Randomness—and it’s handmaiden nothingness—looms large in Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest film No Country for Old Men. From the opening shots of empty space to the abrupt cut to black at its end, No Country for Old Men relentlessly portrays its consequences and effects. This is most explicit in bizarre games of chance between the killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and two hapless opponents—a gas-station owner (Gene Jones) and Llewelyn Moss’ wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald). In the first instance, the gas-station owner has no idea what’s going on, at least at first . . . but as the game wears on, and Chigurh insists that he play, it gradually dawns on him that if the coin lands wrong, he will die.
In Carla Jean’s case, she understands from the get-go what’s at stake—she knows who Chigurh is, she knows what he has done, she knows what he has come to do. And yet, when given the opportunity to escape, she refuses. She refuses to call the flip of the coin, which might have given her at least a 50-50 shot.
In another, more eager-to-please film, her plucky resistance would be rewarded—Chigurh would be moved by her moxie, or he’d be intimidated (because after all, he’d never been stood up to before), or something like that. But No Country doesn’t pander, nor does it betray its bleak vision. The gas-station proprietor plays along and lives. Carla Jean resists and . . . well, we’re not shown her fate explicitly , but Chigurh checks his boots as he leaves her house, and we know what he hates to get on his boots.
In No Country for Old Men, the world is turning, and not for the better. You can do all the right things, for all the right reasons, all to no avail. Everyone is in the grip of things beyond their control, things outside their experience, and these things are all wrapped up in Anton Chigurh. As played by Javier Bardem, with his Beatle-cut hair and dead-fish eyes, he’s the embodiment of the times, a spirit of the here and now, an avatar of all that is nihilistic and wrong. His control is complete, his disregard for anybody other than himself is breathtaking. I’d call him a narcissist, but that’s far too mild a term.
As Jim Emerson has pointed out, in his definitive analysis over at Scanners, his name is unpronounceable—not necessarily in the phonetic sense, but in the sense of not daring to say it aloud. As a responder to Jim’s post pointed out, it’s like Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels, but the tradition goes back much further than that. In the Jewish tradition, whenever the four-letter name of God (the tetragrammaton) is read in the reading Hebrew scripture aloud, they substitute another name for it, like Adonai (Lord) or Ha-shem (The Name); when they write it, even in English, they don’t write it all the way, they substitute G-d or something like it.
Thus, as Emerson has also said, there is a Genesis tone, an Old Testament feel to the movie. As in a Bergman film (the opening shots reminded me of many a Bergman set up), God is absent and evil is having its way. In the end, even Chi—h is in the grip of this indifference—he is struck at random after dispatching Carla Jean, and wanders off into a small-town Texas neighborhood. He is avatar no more, just a psychopath limping toward G-d only knows what.
Many folks have commented on the ending to the film; I for one think it’s perfect. Tommy Lee Jones’ marvelous face is in front of a window; outside that window is the Texas prairie. But in the foreground is a lone tree, with a twisted trunk. Accident of location or not, the tree stands against the emptiness, against the creeping nothingness, like a sentinel, as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell once did. But the tree has been bent by the harsh environment, just as has Ed Tom, and his father—who rides before him in the dream—before that.
We’re all changed in the face of our environment, we’re all marked at one time or another by its randomness. One moment we’re driving down the freeway, the next we’re in the hospital, bills mounting up. One day we’re sitting across from loved ones at supper, the next they’re gone, victims to the void. The Coens have expressed that inevitability in brutal, poetic language, in a film that will endure, and surely be recognized as in time as their masterpiece.
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