Jeremy’s Tophunder №74: No Country For Old Men

9 min readApr 15, 2020

I’ve been trying to write about these movies without “spoiling” any key plot points, in case you, my favorite reader, hasn’t yet seen the movie.

That being said, I can’t really talk about the parts I like and/or don’t like about No Country For Old Men without touching on a few scenes and sequences that would spoil key moments of the movie, for anyone out there that hasn’t seen it.

So, I apologize in advance for that. On the other hand, it’s a movie that came out 13 years ago, won Best Picture, appeared on more year-end Top 10 lists than any other movie that year, and is widely considered to be the best movie of the decade. If you haven’t seen it yet, I don’t have a ton of sympathy for you.

Anyway, if you’re a person who doesn’t like having good movies spoiled, you should stop reading at the end of this paragraph until after you’ve seen it. It’s a $4 streaming rental on Amazon. Certainly worth it. It’s a good movie, you should check it out.

Okay, so — now that that’s out of the way.

Part of me loves No Country For Old Men because of how impeccably well-done it is. It’s beautifully shot, beautifully constructed, and it’s an exhilarating cat-and-mouse thriller that always keeps you on your toes.

Then again, part of me kind of hates No Country For Old Men because it lives right on the border between a cool and exciting neo-western thriller and an inane and pretentious art house flick that goes out of its way to subvert your expectations for reasons that aren’t readily apparent.

For example, let’s talk about the gas station scene.

Imagine that you work a run-of-the-mill service job, and some dude with a bad haircut walks up to the counter you have an awkward conversation for a minute. Then he flips a coin and asks you to call it. What do you do?

If you’re anything like me, you just shrug your shoulders and say “welp, tails never fails, I guess!” But if you’re in a Coen Brothers movie, you’re apparently obliged to go back and forth with this guy for another few minutes trying to figure out why he’s flipping a coin and what you stand to potentially win or lose.

Don’t get me wrong — the scene is important. It further establishes Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem in an Oscar-winning performance) as someone who (a) might possibly murder anybody he encounters at any time, but also (b) won’t just murder someone for no reason. If you’re standing between him and what he wants (to track down the $2 million that Josh Brolin found), he won’t hesitate to kill you, or, as Woody Harrelson explains later in the movie, even if you bring him the money, he’ll kill you just for inconveniencing him. But a random gas station attendant? While he has no problem killing that guy, the guy has to lose a coin toss first. Chigurh possesses a chilling sociopathy that leaves a trail of bodies in his wake — he contemplates murder of not only people tied up in the mess with the money, but literally every person he encounters. But, he’s also principled. He has rules.

So yes, the scene is important. But it’s also a scene that kind of beats you over the head with subtext. It’s a touch pretentious, a touch pedantic, and a touch self-indulgent.

The best example of this in the movie, however, is the scene were Josh Brolin’s character (Llewelyn Moss) is murdered. I use this example because, well, the scene doesn’t exist. The first hour and a half of the movie is mostly Moss trying to get away with the money while being followed by Chigurh (who plans to kill him) and Tommy Lee Jones (Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who hopes to protect him). We see Moss check into a motel in El Paso, planning to get the hell out of dodge with the money. Then we cut to Tommy Lee Jones driving up to the motel as gunshots fire and a truck of (presumably) Mexican hitmen peel out. Jones surveys the scene and Moss is already dead.

Like, come on, really? Moss is one of the three central characters, and the story has unfolded mostly through his decisions to this point in the movie, and then you’re going to (a) have him murdered by characters we haven’t even really been introduced to, and also (b) not show it? Like, really? Imagine any movie where a central character dies and it’s a big deal. It shouldn’t be too hard, there are like a hundred of them. Imagine that movie, but instead of us seeing that central character die, we instead just cut to the next scene and they’re already dead. You would be very confused and angry.

In retrospect, it makes some sense now. Us not seeing Moss’s death is the beginning of the shift in the story, away from Moss, Chigurh, and the money, but towards Sheriff Bell and his utter bewilderment about the whole situation. If anyone, Bell is the real “main” character of the story, you just don’t quite realize it until the last half-hour of the movie. Bell is a stand-in for the audience. If Bell doesn’t witness the murder, then neither do we. Like, I get it. But again, it’s still a movie, right? It’s another moment of the movie that’s just a tad too cute for me.

