No Country for Old Men (and a little bit of Fargo)

No Country for Old Men (2007). Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Near the end of the movie Fargo, as a police chief is bringing a murderer to justice, she sighs for her inability to comprehend the actions of taking five lives away for a relatively trivial amount of money. The chief’s remark introduces an intriguing idea about the essence of evil and how incomprehensible the concept of evil may be in the eyes of justice. As capable as she is, the police chief in Fargo is only able to catch the murderer out of sheer luck. The murderer is not a person with cunning wits. The reason why the chief does not catch the murderer is because those murders are not the results of careful calculations of pros and cons, but a result of the murderer’s violent and impulsive nature. Reasoning, especially reasoning done by a person with a sense of justice, simply does not work. Although justice prevails at the end of Fargo, the ending clearly points us to a much darker alternative, where evil thrives on its incomprehensibility to the minds of justice.

Eleven years later, the same directors made No Country for Old Men, a movie that might be regarded as a conceptual continuation from some of their earlier films, such as Fargo, that touch on the concept of evil. While Fargo is a movie about how ill-intended actions can quickly devolve into disasters, we only get a few glimpse of evil as it catalyzes all the tragic turns of events. No Country for Old Men, on the other hand, explores the idea of the obscurity of evil in the eyes of justice and takes it further. In No Country for Old Men, a man named Llewelyn comes across two million dollars from a gone-wrong drug deal. Llewelyn takes the money for his own, not knowing at the moment that the smell (or to be precise, the sound) of the money will eventually lead him to his downfall. A hitman named Anton Chigurh is hired to track down Llewelyn and recover the money. Watching Anton go about doing his business, we see Anton’s evil radiates from his contained pleasure to murder and his cruel indifference as he muses whose life to take.  

At the same time, Texas sheriff Ed finds himself always staring at the leftovers of Anton’s feasts, without any clue where the next feast might be. Ed’s lament on feeling “overmatched” echoes with the remark made by the police chief in Fargo, as both stem from encountering something that’s beyond their comprehension. However, Ed’s frustration tastes far more bitter than the confusion of the chief in Fargo. She gets the bad guy after all, and Ed doesn’t. When the story concludes, Anton Chigurh walks away from his murders untouched by justice. Ed decides to retire because of a realization that he is helpless in front of an evil that he doesn’t understand. The ending, where the prospect of justice prevailing seems very dim, is quite unsettling but at the same time fascinating as it shows how the paths of justice and evil may never be brought to cross if chance doesn’t allow it. Ed’s lament about a time that’s being lost to old men like himself is the epitaph for the death of his justice, and for the chances that he doesn’t have to cross swords with the embodiment of evil.

Abstract thoughts aside, Anton Chigurh is by far the best villain I’ve seen in movies. The character itself and Javier Bardem that brings this cold-blooded hitman to life are both excellent. I’ll even go as far as to say that the performance by Bardem alone would be enough to make this movie worth watching, as disturbing as the viewing experience might be.