‘No Country for Old Men’ a complex masterpiece

The Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” can perhaps only be described as a cinematic punch to the breadbasket. It practically defies description and detail further than that intense, see-it-to-believe-it reaction, something that burrows so deeply into your brain that I had not realized how difficult and far-reaching it all was until I sat down to write about it.

It is filmmaking in its most undiluted form—at once impossibly simple yet mind-bogglingly complicated. When all is said and done, whatever you have felt after those two hours, you can’t help but look inward and outward.

While out on a hunting trip, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon the quiet, bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. Eventually stumbling upon a suitcase containing some two million dollars in $100 bills, he quickly absconds with it and starts planning a new life with his wife (Kelly Macdonald). In a fit of inappropriately timed kindness/guilt/stupidity, Moss decides to return to the scene of the crime later that night to offer a dying (now dead) man a gasp of water—which only allows him to be more easily identified by the surviving drug runners. Also on his trail is mysterious hit-man Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who carries with him a silenced shotgun, an oxygen tank and some kind of tracking device—all he needs to roam the countryside as a terrifying specter of death. Moss attempts to make a run for it, with some vague plans of killing his pursuers or evading them across the border, but everything is quickly bearing down on him...

It will take more than one viewing (and maybe a read-through of the Cormac McCarthy novel upon which the film is based, eh?) to even understand the full breadth of everything that “No Country for Old Men” has to offer, though of course one can find an easy point of entry in Chigurh. (It’s disturbing, first and foremost, to contemplate that, through the conveniences of cinematic excitement, the character easiest to identify with in this film should be a psychopath.) Throughout much of the film, he is the primary source of the film’s ever-present tension, alternately building upon a sense of dread as an approaching, unreasonable force of nature and often literally punching through the film’s oppressive silence with shocks of violence. But brief moments that reveal his (strictly literal) humanity finally expose his weakness, and force us to realize that he has only succeeded in making us believe that he is some inhuman concept that exists to be feared. These moments lead us to contemplate so many different concepts at once, all of them unbelievably broad in scope: the basic level of cruelty of which humanity is capable; the degrees to which we all attempt to fool ourselves and each other; and that Chigurh, like everyone else, is headed towards destiny and, ultimately, death.

But it would be far too easy to call “No Country for Old Men” a work of nihilism—although it is a film that surrounds the fulfillment of the inevitable and the indifferent punishment of “good acts,” somehow the immutable existence of those good acts speaks for something. Tony Gilroy, the thoughtful director of the unfortunately shruggable “Michael Clayton,” told me something that I’ve been thinking about ever since: “I think that, human beings—you’re hardwired to be optimistic. Not optimistic, but you’re hardwired to continue.” Now, especially, it runs through my mind when considering the arc of the sullen, world-weary sheriff following the Moss case, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). Responding to his deputy’s exasperated chuckle upon hearing a story of murder and depravity, Bell responds very simply: “I laugh sometimes too. ‘Bout all you can do.” I can’t see it as a moment of crushing despair, but rather as one that simply recognizes that it’s all screwed up, this world of ours, and some things will always exist beyond our comprehension. There’s only so far you can go in trying to decipher human nature before you exhaust yourself trying to pass the impassable. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s less than that; maybe it’s more. It’s a great mystery, this film, and like a fool, I’ll probably see this film several times over in an attempt to refine my thoughts and piece together the puzzle. But I can’t help it—I’m hardwired.