of processing it must come from their perspective, not uniform ideas. Bell’s musings are as much a product of an aging lawman rocked by the growing brutality of his small town as Chigurh’s assertions about the justice of fate are tangible to a psychopath defying accountability.

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Chigurh is not some supernatural figure, but he is also far more than he is willing to admit. He carries into a country road gas station a 22-year-old coin. It has spent two decades changing pockets, there thanks to fate. Thus, fate will decide what will happen to its new prospective owner. Chigurh flips the coin and tells the terrified attendant to call it. The man resists. Chigurh has subtly established what the man has to lose, inquiring into the station’s business hours, where he lives, and what time he sleeps.

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The assassin is shocked to learn that the man behind the counter, isolated along a dusty country road, married into his circumstances. The man knows what he stands to lose but has no concept of what he stands to gain. He has lived an ambitionless life and settled for the painless path instead of exploring life; that life is on the line, but it was there long before the coin.

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Chigurh dismisses the man’s denial that he married into the business. It is not a matter of perspective: it's "just the way it is." He relinquishes his role and allows the man to call it, but he forgets a simple truth: he flips the coin. Nothing in his world truly is “just the way it is.”

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No coin got flipped when he studied a phone bill to determine Carla Jean’s location. No coin got flipped when he held Carson at gunpoint before executing him in his hotel room. The coin is only a coin to Chigurh because, to him, life is meaningless. Fate is a means to an end because he does not want to be the means.

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Structuring characters into singular focus is the path of least resistance. Everyone will believe certain things and thus play a narrow role in a larger story. It is cleaner this way but less exploratory. Chigurh is methodical, from blowing up a car as a diversion to tracking down a rival gang. We confuse brutality with mindlessness. By seeking physical and psychological violence and contradicting his rationales with deviations from principle, he reminds us that things are not always as they initially appear.

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The film masters multi-dimensionality, humanizing its characters through circumstances in which they place themselves. What lets Llewelyn take the drug money is what makes him clever enough to observe his surroundings, sparing an innocent taxi driver. What allows Bell to recognize his world needs saving is what lets him realize it is leaving him behind. Everyone grapples with internal and external ideas, and the questions and answers funnel themselves into the larger narrative.

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No Country for Old Men caters to its visuals and thus achieves thematic significance by contrasting itself with its landscape. It has the shadows of noir and the grit of Westerns. Its desert is all cracked earth and sparse tumbleweeds, a uniform, lifeless brown that stretches to the horizon. Everything that takes place within its borders, even as it ventures into the small towns within which gunfire gets exchanged and duels of life and death decided, extends across a self-contained and inescapable setting.

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It justifies shaping the movie into a visual and auditory experience, built on the tension not from seeing what hunts you but simply knowing you're getting hunted. It can break its tension with a ringing phone or inspire our frightened empathy as we watch a man quietly prepare for confrontation where darkness is the only safety, and just as much for the villain as the hero. It can be a game of wits, strategically booking hotel rooms and using devices meant to trap you as exit strategies. It can stir more fear with the silhouette of a car atop a hill than a slasher flick with a bloodied knife in a haunted house, but it can also exploit that emptiness to expand its characters.

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No Country isolates the dialogue into compact, spaced-out sequences, raising stakes and establishing ideas with conversations, then inflicting consequences and resolving concepts with visuals. We do not have skyscrapers, train stations, bustling streets, and buzzing highways. We have only the dim lights and paved roads of a small town, where the only signs of life are changing traffic lights in the dead of night. Everyone is inside a world that invites projection.

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By allowing invitation, it will not force refutation. The power is in the players to discover, advertently or otherwise; their actions will prove who is “right” or “wrong” and to what extent. They will prove whether what we believe is worth anything when life can get snuffed out in the blink of an eye. They will show whether or not all that seems definite truly is and if we can be what we do, whether that means shooting a limping dog as it drags itself away from a crime scene or accepting that it is not a coin that decides, only the man flipping it.

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We think of ourselves as the hero of our story, the savior of our dreams. We are the light in the darkness, the small flame glistening in the distance on a snowy winter night. But a time comes when we reflect on our life's course and wonder what role we played, if all our ambitions got realized. We learn that every mantle we took up was the dropped ball of a past generation. We got designed by their shortcomings, but we know, in the end, they did not fail. They did the best they could with what they had. Society will decay. The world we once knew will overwhelm us, and nothing can stop that. Our best can never be good enough.

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We are not heroes or saviors. We are not light in the darkness or small flames glistening in the distance on a snowy night. We cannot usher our loved ones to a place entirely their own, untainted by the horrors from which we fought to protect them. We cannot claim the world from men like Chigurh, even if they are as flawed as us, rife with contradictions to excuse actions that cannot get pawned off on fate.

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We feel the world has escaped us, but we never had it. We can believe doing what is right will lead us to salvation but often find ourselves condemned in its wake. People of honor gain it from getting forced to look inward and stop idealizing the world, but that world becomes lost to them, their honor meaningless. Abiding by notions of fate, destiny, free will, or self-determination will do little in the face of life's designs.

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After all, Chigurh gets t-boned at a green light: no coin could have spared him from that. The world will play itself out; only our values make it seem controllable, but eventually, we realize nothing is as we believe. The heroes won't always die heroically, the villains won't always die gruesomely (or at all), and the innocence we thought sacred will get snuffed out, proving it was a pipedream. The small choices determine our lives, even though the big ones set so many in motion. We bank on life giving what we do, but it doesn't. We make our choices and hope for the best. Expecting it to wait for or come to us is vanity.

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It is clear to Bell as he sits across from his wife at breakfast, just as it will one day be clear to everyone with the same ideals he once held. Eventually, our beliefs get reflected, spared from our projections, and given the power to prove that the rule we followed to arrive at the inevitable was useless. The world is not understood by the youth and neglected by the old: it is something no one can ever wholly understand. There is no safe haven, utopian paradise, sacred land, or heavenly oasis.

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There is no country for old men.