It seems like now might be as good a time as any to get something else off my chest — I don’t really like Coen Brothers movies all that much. In fact, I usually don’t like them. I have friends that revere them, and I just don’t quite get it. I re-watched a lot of their movies in the lead-up to this project — Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou, Burn After Reading, and True Grit — and none of them ever came close to making the list. I appreciate how they construct and film scenes of dialogue, but if often bothers me how meandering and convoluted their stories are. The only movies of theirs that I really enjoy are ones that they adapted from other materials, hence why No Country For Old Men is the only Coen Brothers movie on my list.

But let’s get to the parts of the movie I like, right?

The performances of all three central characters are fantastic, most notably Javier Bardem as Chigurh. It’s one of the best portrayals of unstoppable evil I’ve ever seen in a movie, truly one of the best villains in film history, on par with Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates. My favorite scene of Chigurh’s is at the end of the movie, where Carla Jean Moss (Llewelyn’s wife) returns home to find him waiting for her. A good deal of time has passed since the hunt for Moss and the money has been resolved, but Chigurh told Moss that he could spare his wife only if Moss brought him the money. Moss didn’t do that, so now Chigurh has to kill Carla Jean. His murderous judgment is so rigid that he’s going to kill someone just because he said he would. You would think that his original threat to Moss no longer matters, because the money has been recovered, and Moss is already dead (and hence can no longer feel any punishment for not bringing the money to Chigurh). But that’s not how Chigurh operates. He said he would kill someone, and now he has to make good on his word.

My other favorite scene is also towards the end of the movie, when Tommy Lee Jones goes to visit his uncle Ellis (the dude in the wheelchair with about 45 cats). It’s a scene that I had forgotten about until I re-watched the movie again. Jones is telling his uncle that he plans to retire, because he just can’t wrap his head around the crime that he’s seen in the region of late. Ellis tells him that the region has always been violent, and always will be, and these past few months aren’t any different, they just feel different because Jones has seen too much over the years. Ellis has two lines in the scene that really struck a chord with me. The first is in response to a question that Jones poses about what Ellis would have done if the man that shot and paralyzed him had even been released from prison.

Ellis says, “All the time you spend trying to get back what’s been took from you, more is going out the door. After a while you just have to try to get a tourniquet on it.” It’s a sentiment that applies to all aspects of life — it’s not about what’s behind you, but about what’s ahead of you. A few minutes later, he says something similar: “You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.” Clearly, Ellis isn’t a man that spends much time dwelling on the past. As someone who spends far too much time dwelling and/or reminiscing on the good and bad parts of my life gone by, and not nearly enough time thinking about the future, these lines really resonated with me.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about music in this space, whether that be original scores or a soundtrack of popular songs. No Country For Old Men features almost no music. In a two hour movie, there is only about 15 minutes of music, most of it over the end credits. Further, the music that appears during the main run of the movie is very minimalist. It’s a movie that is driven largely by silence. There isn’t even much dialogue, as the central characters barely intersect — Sheriff Bell only crosses paths with one of them (Chigurh, in the El Paso motel room), and he’s not even aware of it. With almost no music and relatively little dialogue, it accentuates the cinematography (which is stunning) and the ambient sounds that come with the action sequences (gunshots, footsteps, and engines). By stripping away layers of sound that you’d otherwise expect to hear, everything else becomes magnified. It’s a subtle touch that I didn’t notice the first time around, but now every time I re-watch the movie I really appreciate it.

At it’s core, No Country For Old Men is a movie about the line between fate and self-determination. Chigurh places his faith in destiny. He flips coins to decide whether or not to kill people, refusing to acknowledge his own agency in anything he does. Moss places his faith in himself. He found the money, and he’s going to use the money to make a new life for himself. He refuses to involve the police to protect him from the people after him, choosing to rely on his own wits to keep him alive. Bell isn’t sure which side of the line to stand on, and that’s ultimately why he chooses to retire at the end of the movie. He can’t decide whether the crimes he saw unfold were destined to happen and there was nothing he could do to stop it, or whether he was, as he put it, over-matched by amoral forces and he can’t quite rise to the occasion anymore. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter, because either option makes him feel helpless.

I normally don’t like the Coen Brothers, but they put together a really good movie here. I’d probably like a different version of this movie better, one where the whole movie is presented as it is for the first 90 minutes, instead of suddenly taking a hard left when Moss dies. I understand why they chose to arrange the story in this way, but it annoys me just enough that I feel a need to drop it down the list. It’s an incredibly well-made movie, which I very much appreciate, and it made the list with room to spare, but it certainly could be higher with a different interpretation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel. Still, №74 isn’t anything to sneeze at.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13

27. All The President’s Men