No Country for Old Men: All Hell Breaks Loose

Watch enough films, and you become conscious of the images that stick in your mind. The nun at the end of Vertigo. Don Corleone’s death in the garden, at play with his grandson, in The Godfather. The armies sweeping across the field in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran.

Anton Chigurh blowing holes in people’s heads with the kind of stun gun used in abattoirs to slaughter cattle. We get what it is early on, before Sheriff Ed Tom explains what the steel bolt does to the bovine brain. The device resembles medical equipment, an oversize oxygen tank, for which it’s fatally mistaken by the first person Chigurh kills, a young cop he garrotes with his handcuffs after a wrestling match that is as close as Chigurh will come to anything like sex.

Chigurh kills his next victim—a random stranger he pulls over while he’s driving a stolen police car and pretending to be a cop—with the bolt gun, his weapon of choice. The murders are more vivid—more shocking—when we see them on-screen than when we read them on the page, despite how good a writer McCarthy is. The shoot-outs, the ambushes, the on- and offscreen assassinations, the crumpling bodies, and the spurting blood evoke the choreography of a video game. But so far no video game has made me think, as the film does, that being a carnivore means living with a certain amount of denial. The cattle-killing bolt to the forehead says: No matter how merciful or quick, the process that put the burger on my plate was not a happy or kind one.

Our hero, Moss, is such a good guy that he makes a second trip to the crime scene, ostensibly to give the dying man water. We may suspect it’s too late, and that curiosity—as much as conscience—inspires Moss’s return. That’s when all hell breaks loose. From then on, we’re just waiting to see who survives.

Reading the book along with the movie, I was surprised by how many chunks of dialogue had been taken directly from the page—surprised, I guess, because the exchanges sound so much like Coen-brothers dialogue: straightforward enough, with flashes of irony and wit, and a steadily deepening thrum of existential panic.

The challenge of adapting a novel to the screen is to make the interior visual—to turn consciousness into action. The novel includes long, first-person meditations in Ed Tom Bell’s voice, but the film gives us just enough of those passages to make us understand that McCarthy and the Coen brothers are after something deeper than a tale of innocent lives cut short by dirty money. McCarthy’s themes—courage, destiny, spirituality, the American West, history, the contest between our better natures and our survival instinct—are here, even as we realize that they have always been the Coens’ themes as well.

Like any translation, the process of turning a novel into a film requires a series of choices, and much of what makes the movie work so well is the intelligence and creativity of the choices the Coens have made. It’s a choice to start, in voice-over, with a passage from the book’s sections of first-person narration. Ed Tom Bell begins by reminiscing about a bygone era when sheriffs didn’t need to carry guns, then segues into a story about a kid whom Bell’s testimony helped send to the electric chair. The boy killed a fourteen-year-old girl in what was supposedly a crime of passion, but, the boy told Bell, no passion was involved. He’d always wanted to kill someone. If he got out of jail, he would kill someone else. If we’re listening carefully, we’re being warned: we are about to meet evil in its purest form.

It’s a choice to take us across the dry plains of West Texas and in and out of what seems like every seedy motel in the region. It’s a choice to have no background music to warn us of approaching danger or to show us how to feel, no music at all until a brief, disquieting norteño serenade seems to herald more problems but ultimately leads our wounded hero, Moss, to the relative safety of a Mexican hospital. It’s a choice to film Chigurh so he seems to occupy the entire screen, so we know there’s no getting around him. It’s a choice to cut directly from Chigurh telling his victim to hold still and blowing a round hole in his forehead to a second circular aperture that turns out to be the sight of Moss’s rifle, aimed at the antelopes he’s telling to hold still.

We’re subtly but memorably told where Moss learned (or practiced) his sharpshooting skills: Vietnam looms in the background, connecting the state-sponsored violence of war with gang-related narco violence and with the individual human impulse to kill and destroy. The Coens deftly thread the legacy of Vietnam through the film; in one scene, a U.S. border guard allows Moss—naked but for a hospital gown—into the country only after he hears about his military service record.

The casting choices are inspired. Woody Harrelson is transcendent when he comes face-to-face with Chigurh and knows that his number is up. Kelly Macdonald is similarly expert as Carla Jean Moss, our hero’s loyal, plucky wife. Macdonald’s native Scottish accent vanishes into a convincing Texas drawl, as she manages to catch and hold our interest despite having only a few key scenes. Macdonald leaves us broken after the honest, smart, and decent Carla’s inevitable meeting with Chigurh.

It’s hard to pick the film’s scariest moments, but two obvious candidates occur in scenes involving a coin toss that will determine whether someone lives or dies. Just the thought of that decision can drive our blood pressure up, and it keeps rising throughout Bardem’s terrifying performance of what, finally, is an act of extreme psychological torture. The assumption of power, the bullying, the cruelty, the stupidity, the implacable insistence, the mocking smile—every negative human trait feeds into the game that Chigurh enjoys so much, at least partly (we assume) because it confirms his essential nihilism. Heads or tails, life or death, kill or be killed—none of it has any more significance than the way the coin lands. It reminds you of the Misfit (perhaps the literary character whom Chigurh most resembles) in Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” what he says in killing a father, a mother, a grandma, and two kids. “No pleasure but meanness . . . It’s no real pleasure in life.”

The final series of choices by the Coens—to edit out many of the sheriff’s reflections near the conclusion of the novel, but to end as the book does, at the breakfast table, where Ed Tom is telling his wife about a dream he had last night—is both sensible and daring. In real life, we may find ourselves spacing out when our loved ones tell us their dreams. But we’re riveted by the poetry of Bell’s dream about going through a mountain pass, in the cold, and meeting his father:

Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do . . . 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. And then I woke up.

It’s certainly not a Hollywood ending—but like McCarthy, the Coens make it work. What would the Hollywood ending be? The shoot-out to end all shoot-outs. Bullets ricocheting everywhere, bystanders ducking for cover. But neither McCarthy nor the Coens are going to give us that. Because by then, the only major characters left standing are Bell and Chigurh, and neither the novelist nor the directors are cheap or deluded enough to pit good against evil and suggest that one will ultimately win.

The last we see of Anton Chigurh, he has been gravely wounded in an auto wreck. His bone is sticking out of his arm, but with the aid of a sling/tourniquet made from a shirt cadged from a local boy, he lopes off down the street. Chigurh is still out there, maybe coming for us next, because there’s no pleasure in life but meanness, and because his stun gun is the right tool for the right job.