"No Country for Old Men"

Originally posted Nov. 16, 2007

As I get older, I reap the benefits of getting to figure a few things out. But one of the insights I've had lately is that the more meaning-of-life epiphanies I have, the less it seems to matter.

Or the less I matter.

This past week my film world was mired in the era of my childhood, from Kennedy to Reagan eve. In Peter Bogdanovich's luscious 1968 period piece "Targets," Boris Karloff plays an autobiographical character, an actor who realizes suddenly that Hollywood and the world have passed him by.

Earlier in the day I saw the Todd Haynes film "I'm Not There," a pseudo-biopic of Vietnam-era Bob Dylan that suggests life begins and ends the moment you stake your claim to fame, and after that — well, you could just as well be a character from the old West as a rock star. I'll sort that one out next week.

And then there are the Coen Brothers and their deeply moving adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," a paean to the old world order.

The film is framed, both literally and figuratively, by Ed Tom Bell, the aging Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones. This is 1980, and like Boris Karloff in "Targets," Sheriff Ed Tom's world just isn't the same — we're on the brink of an upheaval — and he's ready to hand things over to the type of people who just don't appreciate a "sir" or "ma'am" anymore.

And so be it.

"No Country for Old Men" is, ostensibly, about a welder named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles on the aftermath of a botched drug deal in the desert, finds a bag with $2 million in it and subsequently is hunted by the devil in flesh, air-gun-wielding Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who wants that money back, with a few quarts of blood as interest.

That's the plot, but it's not what the movie is about.

Instead, Joel and Ethan Coen — shedding the froth of "Fargo" and returning to their darker roots of "Blood Simple" — have crafted a quietly apocalyptic morality play about disillusionment.

Yes, Ed Tom is old and cranky and losing his touch. But this is more than nostalgia or the churn of the generations.

He's perfectly ready to step aside, to admit that, as the title suggests, it's a young man's world and always will be. Jones captures the duality that we all slowly comprehend: On the surface, life is fleeting and shallow (a coin flip, as Chigurh demonstrates to a few of his victims), but that doesn't mean each loss we witness along the way doesn't tear us up on the inside, little by little. Those lines in Jones' face got there somehow.

And if we manage to elude the bad guys (or are too timid to take the risk that provokes them in the first place), our consolation is a slow march toward death, a dull wade through inconsequence.

The Coens don't turn their camera away from death. In fact, they linger on the bloody bodies. Death is brutal but natural. In their random universe, dogs die with as much dignity as humans do.

At a crucial point in the film — just when a traditional director would show us a clamorous climax to the underworld chase — the Coen brothers pull the rug out from under us. The death of a key character is skipped over, as if a scene is missing, and instead we see it all in a quick reaction shot, a facial expression.

It's those faces that help tell the real story here. Often the Coen brothers use reflections, another reminder of our lives receding in that rearview mirror. Two characters stare into the same blank TV screen — it's a '70s-era click-channel model — and we see them float in it like ghosts. And perhaps we wink along, conjuring up modern, 3-D plasma images of this all playing out on a reality show in 2007.

After their anticlimax, the directors take a detour. Ed Tom goes to visit Ellis (Barry Corbin), a destitute old coot who survives on stale coffee and not a little bitterness.

Suddenly this potboiler of a movie rambles to an ending — as if scenes were set to iPod shuffle. The Coen brothers put us in the boots of those old men, and we wander aimlessly, confused.

"You can't stop what's coming," Ellis tells Ed Tom at one point, and you can almost hear an "Amen" from Jones the actor.

"It ain't waiting on you," Ellis says coldly. "That's vanity."