No Country For Old Men

If you read Cormac McCarthy’s book No Country for Old Men and recently saw the movie by the same name, the propensity to compare the two mediums is unavoidable. Is there a faulty medium for this story or can both capture the bluntness of beating hearts on their last look at why? McCarthy, the master novelist, minimally words the novel allowing the reader imagination to pummel through their own nest of psychological glues to get at what McCarthy so often gets to: ultimately our culture fails when the tick of nature in all of us turns animal.

Masters too, the Coen brothers take, with the spin of the actors and a Marfan landscape, suspend us in the tragedy of the human race. Their celluloid trajectory lights up our brains making all things familiar and that verisimilitude sets up the edgy violence that scrapes against our comfort in culture.

Three of the main characters are Viet Nam vets still physically prime in this 1980 set story. They know how to saw gun barrels, quick load clips and doctor themselves - and there’s a lot of it.

In the movie, Llewelyn Moss, played by the young Nick Nolte type character Josh Brolin, is a welder who lives in a trailer at the Desert Air in Sanderson, Texas. He discovers a drug deal gone bad while hunting Antelope and finds two million cash under a mesquite tree in a satchel fitted with a transmitter. The story is propelled forward by a never ending chase, running the camera crew through the Rio Grande, Eagle Pass, down some choice landscape off Highway 2810 and winding up pool side at a cheap motel in El Paso.

The antagonist is Anton Chugar, rhymes with sugar, a villain nearly as diabolical as Melville’s Captain Ahab in Moby Dick or Judge Holden in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. His psychopathic ways are governed by the principle that all threats and promises must be acted upon to the ultimate degree. But his will is limited. Chance, he recognizes, is a player in all events, reflecting perhaps, McCarthy’s interest in Chaos Theory, which he studied at the Santa Fe Institute, while writing the novel.

This character’s cold murderous efficiency is played by the sinister Javier Bardem with great finesse. He doesn’t overplay the role, it’s subtle and spooky. Maybe it’s his haircut. The flipping of a coin determines who should live when a victim’s question is correctly posited to him. Marfa banker and first time Hollywood actor Chip Love’s question was wrong and he gets it early in the movie with Chugar’s choice weapon, a gas fired plug machine used in slaughter houses.

Tommy Lee Jones plays a flat old man sheriff but true grit Texan who realizes crime aint what it used to be. He seems to be haunted by the audacity of today’s criminals and at the same time plugged up by some fame he doesn’t deserve. The depth of this character is far more significant in the book, where his narrations and flashbacks give rise to a sense that god has failed him. The futility that he feels as an old man in sparse rugged west Texas and hence the title, triggers what McCarthy might be telling us and what the Coen Brothers did not fail to include; Chugar’s ways reflect a deeper reality.