Review of the film No Country For Old Men

The novelist Cormac McCarthy is famous for being a spare writer. He doesn’t use words upon words to get across a sense of a space or the look of a moment. In the novel No Country For Old Men, this leaning towards spareness is especially true. In making their film adaptation of the novel, the Coen brothers did not use every word of dialogue or every scene that McCarthy penned. However, the ones they did use were and are crucial to the narrative and tone that the author set up. The Coens had to decide how to portray everything around those spare sequences—the physical look of the space, the lighting, the blocking of the actors, the angles seen by the viewer. McCarthy may have left these things out, but the Coens are said by most critics to have remained faithful to the novel. It is my opinion, having read the book several times, that they did remain faithful. This is the ultimate compliment I can give to the filmmakers. Even the actors playing the book’s characters, where no physical attributes were given, seem to look exactly as they should.  It’s a simple story about money and drugs and the way that the two seem to envelop all those within a hair’s breadth and beyond, moving outwards like ripples in a pond. 

It begins when Moss, a middle-aged, lower middle-class white man, is out hunting antelope in the dusty plains of southern Texas. He happens upon a vaguely circular array of vehicles. He moves closer and finds the circle littered with bodies full of bullets of many different calibers and shapes. Flies cling to the blood that has seeped from the deadly wounds. In the flatbed of one of the vehicles are big blocks of heroin and in the cab of another is a dying man asking for water and speaking of wolves. Moss follows a trail of blood from the scene to the base of a lonely tree and finds another dead man riddled with bullets in its shade. Next to him is a suitcase with over 2 million dollars stacked inside. Moss makes the decision to leave with the suitcase with seemingly no remorse, but he later makes another decision, which is the catalyst for the rest of the action in the film: He returns that night to the scene of the fateful drug deal with a jug of water. Soon, Moss is being chased by a killer for hire with a Paige-boy haircut and an implacable sense of what lies before him.

            The events that transpire from that late night decision Moss makes are violent and quick. They roll one onto the next like bloody waves, spreading across a great swath of the state and covering even those who had never dreamed of being touched by such a mess. Through it all is small town Sheriff Bell, played with easy earnestness and hard-gotten wisdom by Tommy Lee Jones, trying to put together the bloody and random pieces. His craggy visage and knowing voice put to words those questions which no one else seems able to express at the carnage that is transpiring: What is the meaning of this? Why do these evil things happen?

The threat of violence looms in nearly every scene writ by McCarthy and filmed by the Coens. They both seem to be saying that it is merciless injustice, but this is the natural state of things. The precepts of civilization can be so easily peeled back and then we find out how poorly fit for survival most of us are without them.