I wish the Coen brothers and their cast and crew weren’t so good at what they do in No Country for Old Men, because in spite of that it depicts violence with the darkness and horror it deserves, it conveys that random violence is unstoppable.
This movie does a great job of depicting a universal theme through a very particular conflict between the specter of nonsensical violence and one older sheriff’s lifelong struggle to quell it. Finally, in the wisdom of old age, our man (Tommy Lee Jones) gives up and gives in. He retires from the external, but not the internal struggle, that of wrestling with the inevitability of death.
On first viewing I thought that most of the wisdom was distilled right out of this movie, and I think viewers may not see what’s profound about it, but may instead be carried by the horror, surprise, and believe it or not, the charm of it.
On the rugged and empty desert, there is nothing anyone can do to stop death, and finally, someone else’s or one’s own death, is, in the end, appealing, because we don’t have to be in control, and in fact, we may as well give up that illusion because we have never been and will never be in control of death. Yet, the making of the film itself is the antithesis of this, because the movie itself is extremely well organized and executed.
A film cannot do what a novel does, of course. Films may be more complex to produce but they are inevitably stupider. Ironically, they have a greater impact on people. I only hope people can read into this one all the possible meanings that it doesn’t willingly serve up.
In the end, it is the only important woman in the film who has any sensible conversation with the monstrous killer on the loose. She refuses to play the randomness of death game he administers, and it is his undoing.
She calls him to an accounting of himself. Human beings are capable of choosing between destroying and creating, between killing and loving, she tells him in her bedroom where he has been lurking in the dark, waiting for her.
Who will see that the film itself is the antithesis of its own message? The killer walks away, broken by what he considers to be his own fate, finally undone by his own distraction, for he has glimpsed goodness in the form of that woman and isn’t looking at the stoplight or the car that hurls into him.
I am afraid that too many people, especially young people, won’t read the film; they'll merely see it. And so, once again, they will see violence glamorized, through the dark mystique of the Coen brothers’ filmmaking.
Perhaps the Coen bros themselves have no other choice than to exorcise monstrous violence by embodying it in film. But they too have options. I would say it is only a film, but that means nothing these days. Films mean money and lots of it.
