***This is the first of five in-depth essays on great directors.***No Country For Old Men is an enigma. A conundrum. A paradoxical riddle. In its very nature it is meant to confuse and baffle. Here is a man so evil, so methodically murderous, that even great and wise men — men who have bore witness to evil before — are unable to justify his morals. Sheriff Tom Bell is no stranger to murderers. He says so in his first monologue of the movie, but his justification is skewed into nowhere: “The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. 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. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, ‘OK, I’ll be part of this world.’” His words, careful and weathered, are trying to assign meaning to someone who has no real purpose to his, or any, existence. Only Anton Chigurh has those answers and by the end of the movie, as he hobbles off undefeated from the wrecked intersection to whatever fate is ahead of him, he seems unlikely to spill his secrets even then.
These are existentialist tenants through and through: the meaning assigned to life and death, to good and evil; the wanton destruction of so many innocent lives for meaningless reasons; the dreams and metaphors that accentuate then cloud this movie’s underlying themes; and that ambiguous scene at the motel with the good Sheriff and the bad Chigurh in an unseen showdown through a broken lock. Absurdism, mankind’s vain attempt to assign meaning to the things around him, is a major element to existentialism and it drives this movie forward. It is why one man can kill, one man can run and one man can throw his hands up in frustration, beaten at his own game. This is a movie about three men's reaction to evil: Chigurh is consumed by it. Llewelyn Moss attempts to defeat it. The Sheriff finds himself at an exasperating stalemate.When I first saw this movie I credited its complex values to Cormac McCarthy, the author of the book from which the movie is based. The more I see the film, though, I realize that Joel and Ethan Coen are the ultimate architects of its greatness. They have translated McCarthy’s words into a raw, naked film. Watch how little actually happens in No Country For Old Men: large portions are without music or dialogue, the lighting is subtle and natural, camera movements are quiet and steady, and the pacing is agonizingly methodical. If it tried any harder it wouldn’t exist, it would disappear from the screen. By dimming the lights and turning down the volume, though, the Coens have heightened our senses and given us reason to tune in to the details. For instance, watch the way Chigurh searches Moss’ house, the way he takes out the milk and sits on the sofa. He looks into the TV and watches his reflection. Not long after, Sheriff Bell is in the same location, drinking the same milk and watching his own reflection in the same TV — they occupy the same space. They’re reflections in each others' lives and yet they are intrigued by that dark figure in front of them. Is it fear? Maybe for Bell. Another director would have not settled on hints so subtle, but here the Coens speak volumes with barely noticeable frames.
Another delicate scene occurs in our introduction to Moss, who is hunting on a vast, dead plain. As he hunts, a large dark cloud looms over the animals grazing far below him. We can see the cloud’s edges and we can see it creeping toward us. Dark times are coming for Llewelyn Moss. It reminded me a great deal of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, when a random cloud blankets a meadow before the violent death of the film’s stars. Or consider the agonizing twitching and death of the peanut wrapper in the gas station. What a curious sequence for the Coens to put in their film. Any other director would have shown a fifth of it, but there we sit with nearly five countable seconds of wrapper torture. Yes, indeed it’s a metaphor for the floundering, flopping old man at the gas station, who’s so close to death he’ll never appreciate how close it all came to ending. No Country For Old Men exists in the details, in the way it does the little things, even in the little characters — the trailer park manager, chicken hauler, gas station owner, various cab drivers, sheriff’s deputies and hotel clerks.Notice also the particular attention to clothes. It’s no coincidence that an injured Moss pays some guys for their coat only to later be upstaged by Chigurh, who pays some kids for their silence and a shirt. They also share several scenes with boots: Moss sheds his to hunt and dive into rivers, while Chigurh takes his off to murder and repair wounds. Let's go one more, this time with socks: Moss tells the manager at the clothing store he only wears white socks. Chigurh wears only black socks and we see this in two scenes: the first time occurs when he removes his bloody socks right after he massacres the Mexicans in the hotel room, and the second time after Moss shoots him in the leg and then repairs his wound. The Coens are mixing these characters together because they're are telling us these men are one in the same — equals — just on opposite ends of the spectrum. But only Chigurh’s side is void of feeling and remorse. That is why he can kill so effortlessly. That is why the country is no use for old men.
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