No Country for Old Men; or, thoughts on a film after a 24-hour digestion period.

When I got home last night, the first thing that I did was to make sure that the door had closed behind me. Then I peered around the wall that divides the kitchen from the living room to double-check that there was no one waiting for me in the darkness on the couch. I turned back to the front door, half-expecting to see the lock burst to pieces; or worse yet, to hear the slow leak of an oxygen tank. I closed my eyes and I could hear the deep, hardly-audible voice of Anton Chigurh. I could see the eyes with red rims, the ones that always look to be on the verge of tears.

The Coen brothers made a thoroughly chilling movie with No Country for Old Men. The film rattled me with its mixture of violence, suspenseful situaions, and lack of clear explanations as to the characters' motives. The audience was at times squeamish, and almost always on the edge of its seat, and I loved the film, even if its violence was indulgent. It gave me the sort of thrill that will keep me coming back for more.

Given only a few glimpses of the interiority of the main characters, the viewer is left to decide why the action unfolds the way itdoes. The protagonist, Llewelyn Moss, shows a reckless stoicism in his efforts to save his own life (he hopes not only to live, but also to keep the $2 million dollar loot that he found by chance). And Anton Chirgurh, the man who relentlessly tracks Moss through the entire movie, does not seem driven by money like his cohorts. His principles, as Woody Harrelson's character suggests at one point, have nothing to do with the drugs or money that everyone else is chasing. At times, the murders he commits are driven by some weird sense of honor - he is keeping his word to someone, somewhere. Of course at other times, the violence is senseless, unthinkable, and definitely avoidable. For directors like the Coen brothers, it is equally important to show these two sides of Chigurh: the dedicated, highly methodical hitman; and the deranged, limitless psychopath. In an effort to display these two sides, one ends up with a very violent movie.

The character to whom the audience has the most 'access' is the Sherriff played by Tommy Lee Jones. His voices narrates sections of the movie, and in the film's final scenes, he describes dreams he has and scenes from his childhood. We see him interact with his family, his co-workers, and occassionally, a victim or two. If there's one character whom you feel you 'understand' by the end of No Country, it is probably this sherriff. And yet the things you end up learning are hardly revealing: he, like everyone else, can't make any sense of Chigurh's warpath. His life spent as a sherriff has not given him any insight into the nature of men. He feels disconnected from God, and does not know the extent to which men are ruled by fate.

Perhaps this is the most realistic aspect of the Coen brothers' grisly, suspenseful film: the conversations that we hope will reveal the most about another person are oftentimes clouded, inarticulate, and partially indecipherable. Every character is given the chance to explain him or herself in the movie, and the vast majority of these attempts fail.