"No Country For Old Men" revisited

***WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!!!***

I picked up No Country For Old Men on DVD today and watched it tonight with my wife. We both saw it in the theater and liked it very much. But this time, it just seemed like, I don't know, more than it had on my original viewing. Like many people, I was a bit taken aback by the ending. Let me clarify that; while I was taken aback by the ending, a lot of people flat out HATED the ending. But as I watched the movie this time, it occurred to me that what the Coen brothers are showing us is not simply a story that unfolds, they are showing us the bigger picture of the nature of violence. I had wrongly assumed that the main story was about Llewelyn Moss, who finds 2 million dollars in a drug deal gone wrong. After all, the action is based on him and he is the one that gets the story rolling in the first place. At first glance, he is the protagonist. But what became clear on the second viewing is that it is not Moss who is the main character, but Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones. It is his story about how much the times have changed and how the world seems to be coming apart at the seams. He decides that this new wave of violence is too much for him, that it has passed him by; the same way it had passed by his father, grandfather and his uncle Ellis, all lawmen.

Javier Bardem got the accolades and awards (well deserved) for his portrayal of the psychotic hit man Anton Chigurh. He is perfect in the role, no doubt. And Tommy Lee Jones is also note perfect as Sheriff Bell. He is really the soul of the movie and Jones plays it with with both humor and a sense of gravity. It's a great performance. But I thought Josh Brolin was equally good in the Llewelyn Moss role. He seems a natural for the part: the rugged everyman who has seen a lot, including war, but can't possibly fathom what he is up against. He makes Moss into a decent, likable man that you root for, even though he is certainly no innocent victim. When he comes to his end, it is shocking in both it's outcome and the matter-of-fact way that it is shown. The Coens seem to be building towards a classic showdown between Moss and Chigurh and many viewers (including this one) felt a bit cheated that Moss is killed by Mexican drug dealers, not Chigurh, and off-camera at that. But on the second viewing I think I understand why they (and obviously Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the book) don't let you see Moss get killed. And it's because that is not what the movie has been about. It has been about ALL violence and the fate of those who dabble in it. It's about the harshness of violence, of the West, and of men who kill without remorse. Some of it is senseless and all of it seems to be fate. How many people die in the movie because they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? It is telling that the death of Moss is shown in the same manner as the girl in the pool who had been flirting with him. After the fact, after all that has happened, they are both just corpses, entwined by violence and fate.

To Sheriff Bell, the violence and crime is getting worse and he cannot deal with the this new harshness that seems to have enveloped the world. But it's not just that the level of violence is new, it's also that Bell has gotten old. His time has passed. As Bell's uncle Ellis says, "Whatcha got ain't nothin new. This country's hard on people, you can't stop what's coming, it ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity." What Bell finds is that it is indeed no country for old men.