No Country for Old Men
/What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss?
~ Anton Chigurh
quick fox: A- | Copper
winding dragon
What’s the most you’ve ever lost in a coin toss? For most people, the result is negligible. For myself, the “most” is probably something close to playing first in a game of Monopoly. But for the characters in No Country for Old Men, a coin toss is the difference between life and death in a world caught between fate and self-determination.
No Country for Old Men (2007), the Best Picture winner at the 80th Academy Awards, is a Coen Brothers subversion of the western genre. While hunting pronghorn antelope in the Texan desert, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across two million dollars from the bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone awry. But he’s forced to flee when Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a ruthless hitman, arrives to recover the money. And in pursuit of both is Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a solemn and moralistic man on the verge of retirement.
The biggest drawback to No Country for Old Men is that it forces the audience into believing, or accepting, its overarching mindset. It paints an extremely nihilistic, brutal view on the world—the opening scene with Chigurh strangling the deputy sets the tone for the rest of the picture—and if an audience member is not willing to separate their own beliefs with the movie’s, then it will be impossible to continue watching beyond the first 20 minutes.
The best way to describe No Country for Old Men is that it’s an allegory for evil and human reactions to it. Chigurh represents a form of evil that is nonnegotiable and permanent, but puts forward a pretense of chaos and chance. In the movie, his favorite pattern is to flip a coin and ask the person he’s with to call “heads” or “tails,” the outcome determining whether Chigurh will kill them. To Chigurh, the flipping of the coin symbolizes that survival is controlled by fate, and his role as the executioner bears no responsibility to its effect. But as Llewelyn Moss’ wife points out, the coin in truth has three sides—heads, tails, and the person enacting the flip. The final element, and the one rarely considered, actually holds the most power in the toss.
In the movie, evil is essentially people’s inability to understand the delicate balance between chance and human causality. And when confronted with evil (Chigurh)— forced to choose between the illusion fate or free will—people’s reactions differ. Some, like Llewelyn Moss, try to run from it. Some, like the drug traders, believe they can control it. And others, like Sheriff Bell, feel overwhelmed and allow it to defeat their sense of morality.
It’s easy to understand why this film won Best Picture. No Country for Old Men is a thought-piece on the presence of evil in the world. Though the film depicts a cynical outlook, the audience still has the ability to debate its philosophical accuracies.